Book review: 'The Elements of Eloquence' by Mark Forsyth
How well do you write? Anyone can learn to breathe life into their writing through studying rhetoric, linguist Mark Forsyth says in his new guide.
by Mark Forsyth
Icon Books
4 stars
David Wilson
How well do you write? Anyone can learn to breathe life into their writing through studying rhetoric, linguist Mark Forsyth says in his new guide.
If you study the verbal science you are in good company because, he writes, every budding writer must - even English literature's high priest, William Shakespeare, did the hard yards.
"Shakespeare was not a genius. He was … the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well," Forsyth writes with trademark wit.
The linguist is especially scornful of the early plays - Love's Labours Lost, Titus Andronicus and Henry VI Part 1. Never read them? Relax, because none contains a memorable line, Forsyth claims.
Shakespeare's work improved gradually, through practice, writes Forsyth. His masterclass on how to turn a phrase like the Bard or Oscar Wilde covers every facet of rhetoric from understatement and overstatement to paradox, rhetorical questions and personification: giving an inanimate presence such as the moon human traits.