The Written Word
by , , and
[Greenberg, $3.50]
PERHAPS advertising is the faith that will save America at the last. Perhaps, too, — and the shock may be greater, — it wall save her English style. If our novelists, like our advertisers, were to pay cash for every extra word, all the departed virtues of Hill’s Rhetoric might return to earth. After all, brevity is the soul of wit, virility and vivacity are sound objectives, and, take it for all in all, there is no writing school like the copy room of an agency.
These considerations lend special interest to an unusual little volume, The Written Word, by H. A. Batten and two skillful associates of his in the workshop of N. W. Ayer and Son (Marcus Goodrich and Granville Toogood). Good writing means, of course, writing that hits its target, and the authors neatly puncture the absurdity of lifting the Anglo-Saxon word — or, indeed, any characteristic of some good writing — to be the standard of excellence. Their happy method of introducing examples of paraphrase is illuminating, and points without tedium the moral that the theme is the ungloved hand which words must fit with precision. To many of us, still first-formers in the interminable School of Writing, not the least interesting part of the book is its exhilarating advice to the professional copywriter. Advertising must do four things: it must attract attention; it must arouse interest; it must create belief; it must lead to action. Novelists, essayists, magazine contributors, writers of the printed word, Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!
E. S.