Justin Taylor's Blog, page 52

Style: Some Notes on Clarity and Grace

Earlier this year Pearson published the 12th edition of Joseph Williams’s Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. This is one of the best books on improving your writing style. Like many of the textbooks by Alister McGrath, it seems that the publishers enjoy changing a few things each year, calling it a new edition with an increased retail price. (Scott, Foresman published the first three editions in 1981, 1985, 1989; HarperCollins published the next two editions in 1989, 1994; Longman published an edition in 2005; now Pearson Longman has published editions in 2005, 2007, 2016 with co-authors for these latter editions, as Williams passed away in early 2008).

Here are some notes I took on an earlier edition.

1. Understanding Style  

The two key principles of the book are: (1) it is good to write clearly, and (2) anyone can write clearly. Not everyone agrees!

The biggest reason for unclear writing is that we are ignorant of how others read our writing.

If you think about these principles while you draft, you may never draft anything.

2. Correctness

There are three kinds of rules: (1) the Real Rules, (2) the rules of Standard English, and (3) invented rules (either folklore or elegant options).

If competent writers violate an alleged rule, then it really has no force. Instead of blind obedience to the rules, we should follow selective observance. It helps to know more about the invented rules than the rule-mongers do.

3.  Actions

Because readers prefer that most subjects be characters and most verbs be actions, (1) match the important actions in your sentences to verbs, and (2) make the characters in your story their subjects. This is because readers prefer that most subjects be characters and most verbs be actions.

Revising involves a three-step process: (1) diagnose, (2) analyze, and (3) revise.

4.  Characters

Readers want (1) actions in verbs, but even more they want (2) characters as their subjects. You must make the subjects of most of your verbs short, specific, and concrete. When dealing with abstract concept, turn them into virtual characters by making them the subjects of verbs that tell a story.

Many writers are too dependent on passive verbs, but it can have important functions (e.g., not knowing the subject of the action, shifting information to the end of the sentence, or focusing the reader’s attention on another character).

Complex style may be necessary (1) to express complex ideas precisely, or it may needlessly (2) complicate simple ideas or (3) complicate already complex ideas.

5. Cohesion and Coherence

Sequences of sentences are cohesive when there is a sense of flow between how each sentence ends and the next begins. You should begin sentences with information familiar to your readers and end sentences with information readers cannot anticipate.

A whole passage is coherent when the reader has a sense of the whole, depending on how all the sentences in a passage cumulatively begin. Readers want to see topics and subject/characters in the same words; in most sentences, start with the subject and make it the topic of the sentence.

6. Emphasis

Use the end of your sentences to manage two kinds of difficulty: (1) long and complex phrases and clauses; (2) new information (particularly unfamiliar technical terms).

The first few words of a sentence offer point of view, the last view can emphasize particular words to stress.

Help readers identify concepts running through a passage by repeating them (1) as topics of sentences (usually as subjects), and (2) as themes elsewhere in a passion (nouns, verbs, adjectives).

7. Concision

Delete words that (1) mean little or nothing, that (2) repeat the meaning of other words, or that (3) are implied by other words.

Replace a phrase with a word, and change negatives to affirmatives.

Use metadiscourse discerningly to (1) guide readers through your text (e.g., first, second, third; therefore, on the other hand, etc.) and (2) to hedge your certainty as needed (e.g., perhaps, seems, could).

8. Shape

Quickly get readers to (1) the subject of your main clause and (2) past that subject to its verb and object. Therefore avoid long introductory phrase and clauses; long subjects; and interruptions between subjects and verbs, and between verbs and objects.

When you write a long sentence, extend it with the use of resumptive, summative, and free modifiers (but don’t dangle it). Try to coordinate your sentences so that they go from shorter to longer, from simpler to more complex.

9. Elegance

The most striking feature of elegant writing is balanced sentence structure. You can balance one part of a sentence against another by coordinating them (with and, or, but, and yet); you can also balance noncoordinated phrases and clauses.

Think about the length of your sentences only if they are all longer than about 30 words or shorter than 15.

10. The Ethics of Style

Unclear writing can be the result of unintended obscurity or intentional misdirection.

The First Principle of Ethical Writing: we write well when we would willingly experience what our readers do when they read what we’ve written. Write to others as you would have others write to you.

We owe readers an ethical duty to write precise and nuanced prose, but we ought not assume that they owe us an indefinite amount of their time to unpack it.

Clarity is almost an unnatural act. It has to be learned, sometimes painfully.

Ten Principles for Writing Clearly

Distinguish real grammatical rules from folklore.
Use subjects to name the characters in your story, avoiding abstractions.
Use verbs to name characters’ important actions, identifying actions and avoiding nominalizations.
Open your sentences with familiar units of information, utilizing introductory fragments and subordinate clauses at the beginnings of sentences.
Get to the main verb quickly:

Avoid long, complicated introductory phrases and clauses.
Avoid long abstract subjects.
Avoid interrupting the subject-verb connection.


Push new, complex units of information to the end of the sentence, providing transitions to get to them.
Begin sentences constituting a passage with consistent topic/subjects.
Be concise:

Cut meaningless and repeated words and obvious implications and clichés.
Put the meaning of phrases into one or two words.
Prefer affirmative sentences to negative ones.


Control Sprawl:

Don’t tack more than one subordinate clause onto another.
Extend a sentence with resumptive, summative, and free modifiers.
Extend a sentence with coordinate structures after verbs.


Above all, write to others as you would have others write to you.

Ten Principles for Writing Coherently

In your introduction, motivate readers to read carefully by stating a problem they should care about.
Make your point clearly, the solution to the problem, usually at the end of the introduction.
In that point, introduce the important concepts that you will develop in what follows.
Make it clear where each part/section begins and ends.
Make everything that follows relevant to your point.
Order parts in a way that makes clear and visible sense to your readers.
Open each part/section with its own short introductory segment.
Put the point of each part/section at the end of that opening segment.
Begin sentences constituting a passage with consistent topic/subjects.
Create cohesive old/new links between sentences.

What Did the Old Testament Writers Know and When Did They Know It?

Machen

Writing in 1936, J. Gresham Machen wrote:

The writers of the Bible did know what they were doing when they wrote.

I do not believe that they always knew all that they were doing.

I believe that there are mysterious words of prophecy in the Prophets and the Psalms, for example, which had a far richer and more glorious fulfillment than the inspired writers knew when they wrote.

Yet even in the case of those mysterious words I do not think that the sacred writers were mere automata.

They did not know the full meaning of what they wrote, but they did know part of the meaning, and the full meaning was in no contradiction with the partial meaning but was its glorious unfolding. (J. Gresham Machen, “Do We Believe in Verbal Inspiration,” in The Christian Faith in the Modern World [1936; reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1947], 55; my emphasis)

Beale

Greg Beale, in an article for the Westminster Theological Journal on “The Cognitive Peripheral Vision of Biblical Authors“—adapted as an appendix in the book co-authored with Ben Gladd, Hidden But Now Revealed: A Biblical Theology of Mystery (IVP Academic, 2014)—agrees with Machen and offers an evocative metaphor to describe the relationship:

Machen is referring to meanings of Old Testament authors that lie at the “edges” of the widest part of their cognitive peripheral vision. There is a blurring at these edges, just as there is with the peripheral vision of our literal eyes.

Because of this blurring, one can, therefore, say that these authors may not have been very aware at all of these meanings; but God, who inspired them, was explicitly aware, and when this meaning becomes explicit in the New Testament, the “blurred vision” becomes clear and it is truly something that is organically “unfolded” from the Old Testament author’s original meaning. (364)

Beale, writing in The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (Apollos/IVP, 2004), argues that

We should want to follow an interpretive method that aims to unravel the original intention of biblical authors, realizing that that intention may be multi-layered, without any layers contradicting the others. Such original intentions may have meaning more correspondent to physical reality (hence so-called ‘literal interpretation’) while others may refer to ‘literal’ spiritual realities. . . .

This means that

the progress of revelation certainly reveals expanded meanings of earlier biblical texts. Later biblical writers further interpret earlier biblical writings in ways that amplify earlier texts. These subsequent interpretations may formulate meanings that earlier authors may not have had in mind but which do not contravene their original, essential, organic meaning. This is to say that original meanings have ‘thick’ content and that original authors likely were not exhaustively aware of the full extent of that content. In this regard, fulfilment often ‘fleshes out’ prophecy with details of which even the prophet may not have been fully cognizant. (289)

To illustrate this, Beale asks us to imagine a father in the year 1900 promising his young son a horse and buggy when he grows up and marries:

During the early years of expectation, the son reflects on the particular size of the buggy, its contours and style, its beautiful leather seat and the size and breed of horse that would draw the buggy.

Perhaps the father had knowledge from early experimentation elsewhere that the invention of the automobile was on the horizon, but coined the promise to his son in terms that his son would understand.

Years later, when the son marries, the father gives the couple an automobile, which has since been invented and mass-produced.

Is the son disappointed in receiving a car instead of a horse and buggy?

Is this not a ‘literal’ fulfillment of the promise?

In fact, the essence of the father’s word has remained the same: a convenient mode of transportation.

What has changed is the precise form of transportation promised. The progress of technology has escalated the fulfillment of the pledge in a way that could not have been conceived of when the son was young. Nevertheless, in the light of the later development of technology, the promise is viewed as ‘literally’ and faithfully carried out in a greater way than earlier apprehended.  (352-53)

5 Presuppositions of the New Testament Writers

Beale’s Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament: Exegesis and Interpretation (Baker Academic, 2012) identifies five assumptions or presuppositions of the New Testament which affects how they understood and use the Old Testament:

There is the apparent assumption of corporate solidarity or representation.
In the light of corporate solidarity or representation, Christ as the Messiah is viewed as the true Israel of the OT and the true Israel—the church—in the NT. [Thus, e.g., Isa. 49:3-6 and the use of Isa. 49:6 in Luke 2:32; Acts 13:47; 26:23; note how Christ and the church fulfill what is prophesied of Israel in the OT. Beale notes, “one can hold to the notion of Christ as true Israel and still have room for a hope that the majority of ethnic Jews will be saved as some point in the future. Any such salvation would be in their identification with Christ as true Israel.”]
History is unified by a wise and sovereign plan so that the earlier parts are designed to correspond and point to the later parts (cf., e.g., Matt. 5:17; 11:13; 13:16-17).
The age of eschatological fulfillment has come in Christ. [See, e.g., Mark 1:15; Acts 2:17; 1 Cor. 10:11; Gal. 4:4; 1 Tim. 4:1; 2 Tim. 3:1; Heb. 1:2; 9:26; 1 Pet. 1:20; 2 Pet. 3:3; 1 John 2:18; Jude 18.]
As a consequence of the preceding presupposition, it follows that the later parts of biblical history function as the broader context for interpreting earlier parts because they all have the same, ultimate divine author who inspires the various human authors. One deduction from this premise is that Christ is the goal toward which the OT pointed and is the end-time center of redemptive history, which is the key to interpreting the earlier portions of the OT and its promises. [On this, cf. 2 Cor. 1:20; Matt. 5:17; 13:11, 16-17; Luke 24:25-27, 32, 44-45; John 5:39;20:9; Rom. 10:4.]

For a full-scale commentary along these lines, see the Beale and Carson edited volume, Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Baker Academic, 2007).

A Q&A with the Apostle Paul on What’s Wrong with the Human Race and What God Did About It

We sometimes think of the second half of the first chapter of Romans as a discourse about atheists. (And indeed, according to Romans 1, the answer to the question “Does God believe in atheists?” is “no.”)

But in reality, it’s much more than this: a universal text that applies to all of us apart from Christ—what we are, what we do, and what we would do apart from God’s restraining and redeeming grace, with graphic examples to illustrate our truth-suppression and idolatrous identity.

Here are some questions for the Apostle Paul, with his answers:

What do all of us know?

(1) We know God himself.

(2) We know God’s decree.

(3) We know God’s judgment—that those who practice sinful things deserve death.

What is our responsibility?

We are without excuse.

How clear is the evidence for God’s knowability?

What can be known about God is plain.

Who showed us the evidence for God?

God himself has shown us what can be known about him.

What is it about God that every one of us knows?

We have clearly perceived God’s invisible attributes (= his eternal power and divine nature).

Where do we see God’s invisible attributes?

In the things that God has made.

What do we fail to do in response?

(1) We fail to honor God as God.

(2) We fail to give thanks to God.

(2) We fail to acknowledge God.

What do we do instead of honoring and thanking God?

We suppress the truth.

How?

By our unrighteousness.

What do we claim about our thinking?

We claim to be wise.

What are we in reality?

We are fools.

What happened to our minds?

We became futile in our thinking.

What happened to our hearts?

Our foolish hearts were darkened.

What is the result?

We exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images.

What do the images we chose resemble?

mortal man
birds
animals
creeping things

What’s another way to describe exchanging something glorious and immortal for mortal things?

We exchanged the truth of God for a lie.

What did we do with created things?

(1) We worshiped the creature rather than the Creator.

(2) We served the creature rather than the Creator.

What is the result of this idolatry?

God gave us up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity.

What kind of impurity?

The dishonoring of our bodies among ourselves.

How did we become entangled in dishonorable passions?

God gave us up to dishonorable passions.

Which dishonorable passions did women commit?

Women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature.

Which dishonorable passions did men commit?

The men gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

What does God do to us for failing to acknowledge him?

God gave us up to a debased mind.

To do what?

To do what ought not to be done.

What are we filled with?

All manner of

unrighteousness
evil
covetousness
malice

We are full of

envy
murder
strife
deceit
maliciousness

What are we?

We are

gossips
slanderers
haters of God
insolent
haughty
boastful
inventors of evil
disobedient to parents
foolish
faithless
heartless
ruthless

What do we know?

God’s decree.

What is God’s decree?

Those who practice such sinful things deserve to die.

What do we do?

(1) We do these sinful things.

(2) We give approval to those who practice these sinful things.

What does God do in response?

God reveals his wrath from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.

Is there any hope?

The gospel.

What is the gospel?

The power of God for salvation.

For who?

To everyone who believes—to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

What is revealed in the gospel?

The righteousness of God, from faith to faith.

As Habakkuk 2:4 says, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

Romans 1:16-32

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. 29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

When Did Each of the Biblical Patriarchs Live and Die?

When I first started working on the ESV Study Bible, ten years ago, one of the most enjoyable projects was trying my hand at some charts that would summarize the ages and timelines of various figures. If you are reading through the Bible on your own, this information can be difficult to track as it is not presented systematically. For example, we learn in Exodus 7:7 that Moses is 80 years old when he returns to Egypt to confront Pharaoh. (We also learn in that verse that Aaron is three years older than his brother Moses.) And at the end of the Pentateuch we learn that Moses is 120 years old when he dies (Deut. 34:7). But it’s not until Acts 7:23 that we learn that Moses was 40 years old when he fled Egypt for the first time.

So when we put all the data together, a simple chart emerges:

Lately I’ve tried to do something similar with the Patriarchs and some of their key descendants prior to the time of Moses. It’s interesting to me not only for seeing the age in which someone died (say, Abraham at the age of 175), but how old his sons and grandsons where when he died (Isaac was 75 and Jacob was 15). The Bible does not explicitly say those latter ages, but they can be deduced mathematically (e.g., Abraham was 100 when Isaac was born, so if Abraham died at 175 then Isaac would have been 75). Does any of this matter much when we read through the Old Testament narratives? Probably not. But it helps me, at least, to remember that these are real people (not just stories) and to picture them at various stages of their lives. It also reminds me of the compressed nature of these narratives, as the story can often times skip decades ahead from one verse to the next.

In the chart below, I added something in the far-right column that might only make sense to someone who has a weird brain like mine. I noticed that the time period from Abraham to Joseph was 361 years (2166-1805). That’s a good chunk of time. What if we were to make each year roughly equivalent to a calendar day in a single year. So if Abraham was born in year 1, that would be January 1.

In other words, if the Patriarchal period was compressed to the timeline of a year, then Abraham would be born on January 1, Isaac would be born on April 9, Jacob would be born on June 8, and Joseph would be born on September 18. Abraham would die on June 23, Isaac would die on October 6, Jacob would die on November 19, and Joseph would die on December 26.

If that part makes sense only to me, so be it. You can ignore that column on the chart.

Here it is:

EventAbraham

Isaac

Jacob

JosephGenesisYear (BC)

Illustration




Abram born

2166Jan 1




Isaac born to Abraham and Sarah

100

21:5

2066

April 9




Jacob born (with twin Esau) to Isaac and Rebekah

160

60

25:26

2006June 8




Abraham dies

175

751525:71991June 23


Joseph is born to Jacob and Rachel

1519130:25;

31:38-411915September 18


Isaac dies

1801202935:28–29; cf. 25:26 with 35:28

1886

October 6




Jacob dies

1475647:281859November 19


Joseph dies

11050:22-261805December 26

For the dates, I’ve used the ESV Study Bible and Andrew Steinmann’s indispensable resource for biblical chronology, From Abraham to Paul: A Biblical Chronology (Concordia, 2011).

What Is the Christian’s Highest Good?

Jonathan Edwards answered that question in a sermon delivered when he was 27 years old:

The redeemed have all their objective good in God.

God himself is the great good which they are brought to the possession and enjoyment of by redemption.

He is the highest good, and the sum of all that good which Christ purchased.

God is the inheritance of the saints; he is the portion of their souls.

God is their wealth and treasure, their food, their life, their dwelling place, their ornament and diadem, and their everlasting honor and glory.

They have none in heaven but God; he is the great good which the redeemed are received to at death, and which they are to rise to at the end of the world.

The Lord God, he is the light of the heavenly Jerusalem; and is the ‘river of the water of life’ that runs, and the tree of life that grows, ‘in the midst of the paradise of God’.

The glorious excellencies and beauty of God will be what will forever entertain the minds of the saints, and the love of God will be their everlasting feast.

The redeemed will indeed enjoy other things; they will enjoy the angels, and will enjoy one another: but that which they shall enjoy in the angels, or each other, or in anything else whatsoever, that will yield them delight and happiness, will be what will be seen of God in them.

—Jonathan Edwards, “God Glorified in the Work of Redemption, by the Greatness of Man’s Dependence upon Him, in the Whole of It (1731)” [sermon on 1 Corinthians 1:29-31 preached in the fall of 1730 at Northampton and then repeated at the Publick Lecture in Boston on July 8, 1731] in The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Douglas A. Sweeney (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 74-75.

A Prayer to Sing: “He Will Hold Me Fast”

The Norton Hall Band:

When I fear my faith will fail,

Christ will hold me fast;

When the tempter would prevail,

He will hold me fast.

I could never keep my hold

Through life’s fearful path;

For my love is often cold;

He must hold me fast.

He will hold me fast,

He will hold me fast;

For my Savior loves me so,

He will hold me fast.

Those He saves are His delight,

Christ will hold me fast;

Precious in his holy sight,

He will hold me fast.

He’ll not let my soul be lost;

His promises shall last;

Bought by Him at such a cost,

He will hold me fast.

For my life He bled and died,

Christ will hold me fast;

Justice has been satisfied;

He will hold me fast.

Raised with Him to endless life,

He will hold me fast

‘Till our faith is turned to sight,

When He comes at last!

A Replica of Noah’s Ark Set to Sail

The Ark of Noah Foundation has announced they plan to sail the full-size replica.

This little video shows the ship’s dimensions:

5 Writing Rules to Energize Your Prose

Helen Sword, professor and director of the Centre for Learning and Research in Higher Education at the University of Auckland, authored the book The Writer’s Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

She offers five rules to improve your prose:

1. Verbal verve: use active verbs whenever possible.

Favor strong, specific, robust action verbs (scrutinize, dissect, recount, capture) over weak, vague, lazy ones (have, do, show).
Limit your use of be-verbs (is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been).

2. Noun density: favor concrete language over vague abstractions.

Anchor abstract ideas in concrete language and images.
Illustrate abstract concepts using real-life examples (“Show, don’t tell”).
Limit your use of abstract nouns, especially nominationalizations (nouns that have been formed from verbs, adjectives, or other nouns).

3. Prepositional podge: avoid long strings of prepositional phrases.

Avoid using more than three prepositional phrases in a row (e.g., in a letter to the author of a book about birds”) unless you do so to achieve a specific rhetorical effect.
Vary your prepositions.
As a general rule, do not allow a noun and its accompanying verb to become separated by more than about twelve words.

4. Ad-dictions: employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute something new to the meaning of a sentence.

Let concrete nouns and active verbs do most of your descriptive work.
Employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute new information to a sentence.
Avoid overuse of “academic ad-words,” especially those with the following suffixes: able, ac, al, ant, ary, ent, ful, ible, ic, ive, less, ous.

5. Waste words: reduce your dependence on four pernicious “waste words”: it, this, that, and there.

Use it and this only when you can state explicitly which noun each word refers to.
As a general rule, avoid using that more than once in a single sentence or three times in a paragraph, expect to achieve a specific stylistic effect.
Beware of sweeping generalizations that begin with “There.”

Watch Helen Sword’s TED-Ed lecture on one of the points in #2, on avoiding nominalizations:

You can test your own prose for free using her WritersDiet Test, an automated feedback tool that “identifies some of the sentence-level grammatical features that most frequently weigh down academic prose.”

From Ethiopia to Austin: An Adoption Story

It’s hard for me to watch videos like this without shedding a few tears:

Thank you, Moving Works films.

You can download the film and a study guide for it here.

A Look Inside One of the World’s Premier Bible Binderies, Where Many ESV Bibles Are Made

Crossway recently traveled to Royal Jongbloed in the Netherlands, one of the world’s premier Bible binderies, where they filmed how some of the classic leather ESV Bibles are printed and bound. As the Crossway blog explains, “Founded in 1862, the company employs over 100 people with an office covering 10,000 square meters, and is the exclusive manufacturer of a number of ESV Bibles, including the ESV Heirloom Thinline Bible, ESV Heirloom Wide Margin Reference Bible, ESV Heirloom Single Column Legacy Bible, and ESV Omega Thinline Reference Bible.”

You can watch the video below, and learn more here.