The distinguished philosopher Brand Blanshard, once musing in a Yale Alumni Magazine on the pleasures of being an emeritus, put down as the first of these the freedom from reading student papers."Though I enjoyed both lecturing and discussion, reading student papers was another matter. It is the grimmest part of a teacher's life." He went on to discuss the desperate stratagems which he, like most of us, embraced to do his duty and yet save time and sanity—checklists of standard errors, rubber stamps, the lot. The most desperate of these, of course, has always been to write a book, a book which will put down, clearly and economically, all the things one must say over and over about student papers. Then the office hour, purified of repetitive detail, will become more efficient and more refined. One can say simply, "Look, take this book and read it, memorize it in fact, rewrite the paper, and then come in again if you have any further questions."

Jacques Barzun, toward the end of a long career which has always included an interest in prose style as well as a distinguished practice of it, has finally written the book, Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers.It is difficult for such books, by their nature as textbooks, to be more original than the errors they seek to chronicle and prevent. Thus Barzun, under such snappily traditional rubrics as "Tone and Tune, or What Impression Will It Make?" and "Composition, or How Does It Hang Together?" offers the same advice American composition texts have been retailing for the last 75 years. The purpose is "to be understood aright"; the prose is to be "simple and direct"; and for the writer, "the first requisite is sincerity." The proper "tone" (by which Barzun seems to mean "style") is a "plain" and "even" one, as exemplified, we are told, by both Whitman and Mark Twain. Neologisms are all but outlawed: "New words are rarely needed outside trade and technology." If genuinely needed, better Anglo-Saxon than Greek or Latin derivatives: "Think how much plainer and finer, less obtruding and conceited the tone of prose would be if from the beginning we had said speed meter and not speedometer, laundry shop and not laundromat, moving stairs, icebox, and lift, instead of elevator, escalator and refrigerator," "Gas station" and "scotch tape" show "the true democratic spirit" but not "discotheque" or "polyester." The "wooly metaphorical style" of our generation is to be banished by "Principle 16": "Worship no images and question the validity of all." And jargons—in fact, all fancy wordings —are proscribed.