Nietzsche’s 10 Rules for Writing with Style (1882)

 

As a theorist of the embodiment of ideas, of their inextricable relation to the physical and the social, Nietzsche had some very specific ideas about literary style, which he communicated to  Russian-born poet, novelist, critic, and first female psychologist Lou Andreas-Salomé in an 1882 note titled “Toward the Teaching of Style.” Well before writers began issuing “similar sets of commandments,” writes Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, Nietzsche “set down ten stylistic rules of writing,” which you can find, in their original list form, below.   


1. Of prime necessity is life: a style should live.

    2. Style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate. (The law of mutual relation.)

    3. First, one must determine precisely “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writing must be mimicry.

    4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker’s means, he must in general have for his model a very expressive kind of presentation of necessity, the written copy will appear much paler.

    5. The richness of life reveals itself through a richness of gestures. One must learn to feel everything — the length and retarding of sentences, interpunctuations, the choice of words, the pausing, the sequence of arguments — like gestures.

    6. Be careful with periods! Only those people who also have long duration of breath while speaking are entitled to periods. With most people, the period is a matter of affectation.

    7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.

    8. The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.

    9. Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose consists of choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.

    10. It is not good manners or clever to deprive one’s reader of the most obvious objections. It is very good manners and very clever to leave it to one’s reader alone to pronounce the ultimate quintessence of our wisdom.

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