Mark Forsyth's Advice on Writing: The Formulas Everyone Should Know
Mark Forsyth is a rhetoric and language expert who wrote The Elements of Eloquence, The Etymologicon, and The Unknown Unknown. He is the rare person who can explain why "Tiger, tiger, burning bright" is unforgettable and "A tiger is on fire" is not, and make the explanation both rigorous and funny. His books have made classical rhetorical techniques accessible to anyone who writes.
Most writing advice tells you what to say. Forsyth teaches you how to say it. The specific arrangements of words that have made phrases memorable for thousands of years, from the Bible to Shakespeare to Katy Perry.
Here are the key principles from his conversation on the How I Write podcast and his books on rhetoric and language.
1. There Are Formulas for Memorable Writing. They Work.
The most memorable lines in the English language follow identifiable rhetorical formulas. Not sometimes. Almost always.
"Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." Antithesis.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Antithesis extended into a series called progressio.
"We fight, we break up, we kiss, we make up." Katy Perry. Same formula. Used in the Bible, in Shakespeare, in jazz, in advertising, in politics.
The technical names do not matter. The ancient Greeks could not even agree on half of them. What matters is recognizing the patterns and learning to deploy them.
2. Antithesis: The Most Versatile Formula
Antithesis places two contrasting ideas side by side in a balanced structure.
"To err is human; to forgive, divine." Alexander Pope. Isocolon - a sentence in two perfectly balanced halves - combined with antithesis.
"You say potato, I say potato. You say tomato, I say tomato." A long series of antitheses.
"There is a time to weep and a time to rejoice. A time to build and a time to cast down. A time to live and a time to die." Ecclesiastes. Same formula.
The brain is wired for contrast. When you present two opposing ideas in a balanced structure, both become sharper and more memorable. Ward Farnsworth catalogs dozens of variants in Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric, with examples from Churchill, Lincoln, and Samuel Johnson. Forsyth approaches the same devices through pop culture and humor.
3. The Rule of Three: We Will Change History to Get a Nice Phrase
Churchill's famous line is "Blood, sweat, and tears." Except he said "blood, sweat, toil, and tears." Four things. We remember it as three because three feels right. We literally changed history to make the phrase fit the pattern.
"Fly, my pretties, fly!" from The Wizard of Oz is not in the movie. We invented it because it sounds like it should be there.
"Location, location, location." Three repetitions.
King Lear's greatest line: "Howl, howl, howl." Three repetitions.
The simplest form of rhetoric is just saying the same word three times. It works in real estate. It works in Shakespeare. It works in everyday speech.
4. Alliteration: Humans Cannot Resist It
"Full fathom five thy father lies" is one of the most beautiful lines in English poetry. "Your father is 9.8 meters underwater" means exactly the same thing. It does not work at all.
Shakespeare was "a wonderful thief." He took passages from Plutarch and turned them into immortal poetry. What did he add? Often just alliteration and iambic pentameter. "He's like a thief who breaks into your house and tidies it up."
When a sentence feels flat, check whether alliteration could give it lift. A phrase that starts two or three key words with the same sound gains a music that makes it memorable.
5. Great Lines Often Make No Logical Sense
Many of the greatest lines in English poetry are grammatically or logically incoherent. They work anyway.
"Tiger, tiger, burning bright / In the forests of the night." What are the forests of the night? It means nothing in any technical sense. But it is wonderful.
Milton's "Lycidas" is Forsyth's favorite poem. "There entertain him all the saints above / In solemn troops and sweet societies / That sing and singing in their glory move / And wipe the tears forever from his eyes." The grammar hardly holds up. The syntax barely works. "But I mean, that looks very like heaven, if you see what I mean."
"ABC, 123, easy as do-re-mi." The Jackson 5. Letters, numbers, and musical notes are not equivalent. It does not matter. The rhythm and the tricolon carry it.
Writers who worship clarity above all else miss the register of language that operates below logic, in sound and rhythm and feeling. Dana Gioia calls this "pre-analytical language."
6. Establish Your Voice in the First Paragraph
The reader has no idea who you are when they start reading. Your voice is the voice of a machine. "Please stand clear of the closing doors." That is your default until you prove otherwise.
"A man was walking down the street" is voiceless. "A chap was walking down the street" makes you English and posh. "A dude was walking down the street" makes you American and casual. "A gentleman was sauntering down the street" is yet another register.
"You wouldn't be changing what was said at all. Except you'd be establishing your own voice."
Raymond Chandler does it instantly. P.G. Wodehouse does it instantly. Elmore Leonard does it instantly. The first paragraph teaches the reader how to hear the rest of the book.
7. Write Fast. The Flow Transfers to the Reader.
Think about what you want to say. Walk around the block. Talk to yourself. Explain it to an imaginary person. Get everything clear in your head. Then sit down and write as fast as you can.
"If it flows out of you, then it will flow into the reader. You're trying to take people along with you emotionally. If you can write it in that quick flowing way, then it will flow for the reader. It won't be jerky."
You run, you jump, you fail. Go all the way back. Run up again. Jump. Do not try to fix a failed jump mid-air. Start over.
"Most people who I know who don't have voice in their writing write incredibly slowly and are stultified the entire time. They sit there thinking, 'Is this right? Is this proper?' rather than just expressing themselves."
A high school English teacher had a terrible stutter in normal speech but was a phenomenal freestyle rapper with no stutter at all. The speed and rhythm deactivated whatever part of the brain produced the stutter. Fast writing does something similar.
8. Shakespeare Was a Thief. You Should Be Too.
Shakespeare took plots, characters, and even specific passages from other writers. His version of Cleopatra's barge in Antony and Cleopatra is lifted almost verbatim from a translation of Plutarch. What Shakespeare added: alliteration and iambic pentameter. Enough to turn competent prose into immortal poetry.
"He's quite clearly taking from Plutarch. What he does is add an awful lot of alliteration and turn it into verse."
Originality in writing often comes from form rather than content. You can take a familiar idea and make it new through rhythm, structure, and sound. The raw materials can come from anywhere. The craft is in the arrangement.
9. Language Changes Fast. Pay Attention.
As a linguist, Forsyth has a deep appreciation for how quickly language evolves. In the 1990s, if you said "a troll was sending me spam on the web and I was going to change my browser," a listener would hear: a Scandinavian creature was sending tinned meat on a spider's web, and you were going shopping. Every word in that sentence changed meaning within a decade.
He loves old slang dictionaries - World War I soldier slang, eighteenth-century highwayman slang, rural Shropshire dialect from the 1840s. Each dictionary contains a whole world.
"You go through eighteenth-century highway thief slang and they have loads of slang words for being hanged. 'Dancing on nothing.' 'Having an artichoke for breakfast' - a heart-choke."
The texting era has made writing more important than ever. Writing is how we communicate, get jobs, build relationships. Understanding how language sticks in the mind is no longer an academic luxury.
10. Editing Should Not Kill the Music
"If you start expanding that sentence or contracting that sentence, these should have had that rhythm in the first place. If it reads wrong, the best thing is to delete the whole thing and go again."
"I think editing can kind of kill it. The rhythm should have been right in the first draft."
When the fast draft works, it has a natural music that careful editing can destroy. When it does not work, the fix is not surgery but demolition and reconstruction.
The Formulas: A Quick Reference
Based on Forsyth's work, here are the most useful rhetorical devices for everyday writing:
- Antithesis. Place contrasting ideas in parallel structure. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
- Tricolon (Rule of Three). Group ideas, words, or phrases in threes. "Blood, sweat, and tears."
- Alliteration. Start key words with the same sound. "Full fathom five thy father lies."
- Isocolon. Make two halves of a sentence mirror each other in structure. "To err is human; to forgive, divine."
- Anadiplosis. End one clause with a word and begin the next clause with the same word. "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate."
- Progressio. A long series of antitheses or parallel structures that build momentum. Katy Perry's "Hot N Cold" is pure progressio.
- Adynaton. List impossible things to express extremity. "I'll love you till the ocean is folded and hung up to dry."
The technical names are irrelevant. The patterns are everything. Forsyth suggests making a cheat sheet with a few examples of each. When you are writing and a sentence feels flat, scan the cheat sheet. Often one of these formulas will give the sentence the lift it needs.
The final lesson from The Elements of Eloquence: the prevailing advice to write simply, clearly, and in as few words as possible is incomplete. Clarity matters. But if clarity were everything, instruction manuals would be literature.
For more on the intersection of rhetoric and prose style, see Ward Farnsworth's advice on classical English rhetoric. And for a perspective on why deep reading is the foundation of good writing, read Ted Gioia on distraction, reading, and cultural decline.
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