simplicity

We led off the Punctuation course this past Thursday with the following quotation from William H. Glass (found in Virginia Tufte’s lovely Artful Sentences):

Simplicity is not a given. It is an achievement, a human invention, a discovery, a beloved belief.

I’m not sure that my opinions about punctuation are calculated to achieve simplicity — probably not (as this sentence is trying to suggest). My research strategies aren’t straightforward either, they are recursive and reach outward before they worry about conciseness and accessibility. Simplicity is not among the commonly identified traits of Medieval Irish literature.

What does connect my teaching of all of these subjects is the need to view them close-up, to consider and value them at the micro level as much as at some broader, big-picture level. Train your focus down, down, down to the level of a comma (say, a serial comma at the end of  a list); keep yourself open to the full scope of information that you review when looking for a particularly elusive detail of research; revel in those long, detailed and repetitive descriptions found throughout the Ulster Cycle. (Should I have used a comma after detailed or not?) This close focus – this work close to the ground – is an achievement. It is an invention that anyone can own, a discovery we all can make, and for some it is indeed beloved.