罗素是得过诺贝尔文学奖，作文当然写得好。碰巧他有一篇谈写作的短文（见The Basic Writ ings of Bertrand Russell, Routledge Classics），可以读一下。

他21岁时想学穆勒（John Stuart Mill）的结构、句子和主题展开方式，可是，从数学那儿，他有了不同的想法：用最少的字说明一件事（I wished to say everything in the smallest number of words in which it could be said clearly.），而且，他宁愿牺牲美，也要追求简洁：I would spend hours trying to find the shortest way of saying something without ambiguity, and to this aim I was willing to sacrifice all attempts at aesthetic excellence.

    姐夫曾给他很多写作秘诀，他只记得两条：“Put a comma every four words", and “never use ’and’ except at the beginning of a sentence”. 这两点，我不知道能不能做到；不过，读《圣经》多了的同学，也许喜欢用and。不过，《圣经》真的好，尽管有点儿out了——罗老师也说：Nothing could be better in style than the Prayer Book and the Authorized Version of the Bible, but they express a way of thinking and feeling which is different from that of our time.

    另外，罗老师还给了几条秘诀，虽然比姐夫的复杂，但对写说明文（expository prose）很有用：

    First: never use a long word if a short word will do.

Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences.

Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.

接着，他举了一个社会学作品的句子：

 “Human beings are completely exempt from undesirable behaviour-patterns only when certain prerequisites, not satisfied except in a small percentage of actual cases, have, through some fortuitous concourse of favourable circumstances, whether congenital or environmental, chanced to combine in producing an individual in whom many factors deviate from the norm in a socially advantageous manner”.

     这种博物馆的句子，现在不能写了（当然我们也学不会），但把握它的结构和意思，是阅读经典的基本功。罗老师说，那段话应该这样写：

 “All men are scoundrels, or at any rate almost all. The men who are not must have had unusual   luck, both in their birth and in their upbringing.”

这句话，不用解析的功夫就能明白；不过，那么写会显得好没水平——I am afraid any professor who used the second sentence instead of the first would get the sack.