The Marshall Review

I was educated in a school founded eight centuries ago, given its Royal Charter by Elizabeth I, and governed, in spirit. and often in daily practice, by Oxford and Cambridge dons. It was the kind of place where language arrived not as a living medium but as a set of obligations. You did not “learn English”; you inherited it. You spelled organize with a Z because that was the proper, etymological form. You cast your sentences in the passive because it was dignified. And in sixth form classrooms, you spoke a kind of Middle English that had never quite admitted the existence of the twentieth century.

It was a beautiful education in many ways. But it left me with the sense that language was something to be obeyed rather than understood.

I’ve spent years unlearning that stance. Not rejecting it, there is value in precision, in etymology, in the long continuity of English thought. But loosening its grip. A writer cannot live by rules alone. A writer must live by judgement.

This is why my style sheet has begun to change. It is no longer a ledger of prohibitions inherited from Hart, Butcher, the ghost of some medieval grammarian, or the Elizabethan drive for a language fit to govern by. It is becoming a record of decisions: small, careful, reader‑facing choices about how thought should appear on the page.

The shift is simple to describe and difficult to practise. I’ve begun to prefer relation before interruption. If secondary material has a clear logical connection – cause, concession, condition, definition – I try to express it through syntax rather than punctuation. Let the reader feel the continuity of thought. Use parenthesis only when the mind genuinely steps aside.

This tendency has changed how I see the page. A style sheet is no longer a set of instructions; it is a companion in editorial judgement. It asks: what does the reader need at this moment? How do I help them enter, follow, trust, and remain with the essay? And how do I make my thinking visible without making it burdensome?

In a way, the work feels like reclaiming the language I was given; not rejecting its history, but choosing its future. Not Middle English in a sixth form classroom, but a living English shaped by the needs of the reader and the movement of thought.

I’ve written a short note about this evolution on write.as here in my essayist’s notebook: esy.ie https://go.marshall.ie/style-sheet-essay-notes