The Rulebook Twain Hid in an Insult
On “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” 1895, and the writing rules it still enforces
On Mark Twain’s essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” 1895 · In the public domain
In 1895 Mark Twain published an essay so brutal that it outlived the books it reviewed. “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” takes apart the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, then celebrated as the greatest romancer America had produced, and it is still one of the funniest demolitions in American letters.
But there is something else in the essay. Twain gives us a set of writing rules almost by accident. He did not sit down to write a style guide. He wrote one anyway.
The charge
Twain opens by keeping score. In two-thirds of a single page of Cooper’s novel Deerslayer, he reports, Cooper “scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115.” Then he counts the rules. There are nineteen rules of literary art in romantic fiction, Twain says, some say twenty-two, and Cooper broke eighteen of them in Deerslayer.
Eleven of those rules are about storytelling, and they are the ones a reader nods along to. A tale must accomplish something and arrive somewhere. The people in it must be alive, and the reader must be able to tell the living from the corpses. When they talk, the talk must sound like human talk, stay near the subject, and stop when the speaker has nothing more to say.
The little rules
It is the last seven that stop you. Twain calls them the little ones, then sets them down like a checklist:
12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.
Then the verdict: “Even these seven are coldly and persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale.”
Read it again, with a language model in the room
Twain was writing about Cooper, not about a language model. But some of these rules are useful for judging AI-generated prose.
Give a language model a blank page and no editing, and the same faults show up. It reaches for the word that is close instead of the word that is right, and it pads sentences that were already done.
Twain even names the mechanism. Cooper, he writes, had a poor ear for words, so “his ear was satisfied with the approximate word.” The result is “a literary flatting and sharping,” a writer who “keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune.” That is a useful way to think about an unedited AI-generated draft. The sentence can be grammatically sound and still miss the exact thing it needed to say.
Why we keep the list
The rules are not new, and they are not ours. We use them when we edit AI-assisted work. “Eschew surplusage” is the old-fashioned name for a rule we still keep, which is to cut what the sentence does not need. “Use the right word, not its second cousin” is a warning against the vague and the almost-right. “Say what you propose to say, not merely come near it” is the rule we come back to most.
When we use AI to retell his stories, in The Jumping Frog, The Invalid’s Story, and Journalism in Tennessee, and The Stolen White Elephant, we hold the new work to the rules he set for the old.
Watch what Twain does
It would leave the wrong impression to call the essay a lecture. It is a comedy, and Twain catalogs Cooper’s tricks with open glee. There is the broken twig somebody steps on every time silence is “worth four dollars a minute,” until Twain proposes the whole Leather Stocking series be renamed the Broken Twig Series. There is the band of Indians who wait in a bent sapling to drop onto a passing boat, and then miss it, the chief landing in the stern and knocked silly, his five companions leaping after him one at a time, each falling farther back in the water than the last. There is Chingachgook, whom Twain insists on pronouncing “Chicago.” There are the three rifle balls Cooper claims went into a single hole a hundred yards off, which nobody dug out to check.
None of it is explained. Twain stands over the bad writing and points. You see the problem before he names it. You learn what surplusage is by watching a man drown five Indians to fill a page. That is the method this project borrows.
The last rule
The hardest rule is also the plainest. Use the right word, not its second cousin. Cooper reached for the second cousin again and again, and a fast first draft will do the same. The edit is where you catch it.
A note on this page
Twain’s essay is in the public domain, and the lines quoted here are his, untouched. This page was written with AI assistance and edited by R. M. Hume.
For teachers
This essay is a classroom unit
Twain’s rules, turned into a lesson. Students pull the rules out of his 1895 Cooper essay, watch him apply them to real prose, revise weak paragraphs, then edit an unedited AI draft with the same checklist. Grades 9 to 12.
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