An Essayist's Notebook

I have just published a piece called “To Dig Where I Stand” on Marshall on Policy. It is not an essay on housing, infrastructure, energy, governance or any other policy topic, in away it's about all of them. It attempts to answer a question that I had not realised readers were asking:

“What exactly are these essays trying to do?”

The answer eventually led me to identify three principles that seem to have emerged from the writing itself:

• Understanding comes before prescription. • Sequencing is substance. • Relationships create outcomes.

They seem to have been present, sometimes only as undercurrents, in my essays about music, infrastructure, landscape and governance, long before I recognised them explicitly. Some assumptions run deep. Discovering them requires a degree of intellectual honesty, and perhaps a little perseverance.

That raises an intriguing possibility. Perhaps an essayist does not invent a method so much as discover one, much as a river discovers its course.

A description often arrives as if it were direct.

It says: c = a.

But very often something has happened in between. There is a missing term, a mediating frame, a typology through which the description has become possible. What has been presented as direct recognition may in fact be recognition through b. The danger is not only that b may be forgotten. It is that b may become so familiar that it disappears into the description itself.

This is where consensus has value. Consensus is not merely agreement about the final description. It is a shared knowledge of the character and necessity of the mediating term. We know, together, why c can be described as a, because we share some understanding of b. Consensus, then, is a kind of social memory. It remembers the typology that the description has hidden. It preserves the route by which the fact became legible.

But this also explains the danger. Consensus can keep b alive, or it can bury it more deeply. What everyone knows may become what no one thinks to examine. So perhaps the question is not only whether we agree. It is whether our agreement still remembers what made agreement possible.

For Example A spirit level offers a simple illustration. When the bubble settles between the two lines, we say the shelf is level. The description arrives as if it were direct. Yet the claim rests on a mediating term: the behaviour of liquid under gravity, the calibration of the vial, the shared convention that this particular bubble’s position encodes “horizontal.” Consensus makes the reading feel immediate because everyone already remembers, or once remembered, how the tool works. But that same consensus can also bury the mediating term. The bubble becomes authoritative even when the vial is warped or the temperature is wrong. What looks like direct recognition is really recognition through a frame that has been naturalised into the act of seeing.

David Marshall Skerries

What happens when a question stops asking for an answer and begins asking to be understood?

Perhaps that is the moment it ceases to be a problem and becomes an essay.

David Marshall Skerries

Is poor education to blame for the fact that so many native English speakers can’t use bring and take correctly? Or have we collectively lost the ability to imagine where we are standing at any given moment?

Last week I read a piece in the Irish Independent in which a prominent journalist wrote something along the lines of: “an injured person was brought to the hospital.”

Really? Brought?

Was the journalist personally accompanying the ambulance? Were they clinging to the back bumper with a notebook and a sense of duty? Of course not. They were at their desk, probably eating a sandwich.

The correct verb is taken. As in: “the injured person was taken to the hospital, while the reporter remained safely at their keyboard.”

Where was the sub‑editor? Possibly also at lunch, – perhaps nibbling on the other half of that sandwich.

But, bring and take aren’t decorative. They contain actual information about location – a concept that, judging by modern usage, is now considered optional – like ironing, or basic geography.

Take these two sentences:

- “I will bring my laptop from home to the office.”

Translation: I am currently at the office, and I am promising to arrive tomorrow with my laptop and, presumably, a sense of purpose.

- “I will take my laptop from home to the office.”

Translation: I am not at the office. I might be at home. I might be in a café. I might be in a field. But I am definitely not at the office.

Now consider:

“I’m going to bring my colleague to the airport” versus

“I’m going to take my colleague to the airport.”

If you say bring, you are speaking from the airport. Perhaps you live there now. Perhaps you’ve set up a small tent beside Departures? Perhaps I need to contact Focus Ireland on your behalf?

If you say take, you are somewhere else – anywhere else – but not at the airport.

This is not advanced linguistics. This is not quantum mechanics. This is kindergarten‑level spatial reasoning. And yet, somehow, it’s evaporating.

Maybe it’s laziness. Maybe it’s the collapse of editorial standards. Maybe we’ve all become so dependent on GPS that we no longer know where we are unless a mobile phone tells us.

But the distinction matters. Language loses something when we stop caring about perspective. And frankly, if we can’t manage bring and take, I fear for the future of lend and borrow.

“Borrow me your blue pencil, will you – the chief already has a lend of mine.”

English has rules, but English also has music. Most of the time the rules win, because they’re easier to print, easier to teach, and easier for software to enforce. But every so often the music insists on being heard.

Take the small matter of an hotel.

I was taught, in a school founded in 1180, by Oxford and Cambridge dons who cared about the shape of a sentence, that the indefinite article follows sound, not spelling. If a word begins with a weak or elided h, you avoid the hiatus and use an. That’s how I learned an historical, an heroic, an humble, and yes, an hotel.

Irish English makes this even more natural. We’re comfortable with a softened h, with liaison, with smoothing the vowel transitions. And we’re comfortable with prosody doing the work. When the stress of the sentence falls on the verb, the noun relaxes:

I am staying in an hotel.

The h weakens, the article shifts, and the phrase flows as one unit: in an‑hotel.

But when the emphasis moves, when the point is the location rather than the action, the aspiration returns:

I am staying, in a hotel.

The noun stands up straight, the h is sounded, and the article changes with it.

This is not archaism. It is not affectation. It is simply English behaving like a spoken language rather than a printed one. Modern editors and AI models flatten this distinction because they assume a fixed, fully aspirated h in all contexts. They enforce the majority usage, not the minority music.

But the minority music is still mine.

And in An Essayist’s Notebook, a place for noticing how language actually works in the mouth, not just on the page, it deserves to be written down. David Marshall Skerries

Every so often an essay refuses to become what you thought it was. For the last few days I have been working on a piece tentatively titled The Espadrilles. On the surface it is a simple story. A lifelong vegetarian travels into the hills east of Tardets to visit a traditional espadrille workshop in search of a pair of shoes that might sit a little more comfortably with his convictions.

I thought I understood the essay before I wrote it. I didn't.

Writing it has been unexpectedly difficult. Not because I lacked the material, but because every time I thought I understood what the piece was about, it shifted beneath me. At first I thought it was about contradiction. The contradiction is obvious enough. I have been vegetarian for fifty years. I have spent much of my life trying to align my conduct with my convictions. Yet I wear leather shoes. Every vegetarian knows the conversation. Every vegetarian knows the smile. Every vegetarian knows the moment someone points triumphantly at a belt, a wallet or a pair of shoes and says, “That's a bit contradictory.” They're right. It is.

But as I wrote, the essay moved elsewhere. The workshop itself began to take on a life of its own. The hemp. The rope. The old machinery. The smell of oil and dust. The stories of migration and craft. Most importantly, the artisan who welcomed me into his world and revealed his values through the way he handled materials, tools and traditions.

Gradually I realised I was no longer writing about shoes. I was writing about recognition. About finding myself in the presence of a way of life that seemed to embody many of the things I value: care, craftsmanship, hospitality, continuity, attention and pride in work. Then came the moment that gave the essay its tension. After hours spent discussing hemp, rope and traditional manufacture, the artisan unveiled what he regarded as the finest expression of his craft. Leather. Beautiful leather. Locally produced leather. Some of Navarre's finest leather. The obvious reading is contradiction. The vegetarian encounters leather.

But that wasn't what stopped me. What stopped me was the sudden recognition that the artisan and I shared many of the same values, yet arrived at different conclusions about what those values demanded. For him, the leather was not compromise. It was excellence. It was an act of generosity. It was hospitality. The finest thing he knew how to offer another person whom he believed genuinely appreciated his craft.

That realisation opened a much larger question than the one with which I began. For years I have been interested in the relationship between values, politics, participation, community and consensus. Like many people, I suspect, I carried an unexamined assumption that sufficiently good people, sharing sufficiently good values, would naturally tend towards agreement. The workshop revealed a crack in that assumption.

Two people may share values and still arrive at different conclusions about what those values demand. Goodness does not automatically generate consensus. I am still trying to understand what follows from that observation. The essay is therefore unfinished. Not abandoned. Simply unfinished.

I now know where it wishes to go, but I also know that rushing it would do it a disservice. The workshop, the artisan, the swallows, the coffee and the leather have revealed something I did not see when I began. For now, that is enough.

The draft remains on my phone. I suspect I will revisit it many times over the coming months. Not because I need to finish the story, but because I want to understand more clearly what the story has already revealed.

Sometimes an essay's first duty is not to reveal something to its readers. But, to teach its author. For the moment, The Espadrilles has done precisely that. David Marshall Skerries

Yes. That feels like the right stance. It's a whisper to myself. And it changes the nature of the style sheet. It means the style sheet will refuse to be a list of prohibitions. And become a record of editorial judgement.

Not: Always use X. Never use Y. – But: When this kind of problem arises, here is how I understand the reader’s need, the sentence’s work, and the available marks. That is a much richer, and a much larger, task.

But it is also exactly the right task for an essayist. I’d frame my stance like this:

Editorial stance I take Hart, Butcher and perhaps RL Trask, not as authorities for the imposition of arbitrary rules, but as companions in judgement. Their value is to encourage care: to think critically, practically, and supportively about the reader’s relationship with my words. The aim of style is not correctness for its own sake, but the best presentation of thought to a reader.

Where a question of punctuation, typography, spelling, structure, citation, or layout arises, the governing question is: what will help the reader enter, follow, trust, and remain with the essay? That gives us the governing principle. Then each style-sheet entry can follow a common pattern:

Style-sheet entry pattern 1: Function: What is this element trying to do? 2: Reader relation: What does the reader need at this moment 3: Available forms: What marks, constructions, or layout choices are available? 4: Preferred tendency: What does my house style usually prefer? 5: Exceptions / judgement: When should that tendency be overridden? 6: Examples: One or two sentences showing the difference.

So for the current issue dangling in my the thoughts, the heading is not “En dash” or “brackets”. It is probably: Parenthetic movement. And within it I should distinguish: • subordination, when the relation between ideas should be explicit; • commas, when the aside is light and integrated; • round brackets, when the material is cooler or off-stage; • spaced en dashes, when the essayist’s thinking voice visibly turns aside; • recasting, when the sentence has become overburdened.

The emerging rule might be: Prefer relation before interruption. If the secondary material has a clear logical relation to the main clause – cause, concession, condition, time, purpose, definition – express that relation through syntax, often by subordination. Use parenthesis where the secondary material performs a genuine aside, qualification, hesitation, self-correction, or tonal adjustment.

That's the foundation of my style sheet: not a rule about punctuation, but a guiding statement about thought becoming readable.

An aside; And you will never see me write “top-anything”. Not top musician. Not top lawyer. Not even top idiot. If I think something is worth saying, I should be able to say what it is, not where it sits in an imaginary league table. __________________________

Perhaps I have already written the opening paragraph:

This style sheet is not a list of rules. It is a record of editorial judgements made in service of a reader. Every convention discussed here exists for a single purpose: to help thought become readable. Where questions of punctuation, typography, spelling, structure, citation, or layout arise, the governing question is always the same: what will help the reader enter, follow, trust, and remain with the essay?

This now feels to me like the moment the project acquires its own voice. Not Hart. Not Butcher. Not institutional publishing. But David Marshall's account of how thought should appear on the page.

view

• inhale confidence, • exhale humility.

A cramped page tells the reader there is no room to think. A brittle page tells the reader to behave. A page too pleased with itself asks to be admired rather than entered. But a well-set essay offers something quieter. It gives the reader enough space to decompress before the walk begins.

And yet even this must be questioned. What is it, exactly, that we are responding to when we respond to a font? Is there some direct relation between form and feeling, between the shape of a serif and the posture of the mind? Or have we learned these responses from books, institutions, classrooms, newspapers, certificates, hymn sheets, official letters, printed programmes, old paperbacks, and the countless designed surfaces through which authority and intimacy have reached us?

Perhaps both are true. Perhaps typography works because it touches the eye before it reaches the argument, but what the eye recognises has already been educated. A font does not merely appear; it arrives with associations. Some of them are personal, some historical, some cultural, some borrowed without our knowing.

We may feel that a page is serious, generous, pompous, cheap, careful, literary, bureaucratic, modern, old-fashioned, trustworthy, or false before we can say why. But that “before” is not necessarily prior to learning. It may be learning become instinct.

This is part of the tension for the essayist. Typography prepares the field, but the field is not neutral. It has been cultivated. The reader brings a history of reading to it. The essayist does too. So the choice of font cannot be defended only as taste. Nor can it be reduced to technical function. It belongs somewhere more interesting: between memory and attention, between convention and invitation, between the learned sign and the lived response.

The page asks the reader to enter, but it does so using materials that have already meant something elsewhere. That is why rediscovering a font can feel like rediscovering a stance. Not because the typeface contains the stance by itself, but because it helps recover a relation to reading. It asks: what kind of seriousness did I once trust? What kind of welcome did I once recognise? What form of attention did certain pages make possible before I knew how to name it?

Here are his conclusions...

• You are interested in relations unfolding through time, not isolated things.

• You tend to ask “What has become visible here?” rather than “What is it?”

• You are engaged in a continuing re-evaluation, where later experiences can change the significance of earlier ones.

• In essays, you typically begin with a tension and seek to recast or reperceive it.

• The goal is not resolution, explanation, or closure, but disclosure: allowing something previously unseen to become visible.

• You generally prefer dialectical exploration to scholastic categorisation or conclusion-seeking.