When I was at school, my English master encouraged us to use (what he called) 'Spangles'. Spangles were a pithy quotation, or factoid, that advanced the point that one was making, quickly and cleverly, without breaking the flow of the argument. As an example, we were studying Little Dorritt, and it was a relatively easy matter to learn a number of quotations about each character and reproduce them in our exam essays. So instead of writing, Mrs. Clenham, blah, blah, blah, I would write, Mrs. Clenham, 'she lived and died a statue', blah, blah, blah.
It is, of course, an admirably cynical way of gaining marks in examinations, because for each relevant point you are supposed to be given a mark.
At the same time as I had this excellent English teacher, I had a disastrous History teacher. We were supposed to be learning about the French Revolution, and his teaching was so bad that I went and read an excellent book, Paris in the Terror by Stanley Loomis. This was full of those little details that could subsequently be slipped into my History essays, and are the details that stay with me 20 years after having read the book: that the smell of blood from the guillotine on the Place de la Concorde was so strong that cattle refused to cross the square and the revolutionaries seriously considered building a 'sangue-duct' to drain it; that Danton had been kicked in the face by an ox as a child, and then suffered from smallpox. By contrast, Simon Schama's monumentally boring and over-rated work on the same subject, Citizens, is simply a turgid recitation of boring details; learned and completely uninteresting.
The very best spangles go straight to the heart of the matter or illustrate some facet of the subject. You can, for example, read all about the causes of the First Anglo–Dutch War, or you can simply refer to the spangle: General Monck saying, The Dutch have too much trade, and the English are resolved to take it from them [1]; or that the U.S. Navy considered a successful invasion of the Falkland Islands by the British to be 'a military impossibility' [2].
Beware the false spangle: if it sounds a bit too extraordinary, it might well just be some crank theory or someone getting the wrong end of the stick. Journalism in this respect is dangerous: journalists usually are not specialists in their subject and are not concerned about writing definitive works.
In writing our encyclopedia articles, we should strive to add spangles. They hold the reader's attention and add to the interest of the article. And, twenty years later, they are what our readers will remember.
The Rise and Fall of British Sea Mastery Kennedy (1976) Allen Lane, London, p.48. Cited in To Rule The Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World Herman, A (2004) HarperCollins, New York, p.560
One Hundred Days Woodward, Admiral Sandy (1992) Annanapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, p.72. Cited in To Rule The Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World Herman, A (2004) HarperCollins, New York, p.560
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