Here’s a list of some highlights—or should I say lowlights. If you master all nine, I can pretty much guarantee you won’t be writing badly. In fact, you’ll be on your way to writing well.
1. Being Wordy: I once had a student include the following sentence in an assignment:“Not only do journalists possess an undying passion to uncover and showcase relevant information to enhance the public’s knowledge on current events, but exhibit a willingness to go to great lengths to obtain stories fit to print.”
The sentence has a lot of problems, notably clichés and poor word choice, but the main thing is wordiness. Not being wordy (in other words, writing concisely) is both selfish and generous. Generous because it contains an implicit acknowledgment that the reader’s time is valuable and that you don’t intend to waste it. And selfish because, compared to verbosity, it’s a much more effective way of getting your point across. Let me stress that by “wordy,” I don’t just mean using a lot of words. Many great sentences go on for a good bit. Rather, I mean the memorable idea expressed by Will Strunk, as quoted by E.B. White in “The Elements of Style”: “Omit needless words!Admittedly, it takes a good deal of time and effort to follow that advice. It’s much easier to be verbose than concise, as the philosopher Pascal observed when he wrote, “Please forgive the long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one.” First drafts (mine, at least) are always wordy. Examining what you’ve written for needless words is tedious in itself. And when you’ve spotted them, you generally can’t just pluck them out and be done with it; the sentence has to be reshaped.
I believe that today, wordiness is more of a problem than it’s ever been, in large part because it’s so easy to write on a keyboard. And once a sentence or paragraph is on the screen it looks so shapely and professional! But good writers have always had to go through the pruning process.
In the case of my student, the process leads to something like: “The best journalists are passionate about their work and indefatigable in tracking down stories.”
2. Starting Weak: Here’s the most underrated writing tip I know: when possible, make the subject of a sentence a person, a collection of people, or a thing. It sometimes seems natural to choose a concept or property or some other intangible as a subject, but when you do, you’re generally forced into a weak or awkward verb or, at best, the passive voice. If you look at a good writer’s work, you’ll find that three quarters of thesentences, or more, have strong subjects.
For example, I once had a student write in an assignment: “Intelligence is a quality shared by every member of the family.” Following this principle, it’s easy to rewrite and improve the sentence: “Everybody in the family is smart.” (For use of “smart” rather than “intelligent,” see number 4, below.) One especially common weak opener are the expressions “there are” or “there is.” Fortunately a fix is usually pretty easy. A lot of the time, you just get rid of “there are/is” and a relative pronoun (“who,” “that”) and voila! For example, “”There are five poets who have given readings at the school this year” becomes “Five poets have given readings at the school this year.”
My rule of thumb is that “there are” constructions are fine is you can replace “are” with the word “exist.” For example, I don’t have a problem with: “There are twenty-five three-star restaurants in Rome.” (It’s certainly better than “Rome boasts twenty-five three-star restaurants.”) Otherwise, rewrite.
3. Ending Weak: Having a strong ending for a sentence is as important as having a strong beginning for a sentence.
I hope you can see how what I just wrote—while being grammatically correct, precise, true, and relatively concise—violates the very maxim it expresses, and as a result ends up being as weak as the beer at a college mixer. (In addition, the subject—“Having a strong ending for a sentence”—violates rule 2, above.)
Unfortunately, a great many of our first-draft sentences seem to want to end up with a whimpering trail of prepositional phrases, non-essential details, and other extraneous material. A word for this is “anticlimax,” and it’s not a good thing. Once you’ve recognized the problem—a key step, as always—the first thing to do is figure out which word or phrase best represents the takeaway with which you’d like readers to leave the sentence. Then see if you can make this the last word.
In the above example, it’s pretty easy to figure out that this magic word is “ending,” and then to shove it to the end. So we end up with: “Possibly the most important building block of a strong sentence is a strong ending.”
You’re probably on the right track if you end with a noun or, once in a while, with an adjective or an adverb. Concluding prepositional phrases are unavoidable, to a certain extent, but try not to double or triple them. Thus, “The priest went back to his homeland” is fine, but “The priest went back to his homeland after his vacation” is clunky. To fix that one, just do some shuffling: “After his vacation, the priest went back to his homeland.” — To be continued
Writing mistakes you’re probably making – Part I
