How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem (13 page)

No good: that question just lies there, unanswered, puzzling or bewildering the reader. First tell us about the regulations, then address the issue of whether or not City Hall is following them.

B. Words and Phrases

1.
REALLY QUICK FIX: AVOID THESE WORDS!

Some writing adjustments are hard. But eliminating or at least sharply reducing these words from your prose is painless and shows swift results.

a.
Unique

Unique
is a much-hated word, but I actually hate it for different reasons than most people do. The most frequent complaint is that it technically means
one of a kind
but is commonly used to mean
unusual
:

The argument goes that there are no degrees of uniqueness; either a thing is unique or it isn’t. Consequently:

Or take a look at these two sentences from a student’s profile of a librarian (whose name has been changed):

Unique
is hardly the only problem in the passage; wordiness, stereotyping, cliché, and a dangling modifier come to mind right off the bat. But the U-word, along with the repetition of
typical
, is probably the most easily addressed. That is, if you want to say he’s approachable and wears everyday attire, just say so, and leave the issue of uniqueness out of it. (Of course, it would be better to specify exactly what he’s wearing, and give an example of his approachability.)

Nonunique
unique
is certainly something to be concerned with, but even worse, to me, is the now very common use of
unique
as a synonym for
admirable, impressive
, or some quality that is vaguely positive but has no other attributes. For an assignment in which
students were asked to nominate a Web site for the Pulitzer Prize in online journalism, someone in my class wrote:

Again, one looks on a veritable cavalcade of infelicities, leading off with bad parallelism, infelicitous use of the passive, and wordiness. What’s being said, I think, is:

Then there’s this:

Not only is that advertising-speak, but it’s
bad
advertising-speak. If you take the effort to find out or figure out something real (the opposite of advertising-speak), you will produce a stronger sentence.

I’ll pause here because the above example illustrated a point that’s going to come up again and again in this section. Being
unique-
less isn’t the only reason why the second version is better. It also has a piece of relevant and specific information: the fact
that the restaurant is sold out. The writer of the first sentence doesn’t know much about Iron Hill—other than a vague sense that it’s popular—and has produced weak writing. The writer of the second sentence has taken the trouble to find out an important fact and has used it to produce strong writing.

This is no coincidence. If you are un- or underinformed about your subject, you will hem and haw, engage in the passive voice and qualifiers, and overgeneralize. If you take the trouble to fully research it—and, equally important, think hard and rigorously about it—you’ll be specific, precise, and authoritative. In other words, knowledge leads to good writing. That is simply a corollary of perhaps the most important of all writing mantras:
show, don’t tell.

This issue never, ever goes away, because telling is much easier than showing. You can sit back in your easy chair, pluck a few adjectives out of the thesaurus, and you’re off to the races. To show, you have to get up off your butt: literally, by doing some research and reporting, or figuratively, by going beyond your initial top-of-the-head thought and lifting and arranging some nouns and verbs.

(I hereby give you permission to use
unique
if you really and truly mean that the thing being described is one of a kind, cross your heart.)

b.
Literally

In conversation, it’s no big deal to use
literally
when you mean
figuratively
. If you said, for example, “I literally turned the house upside down looking for that checkbook,” your listeners would understand that your house is still on its foundation. However, this
literally
literally makes for bad habits and therefore bad writing. No one will misunderstand you, but your readers will raise a collective
eyebrow. You might be tempted to use the word when it’s technically correct—for example, writing
I was literally up all night
in reference to a night in which you did not sleep. Resist the temptation and stay away from
literally.
It’s stronger and cleaner to serve the facts straight up:
I was up all night.

c.
Myself

The English language is being inundated with
myself
s, the result, I think, of creeping wordiness and uncertainty in many cases over whether
I
or
me
is correct. So we get a lot of:

In the second example,
myself
should be replaced with
I.
That’s true in the first example as well, but it’s not as obvious. You can avoid the uncertainty—and improve the sentence—by recasting it:

The bottom line is to use
myself
only when you (the speaker or writer) are the object of the verb (
I looked at myself in the mirror and have to admit I was smokin’
) or as a way to emphasize that you were the sole actor (
I put up the bookcases myself
). Otherwise, dispense with it.

d. Share

Share
is fine to signify “generously distribute,” as in
He shared his cookies with the other students.
But it is not fine as a psychobabbly replacement for
say
or
discuss
, as in
He shared that he plans to retire next year
or
He shared some experiences from his tour of duty in Iraq.
What to replace it with? Well, um,
said
and
talked about
.

e. Qualifiers and Intensifiers

I’d estimate that three-quarters of the time, you can improve a sentence by striking out the qualifiers (
pretty, somewhat, a little, kind of,
and the currently popular
kinda, sort of, rather, arguably, slightly
) and intensifiers (
very, extremely, really, completely, totally, absolutely, unbelievably, remarkably
, and, of course,
literally
).

Qualifiers make you come off as mealymouthed.

What a weak statement! It’s tantamount to saying, “I can’t really back this up, but it’s possible that Roy Halladay is the best pitcher in the league, maybe.” Instead, pick a strong limb and take a stroll out on it:

Or strongest of all:

Intensifiers, meanwhile, make you seem like the Boy Who Cried Wolf:
This time they’re really, really coming. I mean it! Really!
More often than not, a naked statement is stronger than one pumped up with intensifying steroids.

I don’t mean to suggest that adverbs—of which qualifiers and intensifiers are examples—can’t be used effectively and strategically. I just did so. The key is that
effectively
and
strategically
, in this context, are specific and precise, as opposed to adverbs meant to vaguely stoke the fire of your argument or cover your posterior.

f. Others to Avoid

• Particular
  is a currently popular four-syllable word that usually adds nothing to a thought except four syllables.
  
• That
  particular
  film is the most exciting science-fiction epic of the summer.
  
• Personally
  rarely if ever contributes anything of value, either.
  
• Personally, I believe
  U.S. tax policy is a disaster.
  
• (
  I believe
  goes as well: you wrote it, so of course you believe it.)
  
• Personal
  tends to be redundant, most notoriously in the expression
  personal friend
  (what other kinds of friends are there?), but also in:
  
• She led me to her
  personal
  office, which overlooks the museum’s gardens.
  
• Prefacing a statement with
  frankly, to tell the truth, I’m not going to lie
  , or some other such pledge of verity has the effect of making you seem like you’re
  not
  100 percent sincere. So avoid them.
  
• Actually,
  a hugely popular word at the moment, is actually usually just filler.
  
• We
  a
  c
  tually
  met in summer camp.
  
• Aforementioned
  is an oddly legalistic word that has cropped up in some of my students’ writing over the last few years. Why, I don’t know, but I do know that it should go.
  
• With the publication of
  his aforementioned novel,
  The Corrections,
  Jonathan Franzen gained a great deal of notoriety.
  
• Even in quoted dialogue, stay away from dialect, or, in general, words that are spelled to indicate someone’s accent or pronunciation:
  kinda, gonna
  , the Southerner who
  laaahks
  something, the
  New Yawker
  who
  tawks like dis
  . A very little of this goes a very long way. Plus, sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. Sometimes a person will be described as saying,
  “I wazzunt there,”
  making me wonder, What, exactly, is the difference in pronunciation between
  wazzunt
  and
  wasn’t
  ?
  

2.
LENGTHY IS DESIRABLE
SHORT IS GOOD (I)

The English language is unusual and I believe unique in having thousands of pairs of synonyms in which one of the words is plain and the other fancy. Usually, the longer word is Latinate in origin
and the shorter one Anglo-Saxon. No matter what kind of writing you’re doing, it’s usually the case that the simpler word is better. The chart below lists some common pairs.

You get the idea, right? Now, sometimes you will want the fancy word, for variety, ironic effect, sound, or some other reason. And hundreds and hundreds of splendid multisyllabic and/or fancy words, especially the much-maligned adjective, have no simple equivalent. What better way to describe an out-of-the-way word than
arcane,
a bitter person than
dyspeptic,
or the act of deliberately giving up something as
eschewing
? If you “own” such a word, in the sense of being confident of its meaning and nuance, go for it! (Needless to say, the best way to gain ownership of a lot of great words is to read a lot.) Otherwise, nine times out of ten, simpler is better.

E. B. White has a wonderful paragraph about his former Cornell teacher William Strunk, author of the original
Elements of Style
, which White edited and updated in the 1950s and which has been in print ever since. The subject is concise sentences (addressed in III.C.4.), rather than short words, but it is worth a listen no matter what: