How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem (14 page)
Read How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem Online
Authors: Ben Yagoda
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Writing
As I say, the passage is about short sentences, but it uses short words. To be specific, here’s the percentage of time White (generally considered to be one of the finest American stylists of the twentieth century) uses words of various lengths:
One-syllable: 67 percent
Two-syllable: 21 percent
Three-syllable: 10 percent
Four-syllable: 2 percent
Five-syllable: 0
Six-syllable: 1 percent
Seven-syllable or above: 0
And here, for the fun of it, is a pie chart showing the proportion of words, by length, in the passage:
White’s proportions seem about right as a model for us all, with the understanding that there will be a little give and take in view of your own personal style and the kind of writing you’re doing. Note, by the way, the three long words he used in this 128-word passage:
imperative, predicament
, and
conspiratorial
. They are eminently fine words, not replaceable by anything shorter, and a model for when it’s okay to go long.
3.
PRECISION: WORDS THAT ARE A BIT OFF
The online thesaurus is a great tool. The online thesaurus is a menace.
Let me expand on that thought. Three sentences ago, I used the word
tool.
If I for some reason weren’t happy with it and consulted the thesaurus provided by Microsoft Word, I would be offered the following alternatives:
instrument, apparatus, implement, device, means, utensil, contrivance
, and
gizmo.
I submit that none of these would be an acceptable substitute for
tool
in that sentence, with the possible exceptions of
device
(barely) and
gizmo
(not bad).
However, if I were someone who hadn’t read a lot, and especially if I were someone who thought that longer is better, I might be tempted by
instrument, apparatus, utensil,
and maybe even some others. If I gave in to temptation, I would wreck the sentence.
The thesaurus is helpful and cool if you have a strong sense of the meaning and nuance of words, and/or if you are willing and able to use the dictionary as well: that is, if you can handle the goal of writing
well
. If your object is not writing badly, it tends to get you in trouble. You will often find you don’t have the word you want at your disposal. When that happens, break down your meaning into simple, short sentences of whose meaning you are completely confident. If they sound like
See Dick run,
that’s okay: you can start building them back up again.
If you go through this process and find you’re
still
really stuck for a word, fine, use the thesaurus. But when you have a likely candidate, take care to look it up in the dictionary. Study the definition (especially the used-in-a-sentence examples) and don’t go ahead and use it until you really own the word.
Below are some examples of student sentences with off words. They have a number of other problems as well. Let’s take them one by one.
1. [
It was these waves which took control of the stomachs of sixteen of the seventeen passengers on our boat, myself being the exception.
]
It
(see III.C.6),
myself
(see III.B.1.c.), and no fewer than four prepositions (see
III.C.7
.) immediately jump out as trouble spots here.
The main problem in wording is
took control,
which doesn’t quite work as a description of what the waves did to the stomachs. That looks ahead to the second rule in the next section: try to come up with strong subjects for sentences and clauses.
Waves
paints you into a corner when it comes to verbs.
Breaking the sentence down to its elements, you can some up with something like:
The waves rocked the boat, and within minutes sixteen of the seventeen passengers were seasick. I was the exception.
If you want to keep the
waves-stomach
combination, I think the only way to go is to be a little fanciful or facetious:
The waves had their way with sixteen of the seventeen passengers’ stomachs. I was the exception.
2. [
Foreign, sour odors assaulted my nostrils, and already my stomach lurched half an inch. Giggling nervously, I tentatively pierced a large portion of kimchi with my fork, and making sure I had plenty of eerie red sauce, bit into it.
]
This is pretty good writing—specific, vivid, and active—with the exception of the two off words. Replacing
already
with
immediately
solves the first one.
Eerie
sounds like a word the thesaurus proposed to replace
strange
or
weird.
The student was right that
strange
and
weird
weren’t quite right, but neither is
eerie.
What she needs is a succinct description of the sauce. I haven’t tasted it, so I can’t help with this one.
3. [
Walking in the front door of the café, the vestiges of domesticity are everywhere regardless of a recent remodeling.
]
Three problems: a dangling modifier (the vestiges didn’t walk in the front door), the off words
vestiges
and
regardless
, and a seriously weak ending. The solution is shuffling, specificity, and trading in
vestiges
for a simpler model:
The café was remodeled last year, but when you walk in, you still see signs of domesticity everywhere.
4. [
He says the most applicable thing he learned at the university was taken from social aspect which the university provided him with.
]
Leaping out from the verbiage is the word
applicable.
One understands what’s meant—that he felt he could
apply
this stuff in his later life—but that’s not the way the word is properly used.
He says the most useful aspect of his time at the university was meeting and learning to live with new people.
5. [
The university’s theater program has already proven to attract national media attention, not to mention it has
established a curriculum that makes it a staple of graduate theater in the country.
]
Number 5 is an example of typing, not writing. That is, the writer had a vague notion of what she wanted to say, put it down in a nonmindful way, and did not read it aloud with an eye to revision. I bet she had some music on and was checking her text messages. Anyway, there the sentence sits, imprecise, poorly worded, riddled with clichés and catchphrases. It actually starts out fine: the first six words are a strong subject and the beginning of a strong verb. But
already proven to
has problems in meaning and syntax;
not to mention
introduces a comma splice;
staple
is the wrong word (probably taken from the thesaurus); there’s a word missing after
theater
(the writer probably deleted
program
to avoid word repetition); and
in the country
is a weak, trail-off ending.
So let’s just break it down to its elements.
The university’s theater program has attracted national media attention and established a curriculum that’s the envy of the country’s other theater programs.
Better but not great. The biggest remaining problem is the repetition of
program
. One solution is to deploy a fancy word,
counterparts
—and remember, when a fancy word is the
right
word, it doesn’t present a problem.
The university’s theater program has attracted national media attention and has a curriculum that’s envied by its counterparts throughout the country.
4.
AVOID CLICHÉS LIKE THE PLAGUE
The cliché is the poster child of bad writing.
And that, my friends, is a cliché. Clichés are bad because they’re tired, overdone, unoriginal, dull, and mindless. They make you seem like everybody else, not like an individual with an interesting perspective and a voice that deserves to be listened to. But they’re hard to avoid because they express a concept in a vivid and effective way (otherwise they wouldn’t have become so popular), and one that the reader is sure to understand. The combination of aptness and familiarity means that clichés are constantly occurring to a writer. Some of them get excised (or exorcised) by one’s internal editor, but quite a few make it to the computer screen or legal pad, where they need to be vigilantly smoked out.
Until Microsoft Word comes up with cliché-check to go along with spell-check, you’ll never be able to get rid of every single one. The best you can hope for is to manage them.
To that end, it’s useful to take a look at the life cycle of clichés. They are born as fresh, vivid figures of speech: often metaphors, on other occasions words or phrases used in an unexpected context. That means someone invented them. That is, a particular individual once thought to note of a not-especially-difficult enterprise, “It’s not brain surgery.” That was clever! The inventor deserved garlands and hosannas. Inevitably, other people started saying it as well. Over time, George Orwell observed in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” such formulations lose “all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.” He dubbed them “dying metaphors,” another way of saying clichés.
Orwell conceived of this as one stage, but I think there’s a division within it that’s worth bearing in mind. Most tempting and insidious, and thus most important to guard against, are the clichés that seem to be in the very oxygen we breathe—dying metaphors like
it’s not brain surgery
and
[anything] on steroids.
Less of a problem is a category that could be called FFBC—clichés that are Famous For Being a Cliché. This would include such overworked expressions as
at the end of the day
and
it is what it is
and bromides and proverbs like
it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity
and
a stitch in time saves nine.
The world of sports is chock-full of these, for example,
he came to play
or
he gave 110 percent.
By this point, any conscientious writer knows these are off-limits; the vast majority of the time they come up in print is when they are mocked. (And rightfully so.)
Orwell observed that in the dying-metaphor stage, “incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.” Good point.
The
New Yorker
used to sometimes print especially egregious examples at the ends of articles, under the heading BLOCK THAT METAPHOR! Here is one published in 1989, from a letter to the
Boston Globe:
In the face of mounting pressure to gut or eliminate the IRS, it continues to shoot itself in the foot by biting the hand that feeds them.
Whew. The obvious and truly awful mixing is of hand-biting and foot-shooting, but note a phrase at the beginning of the sentence:
“mounting pressure to gut.”
Pressure
and
gut
are metaphors as well, but a reader isn’t likely to notice them. That’s because they have arrived at the next, and final, stage of metaphorical life. After a certain number of years or decades in critical condition, a metaphor kicks the bucket and comes to seem more literal than figurative. Orwell says such a “dead metaphor…has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness.” When we hear of a program being
gutted
, we don’t think of this as a metaphor at all and probably don’t perceive it as a cliché; it’s just a way of saying that the most important aspects of something were rudely removed. The same goes for referring to someone’s weakness as his
Achilles’ heel
, or even using a word such as
astonished,
which originally was a metaphorical suggestion of a shock so great it turned one to stone. These are okay to use, then. Just don’t use too many of them, and definitely don’t use more than one in the same sentence.
Here are a couple of mixed metaphors from student writing, with possible fixes.
[
The golden age of print journalism has rusted and there is a new age emerging from the wreckage—online journalism.
]
Golden age
has reached the dead metaphor stage and is (barely) acceptable; however,
wreckage
introduces a whole other idea. My approach would be to stick with the golden-age thing and actually extend it into what the poets call a
conceit
. Also,
has rusted
is kind of flat and the word
journalism
is repeated. So I would do something like:
The golden age of newspapers has turned into a pile of rust. But some smart young reporters have taken some sandpaper to it and emerged with something shiny and new—online journalism.
[
The Christian Science Reading Room is a small cove of spiritual knowledge which historically has not been a beacon of popularity among college students.
]