How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem (16 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
For example (EV in brackets):
Hartnell read the newspaper. When he was finished [with the periodical], he got up and went outside.
Spence hit a home run in the second inning, his fifth [circuit clout] of the campaign.
In these cases, as is often true, the simplest solution is simply to take the EV out. Voilà! Incidentally, perceptive readers may have noticed that the second sentence contains another EV:
the campaign.
Mediocre sportswriters are elegant variers to the bone, and they will reflexively seek to avoid a common word, in this case
season.
However,
season
is better than
campaign
.
Back to word repetition, check out these examples from student work, with the repeated word underlined. First make sure you read them attentively enough to notice that the repetition is unfortunate. Below each sentence I’ll suggest a fix.
[
Spending the day rushing from Memorial Hall to Main Street to Trabant is a typical
day
at the University of Delaware.
]
Pretty easy.
A typical day at the University of Delaware involves rushing from Memorial Hall to Main Street to Trabant.
Improving this one doesn’t involve much heavy lifting, either.
[
When I was an undergraduate student earning a minor in painting I developed a particular interest in de Kooning’s
painting
s.
]
When I was an undergraduate earning a minor in painting, I developed a particular interest in de Kooning’s work.
Here’s one that’s easier still:
[
Johnson is the youngest representative in the legislature. When he was twenty-three,
Johnson
defeated the Republican incumbent.
]
For some reason, many writers tend to needlessly repeat proper names, apparently forgetting that at their disposal are the very useful pronouns
he
and
she
—which have the added value of being the category of common words, mentioned above, that can be repeated with near impunity.
Johnson is the youngest representative in the legislature. At twenty-three, he defeated the Republican incumbent.
Moving to something a little more challenging, here’s one that requires some mindful pruning. (Note, in passing, the use of the passive voice. It’s a problem in the original because, among other reasons, the identity of “they” is not given. But contrary to what’s
often written, the passive can be effective, and I think it is in the revision.)
[
During the journey children were abducted and taken into captivities where they turned the boys into child soldiers carrying guns twice the size of the young boys.
]
During the journey, the boys were abducted, taken into captivity, and turned into soldiers carrying guns twice their size.
Sometimes, writers seem to develop a repetition compulsion regarding a particular word:
[
Whether they are nice robots like Rosie the robot maid in the Jetsons, C3PO in Star Wars; or mean robots like the robot overlords in the Matrix, robots are a steady figure in popular culture.
]
Whew. Robot much? I think my approach to this would be to embrace the repetition, somewhat, specifically going from five iterations to three, and meanwhile fixing the punctuation and changing that phrase
steady figure.
So it would become:
Whether they are nice robots like Rosie the maid in
The Jetsons
and C3PO in
Star Wars,
or mean robots like the overlords in
The Matrix,
robots are recurring figures in popular culture.
(Or you could just take out every
robot
except the last one. Your choice.)
Here’s an insider’s tip. Take a look at the example I gave a few paragraphs up, the one about de Kooning. Did anybody notice I replaced
paintings
with
work
? Well, I did, and I maintain that even though it’s a substituted word, it’s not elegant variation. The trick is, when there’s no readily apparent way to avoid repetition, it often works to find a word referring to a broader or narrower category of the first one. So
painting/work
is okay (broader), as is
painting/neo-expressionistic portraits
(narrower). But
paintings/canvases
is elegant variation.
2.
START STRONG
Here is the most underrated writing tip I know: when possible, make the subject of a sentence a person, a collection of persons, or a thing. When you choose a concept or some other intangible as a subject, you’re generally forced into an awkward verb or, at best, the passive voice.
[
Intelligence is a quality shared by every member of the family.
]
Everybody in the family is smart.
[
Benefits an organization gains when reusing water include sustainability, good publicity, great economic incentives, and good relations with water conservation programs, said Huang.
]
Huang said that when an organization reuses water, it gains many benefits: sustainability, publicity, economic incentives, and good relations with water conservation programs.
[
Qualities such as imagination and engagement are qualities the admissions board ways heavily.
]
Qualities
such as those
qualities; ways
instead of
weighs.
Hard as it may be to believe, I certify this is an actual student sentence. Anyweigh, I mean anyway:
The admissions board is always on the lookout for qualities like imagination and engagement.
[
Unusual flavor pairings are what best characterize Chef Juan Garces’ restaurants.
]
Chef Juan Garces is known for pairing unusual flavors.
The following three-sentence excerpt from an article about a city council meeting is a symphony of weak openings. And by the way, either that is a spell-check error in the first sentence or it was an extraordinarily tense meeting.
[
The opening of the meeting was similar to past openings with mediation and the pledge of allegiance. Applause
was loud when Mayor Funk hugged and congratulated Rose Gallante, Anita Hunter, Harry McKenry, Judy Miller, and finally Euretta Schultheiss on their contributions to the Newark Police Department. The years of dedication ranged from three years of service to eighteen.
]
The meeting opened with the customary moment of silent meditation followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. Mayor Funk congratulated Rose Gallante, Anita Hunter, Harry McKenry, Judy Miller, and Euretta Schultheiss on their service—ranging from three to eighteen years—to the Newark Police Department. As he was hugging them, spectators erupted into thunderous applause.
3.
END STRONG
[
Having a strong ending is as important as having a strong beginning for a sentence.
]
I hope you see how the sentence above—while being grammatically correct, precise, and relatively concise—violates the very maxim it offers, and as a result ends up as weak as the beer at a college mixer.
Unfortunately, a great many of our first-draft sentences seem to want to end with a whimpering trail of prepositional phrases, nonessential details, and other extraneous material. One word for this is
anticlimax.
Once you’ve recognized the problem—a key step, as always—the first thing to do is figure out which word represents the most important idea, then see if you can make this the
last
word. In the example, it was pretty easy to figure out that this magic word was
ending
and to shove it to the end:
Possibly the most important principle in constructing sentences is having a strong ending.
You usually won’t go wrong if you end with a direct object. Concluding prepositional phrases are unavoidable, to a certain extent, but never double or triple them. Thus
The priest went back to his homeland
is fine, but not
The priest went back to his homeland after his vacation.
To fix that one, how about:
After his vacation, the priest went back to his homeland.
It’s not always that simple. Consider:
1. [
He’s going to attack a lot of these problems about global warming in the future.
]
2. [
The winner of the lottery was an employee of the firm named Henry Galston.
]
3. [
In a flurry we grabbed some plastic containers filled with sprouts and kimchi, spending about $12.75 on these ingredients for dinner.
]
One helpful strategy for the first two is, rather than look for the most important concept, to take almost the opposite tack: gather together the trailing-off stuff and front-load it, either at the beginning
of the sentence or before key nouns and verbs. By the way, both 1 and 2 are not only weak but have ambiguity problems. In 1, are we talking about future problems or a future attack?; and in 2, a reader briefly wonders if this firm might conceivably be called Henry Galston.
After front-loading, number 1 becomes:
In the future, he’s going to attack a lot of these global-warming problems.
Number 2 is better served by flipping the whole thing around:
An employee named Henry Galston won the lottery.
The third sentence, meanwhile, is better served by being cut in two:
In a flurry we grabbed some plastic containers filled with sprouts and kimchi. The damages were $12.75.
Much more often than not, you will want your last word to be a noun. I just took a look at a “Talk of the Town” piece by a good
New Yorker
writer named Nick Paumgarten (“Big Picture,” July 11 and 18, 2011) and calculated that (not counting quotations), thirty-nine of the forty-five sentences in it end with nouns, pronouns, or proper names. All of these are either direct objects (as in the second sentence in the following passage) or the object of prepositional phrases (as in the first). The article is about a newfangled Polaroid camera, which is operated by a woman named Jennifer Trausch:
The strobe flash made a loud pop, and Trausch began slowly pulling the paper through the machine. She laid the print on the table and after ninety seconds peeled back the protective layer to reveal a stately black-and-white image edged in a chemical sludge they call “goop.”
Of the six non-noun-ending sentences in the article—all of which are good sentences, by the way—four end with verbs and two with adjectives. An example of the first category is a long sentence that discusses Polaroid enthusiasts’ efforts “…to try to make new film, using different chemicals and processes, since the old ones were environmentally hazardous or difficult to duplicate.”
An example of the second (referring to the director Oliver Stone, three photos of whom were taken with the camera) is: “Stone and the camera crew stood over them, trying to choose which was best.”