How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem (4 page)

Another example is word repetition, as in a sentence like
The last person to leave the room should examine the room for any possessions that were left behind.
If you’ve made your ear into a fine instrument,
it will hear that second
room
as making a sound akin to fingernails on a chalkboard.

I talk a lot about “not-bad” writing. Another term for this is
the middle style
; sometimes it’s claimed to be “transparent” prose. That’s because it’s clear, precise, and concise and doesn’t call attention to itself, for good or ill. William Hazlitt gave it some other names, and a good characterization, back in 1821: “To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity.” If you’ve ever seen a transcript of actual conversation, you know that you don’t want to write
exactly
like that; too many false starts, too many
um
s,
ya know
s, and
like
s. Yet as Hazlitt recognized, not-bad writing is conversational to the core and reciting your work will help you master it.

Even
good
writing—such as the highly literary style of a Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, or John Updike, or the irony of a Joan Didion or Sarah Vowell—reads aloud well. The worst of academic, bureaucratic, or legal prose doesn’t; you have to take multiple breaths before you get to the end of a sentence, and the dull or vague or merely stiff wording just hits you over the head. It brings to mind what Harrison Ford supposedly said to George Lucas (always more of a visual than a word guy) on the set of
Star Wars:
“You can write this shit, George, but you sure can’t say it.”

A word you see a lot nowadays is
mindfulness.
I confess I don’t know exactly what it means; something having to do with meditation and/or yoga, I believe. But the concept can definitely, and profitably, be adapted to writing. The opposite of mindful writing is careless, unexamined, unattended-to prose: what Truman Capote
may have had in mind when he said (referring to Beat Generation authors), “That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.” Mindless writing is a data dump and one sees it far too often nowadays.

I hope I don’t sound like the “Get off my lawn!” guy too often in this book, but I’ll briefly embrace this persona for a rant about multitasking, that is, the predilection of youth (broadly defined) to do several things at once, most or all of them electronic. Much attention, research, and verbiage has been devoted to this subject, and I freely confess that I haven’t studied the accumulated wisdom and thus am not an expert. However. I am convinced that multitasking—either the act itself or a multitasking state of mind—promotes the mindless writing I am confronted with every day. Without a doubt, if you have several things going on at once, you are perfectly capable of expressing an idea along the lines of
Dude, where should we eat?
or
OMG, did you see what she’s wearing?
But anything more complicated than that—and anything you would want to write for a broader public is more complicated than that—well, it just can’t be done.

In other words, I would bet a lot of money that the student who wrote the following sentence had several other things going on:

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.

It has all the telltale signs of mindless writing: wordiness, clichés, and catchphrases poorly used; subjects and verbs that don’t line up; incorrect use of words; faulty parallelism. It might not be a bad idea to copy it down and put it up on your bulletin board as an example of what not to do. And make no mistake: merely listening
to music while trying to write constitutes multitasking, not to mention texting, watching TV, scanning a computer, and so forth. Any of these things takes the necessary attention away from the task at hand. So if you don’t want to write badly, don’t do them.

A big part of mindful writing is an awareness of and attentiveness to the (hypothetical or actual) person who will eventually be reading your words. Ideally, you look him or her in the eye, as it were. You note a spark of interest or a puzzled look or the glazed expression that indicates incipient boredom, and respond accordingly. Few of us are lucky enough to have a real live person ready and willing to hear our stuff. But that’s okay. Cooking a stew, you don’t need an outside opinion; you just take a taste now and again. It’s the same with writing. Reading aloud—literally or figuratively—will help you take one step away from your work and single-handedly become what Robert Graves called “the reader over your shoulder.”

So read.

How to Not Write Wrong

Note: In Parts II and III, examples of what
not
to do will be
crossed out
or [set in brackets].

A. The Elements of House Style

Which is correct,
6 PM, 6 P.M.,
or
6 p.m.
?

The answer is, all of them!—and I apologize for starting off this part of the book with a trick question. This is an issue of
style
in the sense of
The AP Stylebook
and MLA Style—basically, a set of rules and conventions having to do with abbreviation, capitalization, and so forth that is followed by a particular publication or organization. If your professor, company, or publication subscribes to a certain house style, follow it. If not, the most important thing is to be consistent. That is, if on page 1 you write
6 p.m.
, spell out the
number
fifteen
, and put “Gone with the Wind” in quotation marks, make sure you do things the same way all through your text.

1.
NUMBERS AND ABBREVIATIONS

That said, not-bad writers tend to follow some general style guidelines. Most prominently, they try to stay away if at all possible from numerals, abbreviations, capitalization, and symbols like &, %, #, +, >, /, and @. The underlying reason for this has to do with the whole read-aloud thing. In reciting the sentence below, for example, you wouldn’t say “St.” or “Dr.”; and
fourteen
just reads more fluently than
14.

It’s better to write it as you would say it:

As for state names, never abbreviate when they’re four letters or less, or when they’re standing alone.

It isn’t wrong or necessarily bad to abbreviate a state name when it immediately follows a city, but note that the Associated Press
stopped doing this in 2010. That is, the AP now refers to
Albany, New York,
not
Albany, N.Y.

It’s similar with months. Always spell out the months from March through July. For the rest, spell out when alone (
I was born in February
); when it’s followed by the day, abbreviation is okay, as long as you’re consistent (
I was born on Feb. 22
).

Of course, it would look silly to spell out terms customarily given by abbreviations, initials, or acronyms—to write, that is:

Long-established custom dictates that numbers above 100, sports scores, dates, temperatures, ratios, betting odds, prices, street addresses, phone numbers, and generally stuff referring to numbers as numbers be presented in numerals rather than words.

Otherwise, you won’t go wrong if you follow a simple principle: when in doubt, spell it out.

2.
CAPITALIZATION

A similar strategy goes for capital letters. They’re called on, most frequently, to indicate proper nouns, which are, generally speaking, the official names of people, places, trade names, and organizations. For example:
General Electric, the University of Southern California, the Atlantic Ocean, the Rolling Stones, Mars, Albany, John Glenn, Excedrin,
and
France
. (But not
my Wife, the Ocean, an Antibiotic
, or
the Supermarket
.)

Titles and honorifics that come
before
a name are also capitalized;
Mr
.,
Mrs., Miss, Ms.
, and
Dr.
are abbreviated as well. But if you are merely giving a description of the person or naming his or her job—even before the name—use lowercase.

After a name, even titles are lowercased:

Seasons, directions, and relatives (for some reason, the three most commonly wrongly capitalized categories) are rendered in lowercase as well:

3.
ITALICS

A surprising number of people don’t realize that, in a text, italics or underlining indicate exactly the same thing. In typewriter days, it wasn’t possible to indicate italics, so we underlined for emphasis. Now that everybody writes on computers, underlining isn’t necessary, so don’t do it. Use italics, but only for emphasis, for titles of books and other compositions (as long as you’re consistent), to indicate words as words (as is done throughout this book), and for words in languages other than English. Putting a word in all capital letters is not an acceptable way to indicate any of these things, except in dialogue, where all-caps can suggest shouting at a very high volume, or, occasionally, in informal writing, where it can be amusing.

The foreign-language item demands some amplification. If a foreign word is familiar enough that readers will understand what it means—think joie de vivre, siesta, zeitgeist, espresso—don’t italicize it. However, sometimes you may have reason to use a more obscure foreign word or a short quotation from something said or written in a foreign language. Italicize the word or quote—and make sure you quickly translate it.

One complication with italics is e-mail. Some e-mail programs allow italicization, but others play dumb when you hit the appropriate keys, or instead give you a Spanish tilde sign or some other odd piece of punctuation. Some people compensate for this by using special cues for emphasis, like *this* or _this_ That’s okay for e-mail, but stay away for it in any other setting.

4.
THERE IS NO REASON EVER TO USE BOLDFACE IN A PIECE OF WRITING, EXCEPT FOR A SECTION HEADING (LIKE THIS)

Students commonly use bold instead of the proper typographical way to indicate emphasis or a title, which is italics. Aside from being counter to standard usage, it’s jarring; each boldfaced word makes the reader jump.

B. Punctuation

1.
’

a.
Plurality’s
Pluralities

Punctuation isn’t sexy, but it’s actually a key to not-bad writing. That’s because of the concept I discussed at the end of the last chapter, “mindful writing.” You can dismiss apostrophes—and punctuation in general—as just a series of technical details. I prefer to look at them as measures of mindfulness. When you write carelessly or automatically—mind
less
ly, that is—the chances of apostrophizing correctly are pretty slim. They steadily improve as you begin to pay attention.

An easy thing to remember is not to use apostrophes—ever—to
indicate a plural, no matter how tempting it seems. Doing so will get you pilloried in a book like
Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Should be
TVs
, just as it should be
IOUs, SUVs
, and
C.D.s.
(The first two examples don’t have periods between the capital letters; the third does. That’s a matter of house style and will vary by publication. The rule about no apostrophe before the
s
is the same in either case.)

The same goes for decades and centuries, which are in fact plurals (an accumulation of ten years for a decade, 100 for a century). Some publications countenance
the 1800’s
or
the 60’s
, but it’s wrong. The
1960s, the ’60s
, and
the sixties
are all okay, as long as you’re consistent.

A small number of students instinctively and wrongly reach for the apostrophe to indicate the plural of a
y
-ending word:
several country’s
instead of
several countries.
The move is a bit more understandable with proper nouns, but equally incorrect. That is, the correct forms are:

and

Other writers mess up by pluralizing
y
-ending words when the intention is merely to indicate a possessive: