On Tuesday, I insisted that people learn how to write well. Today, I’m offering some practical tips that I have found useful. Most of these apply to less formal pieces, like blog posts, short articles, or even comments—anything where you’re trying to make a point. If you’re working on a research project, though, you’re on your own.
APPROACHING THE TOPIC
1. Make sure you know what the heck you’re talking about. You don’t have to be an expert: often, the things that need to be said are the things that people already know, but have forgotten—or things they don’t realize that other people are thinking. So it’s okay to be simple, as long as you know exactly what it is you want to say.
If you’re still hashing it out in your mind, be upfront about that, and ask questions of the reader. Don’t pretend to be more sure than you actually are.
2. Make it clear why your topic needs to be addressed. You’ll look silly if you get all worked up clarifying something that no one was confused about. If you are righting a wrong, introduce your piece by summing up the wrong, citing at least one example. One easy trick is to literally ask a question, and then answer it. Or start with a short anecdote which explains what started your train of thought.
3. Don’t resort to defensive writing. Nobody wants to read about what you’re not saying. Say what you do mean. Say it as clearly and firmly as you can —and then let it go. After a certain point, if people hear what you’re not saying, then it’s their problem, and not yours. You don’t owe them a second essay restating your point. Do your best, and move along.
4. Don’t be afraid of trivial ideas. Don’t hold out for the obviously profound. If you are an intelligent person, then an image, idea, or phrase rings your bell for a reason. Go ahead and write about it—you may be onto something.
5. Be honest. If you’re afraid your idea isn’t holding up, your readers will notice, too, so don’t force it. On the other hand, “I used to think so-and-so, but I’ve changed my mind—here’s why” essays are always interesting.
6. Have you noticed that you write about the same three ideas over and over and over again? That’s okay. The best writing comes from insatiable fascination with a particular theme, not from fleeting infatuations with passing ideas.
EDITING
1. Editing should make you sweat. It’s okay to write down every last thing you can think of . . . on your first draft. Often “covering the page” is the only way to figure out what you’re actually trying to say, and sometimes your main point doesn’t emerge until you’ve written around it for several hundred words. But don’t leave it that way. Even if a passage is brilliant, funny, and flows sweet and clear like Grade A honey—it may not belong in this piece. Every word must work in service of your point, or else it’s gotta go.
Even if I’m delighted with what I wrote, I cut out about 10% just on principle.
2. Read it out loud. This is the best way to root out dumb phrases, snootiness, babbling, repeated words, and pronoun trouble. If it’s an important piece, ask someone else to read it, and be ready to accept criticism.
3. Often, an essay doesn’t sit well because the right elements are all there, but are out of order. Try putting your last paragraph at the beginning, and see how that settles. If I’m really muddled, I make an outline that describes what I’ve written. Reducing it to bare bones often shows the flaws hiding in the verbiage.
4. Not sure if you have a unified idea? Try coming up with a descriptive title for the finished piece. If this is hard, then you may not have said anything, or tried to say too much.
5. Clarity before fanciness. It’s fun to write the occasional sentence that makes people go, “Whoa, let me read that again—it sounds cool, but I’m not quite sure what it means.” But that must be the very rare exception. Most of what you say should be plain as plain can be. You’re supposed to be drawing attention to your ideas, not your fancy, fancy self.
6. Remember the Five B’s: Be Brief, Boy, Be Brief. I love to read, but I’m lazy, I’m tired, I’m distracted, and I rarely read a piece that’s longer than 1,000 words. Most of your readers are even lazier. Try breaking up perfectly good paragraphs into mini-paragraphs, just to make them easier to swallow. Cheap, but it works.
BONUS TIPS:
Try to make the sentence structure express emphasis, rather than resorting to italics.
Pretend exclamation points and ellipses cost you $65 per use.
If you find yourself using emoticons, chop your hands off.
I believe in splitting infinitives, writing incomplete and run-on sentences, and generally murdering the language from time to time, if it gives the writing more punch or better flow. So sue me.
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When has “team” become plural? It is “the team is” just as it is “the team’s doing good”. To make it plural means that the conjunction of “the team are good” would be “the team’re good” which makes no sense. This plural “team” has become de rigueur for the World Cup, Woman’s World Cup and Tour de France coverage that I have seen. Team as a matter of grammar is singular. If you want to write well you must speak well and use the correct grammar.
Thanks for the follow-up!
RE: “team” - What does that have to do with anything? Exactly what’s great about Simcha’s rules here is that she lays out truly universal rules for good writing, rather than pedantically listing particular grammatical conventions that admit of variation. Sure, we need to teach young writers such rules as guidelines, but a mature, skilled writer can choose when to start a sentence with “and” or split an infinitive, and the result can still be perfectly good (and indeed correct) writing. Besides, as Fowler points out, collective nouns like “team” are sometimes suitably treated as singular, and sometimes as plural, depending on the context.
@Bunbury: “Team”, “family” and other words that describe groups of individuals can have plural or singular verbs depending on whether you are referring to the group unit or to the individuals collectively. So: “My family was at the picnic.” but “The family were stunned at the inappropriateness of Uncle Ziggy’s ‘poetry’.” The writer needs to use discretion in choosing which sense to use, but it is not universally true that groups are always singular.
Huh? Was the word “team” even in her blog post?
For what it’s worth, collective nouns such as “team” or “family” take plural verbs in British usage and singular ones in American usage. Those of us who read too many British novels can inadvertently slip into British usage here and there, but I like to think that we’re bilingual rather than ungrammatical.
Earnest B, I do a lot of writing for the UK, and invariably my editors there would change common constructs like
‘team/family/office is” to a plural verb form (from the US singular I’d submitted). They think of it as plural, we think of it as more monolithic.
One great resource for clear writing is the book “The Craft of Research,” by Colomb, Williams, et al. It details the critical thinking issues that lead to a clear framework on which to build your writing—useful for everything from emails to research papers, journalism, blogging, and public speaking. I keep giving away my copy and buying a new one!
Strunk & White is the classic guide to good writing, and underused today.
Thank you! Would it be redundant to say this was well written?! :-)
Sorry, I do not apologize for the occasional emoticon in a combox. Sometimes I am lazy/tired/distracted and I don’t have the chops to work hard to achieve the proper tone through my words. When tone is misinterpreted it tends to distort or distract from the central point and then I’ve failed to communicate effectively.
Great advice! Thanks!
Thanks for the great tips to use as I start teaching another college semester and finish writing a book chapter. I particularly love the point about editing, which I think is particularly underused in this “easy to publish my initial thoughts & be done” Internet-enabled environment. It helped me to create a Word document that I’ve entitled MySketchbook for “those brilliant, funny, and flows sweet and clear like Grade A honey” passages that I can’t bear to delete forever.
Great article, Simcha. Thanks!
Thank you Simcha! I recently started writing for Altcatholicah (where one of your NCR posts was re-published) and had a LOT of trouble with blog format writing since I usually write novel-length fiction. This is extremely helpful and I’ll have it handy next time I attempt to write an article.
Great Post!!!!! :)
This reminds me of stuff my news writing teacher told me (but with less profanities). Great advice that we all need to be reminded of! And the Bonus Tips are very true and make me smile. Thanks so much!
Simcha
Even if I’m delighted with what I wrote, I too cut out about 10% just on
@Pat: I guess that’s why they call you “
Well, that’s it, Simcha. It’s been nice and everything, and you’re really, really funny, but splitting infinitives?
I think that we, your readers, should immediately form prayer groups to pray for you. Grammar apostasy is a terrible thing!
@John Paul: I understand. We all have things up with which we will not put.
Out of curiosity, how do you make sentence structure express emphasis rather than resorting to italics? Thanks!
“@John Paul: I understand. We all have things up with which we will not put.”
:D
Awesome piece. I will be sharing it!
Thank you for reminding your readers that good writers work hard to make their writing good. That was an excellent set of tips; if I were still teaching I’d print it to hand out to my students, since it echoes a lot of the points I was continually trying to drive home with them. I appreciate your commitment to excellence in your craft, especially since (as you’ve pointed out yourself) it seems to be sadly lacking in Catholic media.
I am a homeschooling mom and just invested in the Institute of Excellence in Writing’s class on Style and Structure. Even though it is geared to children, for those of us who didn’t recieve an appropriate education in writing, it is well worth the money.
“Try to make the sentence structure express emphasis, rather than resorting to italics *** exclamation points and *** emoticons.” Amen to that. I’ve always found the resort to such devices, apart from being annoyingly cutsey, to betray a lack of ability or imagination to use the language itself in communicating your point. In this respect, emoticons and the like are little better than swear words, which, in my opinion, are a lazy man’s substitute for being articulate.
Hockey Night in Canada has been using “team” as a plural noun for years, as in “The team are skating well tonight.” Maybe some of the rules from North of the Border are creeping south.
As far as I can tell, treating “team” (or “side” if we’re getting really British!) as plural is part of the UK dialect. And since the UK has dominated English-speaking soccer culture for most of its history, the tropes and conventions of British speech have been absorbed by general soccer culture, British or otherwise.
The rule about not splitting infinitives dates from Latin being taught in most high schools. Some languages (e.g. Latin, Spanish) have a single word for most infinitives. The non-splitting enabled easy translation into Latin. If the infinitive is split (I really want to not do this), the reader would have to rearrange mentally before finishing the translation. No longer a big deal.
Simcha, I enjoyed your article.
TeaPot562
@ Buckeye Pastor
As a Canadian who just now learned that the British tend to use plural verbs after a collective noun, I do recognise what you have said about Hockey Night in Canada.
Canadians have historically tended to British word usage rather than American so this makes sense.
It’s nice to think that some things creep south.
Love it.
Thanks for including the tip to read your writing aloud. I always tell my students to do that - often the ear will catch mistakes that the eye will miss.
@ Christine I too find Strunk & White’s guide very helpful. My college professor Elizabeth Christman introduced that work to us and stressed “Omit unnecessary words” in each class. Love it and shared it with my daughter’s middle school newspaper class.
I almost used an emoticon today in my blog post. Thank goodness I read this first!
I usually have my students read George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” It worked for me many years ago and I am certain that it is still helping others improve their writing.
Years ago I read GOOD ENGLISH by G H VALLINS. One of the BEST! It may beout of print! Maybe Amazon?
Whatever…. This article is so, like, arrogant - like YOU are the best writer ever or something or, like writing in other styles is so not good. What a huge bunch of you know what, eh?
I will tell you what, today people can write whatever they want and they DO. NOT. need to know what the heck they are talking about to do it either. Don’t you READ your own blogs?! They are full of people who don’t know what they are talking about but are freely expressing themselves and their feelings. This is a free country, right?
And…what’re you, the verbage police? No you ain’t I AM! Maybe you are just too old to even know that kids today can espress theyselves in many different format and idiums and that they understand each other very, very, very, VERY well.
Language is ALIVE!!!!!!!!!! So why do all you people want to kill it?
Next you will be saying that we have to use the word Thou and Thy and stuff like that. Aren’t you glad we don’t say that stuff anymore? Give you a headache.
Texting and twittering will help you to learn to put it all down there as fast and easy as a Halo Reach game in firefight mode. Maybe YOU SHOULD check it out. YEAH!
But….other than that, your article is excellent and did give some very VERY good tips.
Keep up the good works!
Thanks for this welcome advice. I want to blog but I’m finding it hard just to get started. I already have several ideas waiting.
Run it rhough the Grammer Checker to reduce the reading level 1 year. (8th grade to 7th or post Phd to Phd). Many problems will show up, the reccommened solutons are often worse than the problem but you have the problems located quickly with little effort.
Great article. Even at University level, a lot of the time they don’t break it down so concisely. Well done. If you’re interested, this is another article I read recently which I found helpful, “10 Secrets to Writing Well and Showcasing Your Work”...
http://www.jobstock.com/blog/10-secrets-to-writing-well-and-showcasing-your-work/
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