Introduction

How to not write bad - Ben Yagoda 2013


Introduction

Why a book on how to not write bad (or badly, if you insist)?

I’m glad you asked. Simply put, this is a crucial and seriously underrepresented county in the Alaska-size state of books about writing. From the all-time champ, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, through more touchy-feely works like Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, texts on this subject virtually all have the same goal. Sometimes it’s implicit, and sometimes it’s right there in the title, as in William Zinsser’s classic guide, On Writing Well.

That emphasis is fine, but it has its limitations. In a way, it reminds me of the “vanity sizing” favored by the apparel industry—the custom of labeling thirty-four-inch-waist pants as thirty-two so as to make customers feel good about themselves (and buy that company’s pant, needless to say). I have spent the last twenty years teaching advanced journalism and writing classes in a selective university, and the majority of my (bright) students put me in mind of what Jack Nicholson famously shouted to Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men. The Cruise character couldn’t handle the truth, Nicholson said. Well, most students, I’ve found, can’t handle writing “well.” At this point in their writing lives, that goal is simply too ambitious.

It’s not just my students, either. My colleagues at various institutions say they encounter the same problems I do. And I’ve run into these issues when I’ve taught workshops all over the country and, of course, in that new and universal forum for written expression of every conceivable kind, the Internet.

You can certainly understand why people would want to aim high, especially in the United States, where self-esteem is fed to toddlers along with their Cheerios, and all the children are apparently above average. But you have to crawl before you walk, and walk before you run. And you have to be able to put together a clear and at least borderline graceful sentence, and to link that sentence with another one, before you can expect to make like David Foster Wallace.

In the 1950s, the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott coined the term good-enough mother (now more commonly and equitably expressed as good-enough parent). It’s proved to be an enduring and very useful concept, referring to mothers and fathers who don’t have superpowers, who can’t solve every problem and address every need of their children, who make mistakes, but who provide a level of attention, concern, and care that may seem merely adequate but that turns out to do the job quite well. What I’m talking about here is good-enough writing. As with parenting, it isn’t necessarily easy to achieve, but it’s definitely achievable. And it’s a decidedly worthwhile goal.

* * *

Words are the building blocks of sentences, and sentences are the building blocks of any piece of writing; consequently, I focus on these basics. As far as I’m concerned, not-writing-badly consists of the ability, first, to craft sentences that are correct in terms of spelling, diction (that is, word choice), punctuation, and grammar, and that display clarity, precision, and grace. Once that’s mastered, there are a few more areas that have to be addressed in crafting a whole paragraph: cadence, consistency of tone, word repetition, transitions between sentences, paragraph length. And that’s all there is to it! (I know, I know, that’s plenty.)

I’ve mentioned my students but this book isn’t just for classroom use. It’s for everyone who wants to improve his or her prose. Let me be more precise. The best way to measure or think about the badness of a sentence, or an entire piece of writing, is to imagine the effect it has on someone who reads it. This could be a teacher or professor; an editor who’s deciding whether to publish it in a magazine; a hypothetical person out in cyberspace who has just come upon a new blog post; or a coworker confronted with an interoffice memo. In all cases, bad writing will induce boredom, annoyance, incomprehension, and/or daydreaming. The less bad it is, the more that real or imaginary soul will experience the text as clear, readable, persuasive, and, in the best case, pleasing. And the more that reader will keep on reading.

The book is also for high school and college teachers. Not only are they weary of writing “awkward,” “comma splice,” “faulty parallelism,” “dangling modifier,” and such over and over again on student work, they have good reason to fear that stating and restating these epithets is as hurtful as name-calling and just about as effective in changing someone’s ways. Directing students to the appropriate entry in the book, by contrast, may actually help them learn what they’re doing wrong and how to address the issue.

In the last couple of paragraphs, I talked about things like clarity, precision, and grace, about a text being clear, readable, persuasive, and pleasing. You will rarely hear such words from me again, at least in this book. It operates on the counterintuitive premise that the best road to those goals is by way of avoiding their opposites. Telling someone how to write well is like gripping a handful of sand; indeed, the sheer difficulty of the task may be why there are so many books on the subject. An analogy is with a nation’s or state’s laws. They don’t say, Be considerate to others or Give money to charity or even a Jerry Lewis statute like Be a nice lady! Instead, they are along the lines of Do not lie on your income tax return or Do not shoot or stab individuals. The thinking is that if bad behavior is proscribed, good behavior will emerge. (Western religions are a little more willing to tell you what to do, but not that much so. The only positive two of the Ten Commandments are number four, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” and five, “Honor your father and your mother.”)

Consequently, this book is mainly about the things that writing badly entails. For example, I don’t tell you, Be sure to choose the right word. It’s not that I disagree with that—how could I? It’s rightfully a staple of how-to-write-well books, often accompanied by a spot-on Mark Twain quote: “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” Good stuff and good advice, but how the heck are you supposed to carry it out? Here, in a nutshell, is my “accentuate the negative” approach to word choice:

1. Don’t use a long word when there’s a shorter one that means the same thing.

2. Avoid word repetition. Do not avoid it by means of “elegant variation”—the use of a synonym for the express purpose of avoiding word repetition. (If the original sentence is, “The boy I’m babysitting tomorrow is usually a well-behaved boy,” the elegant varyer would change the last word to “lad.”) Rather, use pronouns and/or recast the whole sentence—in the example above, “The boy I’m babysitting tomorrow is usually well behaved.”

3. If you are considering a word about whose spelling or meaning you have even a scintilla of doubt, look it up.

And you’re on your way.

You are holding a slim volume in your hands. (If you’re holding an electronic device in your hands, you’ll have to trust me on this one.) That’s because the body of common current writing problems isn’t very big. On the basis of some back-of-the-envelope ciphering, I conclude that I’ve read and graded something like 10,000 pieces of written work over the last two decades—articles, reviews, memos, research papers, essays, memoirs, and more, from a fairly diverse (in skill, intelligence, training, interests, and background) group of students. Maybe 95 percent of the corrections and comments I make on their work have to do with about fifty errors and problems. Those are the entries in How to Not Write Bad. If you master them, you might not be David Foster Wallace, but you’ll be ahead of almost all your fellow writers.

The nature of the fabulous fifty may be a little surprising; a lot of them don’t get much press. Even when they do try to address common writing errors, most writing guides and handbooks are off the mark, it seems to me. Often, they display a weird time lag. I remember being puzzled in junior high school to read in my grammar book that it’s incorrect to write of someone “setting” in a chair, rather than “sitting.” No one I knew in New Rochelle, New York, ever talked of “setting” in a chair. Only later, after becoming familiar with The Beverly Hillbillies and Ma and Pa Kettle films, did I realize that the reference was to a widespread rural locution of the forties and fifties.

Fast-forward to the second decade of the twenty-first century. The most (deservedly) popular writing guide is The Elements of Style, based on a pamphlet Will Strunk distributed to his Cornell students circa 1918. E. B. White updated it in 1959, and subsequent editions have made minimal changes. Rule 6 of Part I (“Elementary Rules of Usage”) is “Do not break sentences in two,” and the example given is, “I met them on a Cunard liner many years ago. Coming home from Liverpool to New York.” The trouble is not merely that almost everyone born after 1950 will be mystified by the phrase Cunard liner; it is also that twenty-first-century American citizens almost never are guilty of this particular kind of sentence fragment. Don’t ask me why. They just aren’t. Another Strunk and White example of what not to do is this sentence: “Your dedicated whittler requires: a knife, a piece of wood, and a back porch.” Again, leave aside the sketchy cultural reference to dedicated whittlers. The problem here is that standards have changed such that a colon after anything but a complete sentence—the problem, to S. & W.—is now kosher. You might disagree with me on this, but you have to grant that to the extent it is a problem, it’s one that comes up extremely rarely. (The your + noun formulation—“Your dedicated whistler”—has pretty much gone by the boards as well.)

Then there are the more comprehensive writing books, such as The Bedford Handbook, which I have right in front of me and which qualifies for the final word in its title only if you have a really big hand. That is, it’s long—818 pages, plus index. It aims, as the second sentence in it says, to “answer most of the questions you are likely to ask as you plan, draft, and revise a piece of writing.” I’ll say. Pretty much everything is in here: common mistakes, uncommon mistakes, and lots of things that all people who grew up speaking English (and lots of nonnative speakers as well) know without giving them a second thought. Plus, it goes for $56.59 on amazon.com.

How to Not Write Bad has three parts. Part I gives and expands on a one-word answer to the challenge posed by the title, and goes on to talk more generally about what it means to be a not-bad writer. Parts II and III explain the most common writing problems and give examples I’ve taken from actual student assignments. Part III (to jump ahead for a second) deals with writing choices that aren’t strictly speaking wrong but are, well, ill-advised: awkwardness, wordiness, unfortunate word choice, bad rhythm, clichés, dullness, and the other most frequently committed crimes against good prose.

The mistakes in Part II are, literally, mistakes: of punctuation, spelling, wording, and grammar. There’s a lot of talk afoot about “grammatical errors,” so you might be surprised to find that grammar is the least of the problem, as I see it. Misspelled or just-plain-wrong words and train-wreck punctuation have gotten more prevalent over the years, for reasons I’ll get into later. And spelling and punctuation (more so than grammar) follow hard-and-fast rules, so there really is a clear sense of right and wrong.

As for grammar or syntax, linguists are fond of saying that a native speaker is incapable of making a grammatical mistake. Linguists are also fond of exaggerating, but they have a point, up to a point. No one born and raised in this country would say or write, He gave I the book, and to the extent that a book like The Bedford Handbook explains why the third word in that sentence should be me, it is wasting paper and ink and its readers’ time. In my experience, students are generally aware of and comfortable with grammatical standards. They tend to go off course in a relatively small number of areas (all of which are attended to in Part II). That would include: use of subjunctive (If I was/were king), pronoun choice (He gave the books to John and I; Who/whom did you speak to?), dangling modifiers (Before coming to class today, my car broke down), subject-verb agreement (A group of seniors were/was chosen to receive awards), and parallelism (We ate sandwiches, coleslaw, and watched the concert).*

Beyond these and a couple of others, most recurring grammar issues are fine points. That is, they are easily corrected or looked up and don’t have much bearing on writing or not writing badly. What’s more, accepted practice will probably change fairly soon so as to condone what the student has done. (Now, if you are not a native speaker or if you are don’t have some of the important rudiments of grammar, spelling, and so forth, you need something more basic than this book. The Bedford Handbook or a similar reference work would be a good place to start.)

On that idea of “accepted practice” changing, I recognize—as how could anyone not?—that standards evolve over time. There was a time when it was verboten to end a sentence with a preposition, start one with a conjunction, write an e-mail instead of an e-mail message, use hopefully to mean I hope that, and so on. Now all those things are okay. Going back even further, it used to be that the first-person future tense of to go was thought to be I shall go. If you said that today, you would get some seriously strange looks. Awful used to refer to the quality of filling one with, you guessed it, awe; now it means really bad.

But it takes time to change a standard. The mere fact that a substantial number of people do something doesn’t make it right. Take the title of this book. It splits an infinitive, which used to be wrong but isn’t anymore. It also says (for comic effect) Bad instead of Badly. That used to be wrong and still is. Same with something that an unaccountably large number of my students have taken to doing over the past few years; using a semicolon when they should use a colon, the way I just did. Still wrong. So is another strange and new predilection, spelling the past tense of the verb to lead as lead. I would guess it’s so popular because (A) spell-check says it’s okay and (B) people are misled by the spelling of two words that rhyme with led: the metal lead and the past-tense read. In any case, that semicolon use and that spelling may one day attain the acceptance of a split infinitive, but they haven’t yet. (Less than two hours after I wrote those words, I read a New York Times article with the words “what most troubled her was how he had mislead the public.” The change may come sooner than I think!)

Generally speaking, it’s fairly easy to figure out current standards. But a few things are trickier because they are right on the cusp of change. I make judgment calls on these. Probably the best current example is the use of they or their as a singular pronoun—in sentences like Anyone who wants to go to the concert should bring their money tomorrow or I like Taco Bell because they serve enchiladas that are oozing with cheese. The usage is almost completely prevalent in spoken English, in British written English (interestingly enough), in online publications, and, it almost goes without saying, in blogs and e-mails. I predict it will be accepted in American publishing within ten years. But it isn’t yet, and so for my purposes it counts as bad writing.

I mentioned that I mainly take my corpus of writing problems from student papers. Almost all the same things can be seen in the writing world at large. Not so much in books and newspaper and magazine articles, but rather in e-mails, blog posts, comments, and other online documents. These texts are not selected or processed by an editor (and are for the most part not the work of professionals) and thus display in a clear light the way we write now.

Taken collectively, this collection of problems and errors is kind of strange. I think of it as a giant blob of writing woe, slowly shifting as the years pass. To be sure, there have been some constants over the past two decades. When I started teaching, I wasn’t even familiar with the term comma splice. But then I was quickly confronted with innumerable variations of sentences like:

It promises to be a good game, we plan to get there early.

A colleague taught me what this was called. Knowing the name was somehow comforting; at least it gave me something to scrawl on papers. I have scrawled it many times: comma splices, like the Dude in The Big Lebowski, abide. There are variations over time, however, and one recent favorite is what I call the HCS (for “however comma splice”):

Steven Spielberg’s recent films have been box-office disappointments, however his next release is expected to do well.

The person was using however as a conjunction, more or less synonymous with but. For all I know, this will one day be acceptable, but it isn’t now—and so it is entry II.B.4.d. in How to Not Write Bad.

I started seeing the HCS and a lot of other new bad-writing phenomena ten or twelve years ago. Surprise! That was about the time that online writing started to take off: going beyond e-mail to texts, blog posts, Facebook status updates, tweets, product comments, etc. In a lot of ways, this textual revolution is quite cool; for one thing, it’s picked up many people by the napes of their necks and deposited them into the universe of writers. Certainly, it represents a huge positive change from the time not that long ago, when, other than a postcard here and there and the occasional thank-you note, most people didn’t write much of anything at all. (Reports of letter writing in the pre-Internet era are greatly exaggerated.)

Nor do I agree with the complaint you’ll find if you read more than a couple of op-ed pieces about the effect of this online culture on writing. That’s the charge that smiley faces, “LOL”-type abbreviations, and terms like diss or phat are rampant in young people’s prose. I think this is whack. (I realize all my attempts at slang are at least ten years out of date. My bad.) In fact, I don’t remember encountering a single example in all my years of grading, except for a handful of ironic parries. Students realize that this kind of thing is in the wrong register for a college assignment.

But their writing does show an online influence in subtler ways. Writing for the computer is, for some reason, more like talking than writing for print is. That lends it a welcome freshness and naturalness. But there’s a downside. Just as our spoken words disappear into the very air as soon as we utter then, it somehow seems that words on the computer screen aren’t as final as they are on a piece of paper. One has a sense that the text is somehow provisional, that it will always be possible to make more changes. My friend and fellow teacher Devin Harner has said that something—a certain level of paying attention?—is lost when documents aren’t printed out. I think he’s on to something.

The general wordiness that characterizes so much writing today has got to be related to the incredible ease of using a keyboard to create shapely and professional-looking paragraphs. Back in the days when you had to scratch out each character with a quill pen (or even pound a manual typewriter), words were dearer and therefore were parceled out more judiciously. Now, after some stream-of-conscious keyboarding, you’ve got something that looks impressive. But it isn’t. Paradoxically, it takes more effort to be concise than to be prolix, and people are (or think themselves to be) so pressed for time nowadays. As the philosopher Pascal once wisely wrote, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”

Don’t worry about the ever-shifting sands of grammar and usage. Learning how to not write bad will, for one thing, attune your inner ear to these changes. Not-bad writing will help you hold on to your readers’ attention, clearly communicate your meaning to them, and sometimes even convince them of your point of view. Without a doubt, it will serve to clarify your own thinking. And if you so desire, it will place you firmly on the road to writing well.

* Full marks, by the way, if you noticed that in this sentence I broke Strunk and White’s colon rule.