How to not write bad - Ben Yagoda 2013

How to not write bad: the one-word version

Read.

That one word refers to two things. The first is a big-picture deal: about the least quick of all possible fixes. But hear me out for a minute. Almost without exception, good writers read widely and frequently. By osmosis, they learn from the reading an incalculable amount about vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, style, rhythm, tone, and other crucial writing matters. They also pick up general random information, which also turns out to be important if you want to be a good, or even not-bad, writer.

Another college writing teacher, who calls himself “Professor X” and has written a book called In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic, observes:

I have come to think that the twist ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes a good writer may be (1) having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the rhythms of the written word, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those rhythms.

He may be exaggerating the point. But he does have a point. Sometimes, when encountering an article or essay from a student who makes many spelling and punctuation mistakes, who uses words incorrectly, whose sentences meander in an awkward and ungainly fashion, I want to write on the paper: “Have read a lot!” Besides being a seriously weird tense (present perfect imperative?), that sentence represents a physical impossibility, outside of time-travel movies. So I don’t write it. What I do try to tell all students is that if they want to be good writers, they should start reading as much as they can, starting now. And they should read all kinds of things.

Up until about ten years ago, I could leave it at that, maybe throwing in a great William Faulkner quote indicating that they need not confine themselves to the great works of Western literature: “Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.”

But things have changed. People nowadays read and write huge amounts of online stuff—texts, tweets, e-mails, blog posts, and so forth. As I mentioned in the introduction, I don’t think there is anything especially wrong with this, and the composition end of it, at least, has led to a lot more people actually writing a lot more. But clearly, as far as reading goes, this online textuality doesn’t have the Faulknerian effect. The material one is exposed to is too off-the-cuff and unilateral. For some reason, the stuff that helps your own writing has to have some measure of the traditional structure. It can be in print or online, can be any kind of book or any kind of article, but it seems to need to go through the old-fashioned pipeline. That is, selected and processed by an editor, and then “published.”

How much reading will do the trick? The writer Malcolm Gladwell has popularized the notion that, in order to become an outstanding practitioner in any discipline, you need to devote to it roughly 10,000 hours of practice. I’ll accept that in terms of reading. If you put in two hours a day, that works out to about thirteen and a half years. If you start when you’re eight, you’ll be done by college graduation!

The specific benefits of widespread reading are many. Certainly, it’s the very best and most painless way to absorb the rules of the language. It’s similar to table manners or conduct in public or any other social protocol—it’s far more effective to learn by observing than by studying a textbook or being drilled in a classroom.

Prominent among the protocols of written language is spelling. And please, spare me the retort that spell-check programs mean we don’t have to know how to spell anymore. No question, these applications can be helpful. If I happen to be writing about unfortunate digestive conditions, I can put down diarrea and then diarhea and finally diarrhea—getting a frisson of pleasure from seeing the last one absent a squiggly red line. But spell-check is anything but a cure-all and actually can make things worse. That is, it puts no red line under words that are correctly spelled, but are totally the wrong word. And thus the writer gets a false sense of security and hits save or send or print. This has produced a whole consortium of understandable errors like he lead the way (instead of led); pouring over a book (instead of poring); or peaking his interest (piquing), all of which will probably become the standard spelling some decades hence. (Just as the correct U.S. spelling changed years ago from neighbour and colour to the u-less versions.) More troubling are very common mistakes like confusing your and you’re, its and it’s, and there and their. And worst of all are the howlers that result when spell-check’s suggestions are blindly taken. As I described in more detail in entry II.I.C.2., I have had students refer to wearing a sequence-covered dress, to the Super Attendant of Schools, to a heroine attic, and to an athlete who had to miss several weeks of the season because of phenomena, which baffled me till I realized it was supposed to be pneumonia.

Then there’s punctuation, which once again, you learn far more thoroughly by reading widely than by studying. Not having read widely, most young writers today don’t have a clue. Or, rather, they haven’t mastered the rules, so are guided by intuition and/or sound, which are sometimes helpful but more often aren’t. The intuition leads to the currently hugely popular “logical punctuation”, which I have just used—it consists of putting periods and commas outside quotation marks, when the situation seems to call for it. This style has long been standard practice in the United Kingdom and various outposts of the British Empire, but not the United States. However, in the last five years or so, it’s become inescapable on the Web—and in my classroom, despite repeated sardonic remarks from me that we are in Delaware, not Liverpool. On the logic that while this might be logical, and might become established sometime in the future, it is wrong now, I’ve begun to announce and enforce a one-point penalty on every assignment for infractions. In each class, a couple of (bright) students found this so irresistible that they kept on doing it till the end of the term. Go figure.

As for sound, students tend to insert commas at places where they would pause in speaking the sentence. This has about the same reliability as the rhythm method for birth control. In particular, it has led to the current vogue for commas after sentence-opening conjunctions. It works the other way as well. The majority of my students would write Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is his hometown—leaving out the (required) comma after Pennsylvania because they wouldn’t pause at that point in the sentence.

The benefits of reading extend far beyond protocol and rules. When you have read all kinds of (preferably good) prose by writers with diverse styles and approaches, your inner ear gets exposed to an amazing range of ways to perpetrate a sentence. They subtly but surely become part of your own repertoire. Trying to be a not-bad writer without having read your share of others’ work is like trying to come up with a new theory in physics without having paid attention to the scientists that came before you, or writing a symphony without having listened to a lot of music. It’s possible, I guess, but extremely difficult.

I quoted Faulkner earlier; now let me invoke some advice from his chief rival in twentieth-century American literature, Ernest Hemingway. In the book Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway counseled, “Write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.” That has a nice ring to it, certainly more so than the clichéd motto of creative writing classes, “Write about what you know.” But they both make the same basic point and they are both absolutely true. If Joe is a mediocre writer who knows his subject to the very depths of his soul (let’s say his expertise is the qualities of a good video game), and Jane is an accomplished writer who’s to a certain extent at sea (she’s writing about the validity of the idea of global warming), Joe’s essay is going to be stronger and better every time. Jane’s will hem and haw and qualify and fudge, use passive voice and abstract nouns; it will circle around the subject to try to cover up all the gaps in her knowledge, and in so doing will just make the reader tired.

I imagine the write-what-you-know bromide is mocked because it implies, or seems to imply, that you’re required to write about what you’ve already learned or experienced at the time you sit down at the keyboard: your childhood, your daydreams, your dog-walking routine, the layout of your bedroom, and so forth. But that isn’t the case at all. Whatever your topic—and this is true of fiction as well as nonfiction—your writing will improve in direct proportion to the amount you read, research, investigate, and learn about it. I guarantee it.

There’s a whole other aspect to the one-word solution for not writing bad. This one offers quite a contrast to the massive amount of time reading demands. Indeed, it’s a pretty quick fix. The most effective short-term way to improve your writing is to read it aloud, sentence by sentence and word by word. There was a spoken language before there was a written language, and good writing has always been intimately connected to the ear, whether the short sentences of Hemingway or the near-endless periods of Samuel Johnson and David Foster Wallace.

Gustave Flaubert, renowned as one of the great all-time stylists, used what he called la gueulade: that is, “the shouting test.” He would go out to an avenue of lime trees near his house and, yes, shout what he had written. It’s the same principle as scrutinizing a photograph by blowing up its image on the computer screen; you really can identify the flaws.

Reading aloud isn’t a panacea, even if you shout like Flaubert. At first, you may not catch the rum rhythms, the word repetition, the wordiness, the sentences that peter out with a whimper, not a bang. You need to develop your ear, just as a musician does. But eventually you’ll start to really hear your sentences, and at some point you’ll be able to shut up and listen with your mind’s ear.

It’ll give you good counsel, too. One of the favorite go-to rules of writing textbooks and teachers is to cut out the word that in sentences like He told me that I needed to drop one class. Improves the sentence, to be sure. But sometimes this is bad advice, for example, here: Jack believed that Jill was a liar. If you remove the that, you have Jack believed Jill was a liar, which a reader will find momentarily not only ambiguous but downright contradictory. That is, was Jack doubting Jill’s truthfulness or accepting what she was saying? Even momentary reader confusion is bad, so that should stay. It’s possible to come up with a rule for those situations, but the rule would be so complicated as to be nearly useless. (Use the word that after a verb of expression or thought if the verb, in another connotation, can take a direct object.) Much better to read it, hear it, and act accordingly.

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 ums, ya knows, and likes. 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.