How to not write bad - Ben Yagoda 2013

Sentence to Sentence, Paragraph to Paragraph
How to not write bad

So can I assume we’re all good on sentences? Mazel tov! As we move on to subsequent sentences, and then paragraphs, the key issues are cadence or rhythm, variety, novelty, consistency, and transitions.

The first two (and a lot else besides) are taken up in the beginning of one of my all-time favorite quotes about writing, from the pen of the critic F. W. Bateson. I like the rest of the quote, too, so here’s the whole thing:

[The] defining characteristics of good prose [are]: a preference for short sentences diversified by an occasionally very long one; a tone that is relaxed and almost colloquial; a large vocabulary that enjoys exploiting the different etymological and social levels of words; and an insistence on verbal and logical precision.

Relatively short sentences should be the default, as Bateson suggests, but too many of them in a row produces a staccato ersatz-Hemingway sound, or a dumbed-down Dick-and-Jane sort of thing. Not only will you be able to hear this when you read them aloud, but you can learn to literally see the problem—the short sentences will jump out at you. To fix this, just link the sentences together with commas, conjunctions (and, but), and/or logical connectors like although, after, or because.

[The store will open its doors tomorrow. Baseball star Albert Pujols will give a speech. The first ten customers will receive signed baseballs.]

At the store’s opening ceremony tomorrow, baseball star Albert Pujols will give a speech. The first ten customers will receive autographed baseballs.

A series of long sentences is even worse. Not only does rhythm go by the boards, but it quickly becomes hard for the reader to make his or her way. It’s like walking in the jungle and finding that all of a sudden the vegetation has gotten impassably thick. Fortunately, chopping up sentences is usually pretty easy. I certainly spend a lot of my revising time doing just that. Take a look at the first draft of a passage in this book:

[If you’re on one side or the other and trying to stoke the fire on any of these issues, go nuts with the terms I’ve been discussing and the many others like them. However, if you’re writing in an intelligent, nonpartisan way, avoid them at all costs, instead seeking words that accurately and temperately convey meaning, such as legalized abortion, government spending, taxes (in general) and the estate tax (in particular).]

Reading it aloud, I could see something was off with the second sentence. Like a rapper or basketball player, I tend to try for a strong “flow,” hence the phrase instead seeking and what came after (a lot). But I could tell that right about there, I had to shut the faucet off.

If you’re on one side or the other and trying to stoke the fire on any of these issues, go nuts with the terms I’ve been discussing and the many others like them. However, if you’re writing in an intelligent, nonpartisan way, avoid them at all costs. Instead, seek out words that accurately and temperately convey meaning, such as legalized abortion, government spending, taxes (in general), and the estate tax (in particular).

Follow a similar strategy with paragraphs. If you scan down the screen or the page, and they all seem to be roughly the same size, work on varying them. It’s usually easy to fuse two short paragraphs together. Breaking a long one up can be more challenging, but you can generally discern a sort of point of perforation where it can be divided. If you can’t, leave it be.

By novelty, I mean don’t repeat words, phrase structures, figures of speech, or ideas. By the same token, you should make sure to maintain the tone or register of your writing; that’s a matter of being consistent.

Sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph, transitions are a challenge. Certainly, standards differ according to what you are writing and your own style. A traditional essay requires a lot of transitional words and phrases along the lines of consequently, needless to say, however, and furthermore. However, transitions are famously not allowed in the traditional inverted-pyramid newspaper article. Whatever the form, the most important thing is to have a strong sense in your own mind of the relationship of one sentence or paragraph to the next. Sometime you’ll have to specify the relationship, sometimes you won’t. If you don’t spell out enough, you’ll drop one non sequitur after the other and generally baffle readers. But if you spell out too much, you may come off as ponderous, too literal, and almost overprotective, like a parent who leads his child by the hand even though the kid is a high schooler. Ultimately, as with so much else, it’s a mama bear, papa bear, and baby bear kind of thing: you’re the one who has to decide what’s just right. If you turn off the music, you’re mindful, and you read, read, read, you can do it.

^* As I’ve noted, I teach journalism, and beginning reporters are often tempted to overuse exclamation points in quoted material: “’I hope we have a great year!’ the coach said.” That doesn’t come off well. If you use exclamation points at all in quotes, save them for when the speaker is screaming his or her lungs out.

^* It could be argued that those terms are themselves pseudo-clinical euphemisms for four-letter words beginning with p and s. I leave that determination to wiser heads than mine.

^* In addition, “contaminated salami” is a kind of passive adjective, being shorthand for “salami that has been contaminated.”