How to not write bad - Ben Yagoda 2013

Author’s note

This is my third book about words. They’ve come in kind of a weird order. The first, The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing, dealt with some rather advanced matters and took as object lessons the very best writers, now and through history. The second, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse, was about, among other things, the cool and expressive things all sorts of people do with the English language, things like using the word chill as a noun, adjective, and verb (transitive and intransitive). And now I’m telling you how to not write bad. I shudder to think what the next book will be.

In a way, I’ve been working on this book for twenty years, which is how long I’ve been teaching writing at the University of Delaware. The job has been a picture window on the way people write now—and by people I mean bright students at a selective university who have elected to take advanced journalism and other writing classes. There are some nice views out that window, but on the whole the picture isn’t pretty. As the years and the articles, essays, assignments, papers, and other assignments built up, I came to realize that my students, generally speaking, were not adept. Writing well was not the task at hand for most of them. A more pressing need was getting rid of their bad habits and getting acquainted with some core principles.

Helping them achieve this has been a challenge that, as Dr. Johnson would put it, concentrated my mind wonderfully. It made me think about writing in new ways, and appreciate it in new ways, too. I believe the other teachers out there will back me up when I say that nothing in my professional life is more gratifying than reading a great piece of work by a student—unless it’s reading a great piece of work by a student who started out the semester not that great. I still remember an article written in my very first class in 1992. It was Tye Comer’s on-the-scene piece about a “rave”—then a phenomenon so new that it demanded quotation marks. It was fantastic, and I gave it a well-deserved A+. I remember so many other outstanding pieces over the years, including lines that knocked me out when I read them and get me misty-eyed when I think back on them. So thanks to those who gave me such pleasure, and to all of you, for what you helped me to figure out.

A secondary pleasure has been following the careers of some of these folks. (Tye, for example, is an editor and writer with Billboard magazine; I’ve just been enjoying reading his posts from the Coachella Festival, which, come to think of it, is a rave of sorts.) Some I’ve become friends with, including Jocelyn Terranova, who provided excellent research assistance for this book, as she has for others of mine. Another student from those early years is Devin Harner, now a fellow journalism professor and a welcoming sounding board for ideas and problems.

I think of my colleagues from the University of Delaware as teammates, always ready to throw me a buddy pass or call my number in the huddle. I have had many fun and fruitful conversations about writing with Debby Andrews, Dee Baer, Steve Bernhardt, Jim Dean, Dawn Fallik, McKay Jenkins, Kevin Kerrane, Don Mell, Charley Robinson, and lots of others in Memorial Hall. John Jebb, going above and beyond the call of duty, deaccessioned a few volumes from his vast library on writing, and gave them to me. Linda Stein and Susan Brynteson, of UD’s proper library, were greatly supportive. Beyond campus, I’ve benefited from conversations and e-mail exchanges with Bruce Beans, Wes Davis, David Friedman, John Grossmann, John Marchese, Geoffrey Pullum, and Bill Stempel.

I’d like to thank some editors who gave me the opportunity to work out some of these ideas in pieces for their publications: Heidi Landecker, Liz McMillen, and Jean Tamarin at the Chronicle of Higher Education; Juliet Lapidos and Julia Turner at Slate; and Whitney Dangerfield at the New York Times.

Thanks to Geoff Kloske and Laura Perciasepe at Riverhead Books for helping this book find its best self; and to Stuart Krichevsky, Shana Cohen, and their colleagues at the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency for, well, you know.

Last and best, thanks always to Gigi Simeone, Elizabeth Yagoda, and Maria Yagoda, my posse.

Ben Yagoda is a journalism professor at the University of Delaware. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of ten books, including Memoir: A History; Will Rogers: A Biography; When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse; The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing; The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism (coedited with Kevin Kerrane); About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made; and All in a Lifetime: An Autobiography (with Dr. Ruth Westheimer). He contributes to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Lingua Franca” blog and has written for Slate, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, the American Scholar, and publications that start with every letter of the alphabet except J, K, Q, X, and Z. Yagoda lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Gigi Simeone.