How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem Read online

  How to Not

  Write Bad

  Also by Ben Yagoda

  Memoir: A History

  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

  About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made

  Will Rogers: A Biography

  The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of

  Literary Journalism (coeditor)

  All in a Lifetime: An Autobiography (with Ruth Westheimer)

  How to Not

  Write Bad

  The Most Common

  Writing Problems and

  the Best Ways to

  Avoid Them

  BEN YAGODA

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  New York

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa), Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2013 by Ben Yagoda

  Cover design by Alex Merto

  Book design by Tiffany Estreicher

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Riverhead trade paperback edition: February 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-101-60212-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Yagoda, Ben.

  How to Not Write Bad / Ben Yagoda.—First Riverhead edition.

  pages cm

  1. English language—Rhetoric—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Report writing—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 3. English language—Grammar—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title.

  PE1408.Y34 2013

  808’.042—dc23 2012043126

  ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON

  To David Friedman

  with thanks for being in my corner all these years

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Part I:

  How to Not Write Bad: The One-Word Version

  Part II:

  How to Not Write Wrong

  A. THE ELEMENTS OF HOUSE STYLE

  1. Numbers and Abbreviations

  2. Capitalization

  3. Italics

  4. There Is No Reason Ever to Use Boldface in a Piece of Writing, Except for a Section Heading (Like This)

  B. PUNCTUATION

  1. ’

  2. -

  3. —

  4. ,

  5. ;

  6. :

  7. “ ”

  8. ( )

  C. WORDS

  1. The Single Most Common Mistake Is the Most Easily Fixable Mistake

  2. Spelling

  3. Wrong Word

  D. GRAMMAR

  1. Sanitized

  2. Skunked

  3. Still Wrong

  Part III:

  How to Not Write Bad

  A. PUNCTUATION

  1. Quotation Marks

  2. Exclamation Points, Dashes, Semicolons, Colons, Parentheses, Italics, and Rhetorical Questions…

  B. WORDS AND PHRASES

  1. Really Quick Fix: Avoid These Words!

  2. Short Is Good (I)

  3. Precision: Words That Are a Bit Off

  4. Avoid Clichés Like the Plague

  5. Euphemisms, Buzzwords, and Jargon

  C. SENTENCES

  1. Word Rep.

  2. Start Strong

  3. End Strong

  4. Short Is Good (II)

  5. The Perils of Ambiguity

  6. What Is the What? Or, the Trouble with Vague Pronouns

  7. When You Catch a Preposition, Kill It

  8. To Use to Be or Not to Use to Be

  9. What the Meaning of “Is Is” Is

  10. Tone

  D. SENTENCE TO SENTENCE, PARAGRAPH TO PARAGRAPH

  Author’s Note

  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 l
evel 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:

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

  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.”

  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.)