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:

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.

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.

Note: In Parts II and III, examples of what not to do will be crossed out or [set in brackets].

If you’ve absorbed the previous chapter, you’ve achieved — or are well on your way to achieving — the goal of removing the mistakes and errors from your writing. The next step is getting rid of a collection of qualities that aren’t technically wrong but are eminently undesirable. The best way to sum them up is with a simple chart:

Bad Not Bad Wordy or pretentious Concise, straightforward Vague Precise Awkward Graceful, fluid Ambiguous or misleading Clear Clichéd, hackneyed, or pat Fresh

That’s pretty much it. Of course, there are a lot of additional elements associated with writing well, or very well: brilliant similes and metaphors, masterful deploying of irony and other registers, humor, a personal voice, an ear for and ability to mimic other writers’ and speakers’ voices, a command of pacing and structure, the ability to construct long and complex sentences in the manner of Samuel Johnson, a sure and creative hand with metaphor and other figures of speech, a capacious vocabulary and the ability to use it, a sense of audience, an appreciation for subtlety, and so on.

But those are topics for another book. Writing not-bad is quite enough for this one. Before getting to the particulars, I’ll review the general approach to take. First, turn off the radio, the iPod, the television; put your phone on silence and in your pocket; X out of or minimize all screens other than the one you’re writing on. Multitasking = bad writing.

Second, know what you want to say. Any sort of uncertainty, fuzziness, or equivocation in your thoughts multiplies on the page and yields very bad writing. The boys in Entourage are always telling each other to “Hug it out”; my mantra for you is “Think it out.” You will often realize that you have to find out some more about your subject before you set words to paper. This is called research. Do it.

Third, be a mindful writer. A good homemaker doesn’t just fling silverware and plates on the table, but arranges them consciously and carefully. A stylish dresser chooses an outfit carefully. Be that kind of writer. Read each sentence aloud — literally, at first. Eventually you will develop an inner ear that will allow you to note the awkwardness, wordiness, word repetition, and vagueness that are the hallmarks of mindless, bad writing. And eventually, you will streamline the process and “hear” yourself write. And that is pretty cool.

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.