Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

by Roy Peter Clark

  I learned the power of sentence length when I read a famous essay by Norman Mailer, “The Death of Benny Paret.” Mailer has often written about boxing, and here he reports on the night Emile Griffith beat Benny Paret to death in the ring after Paret questioned Griffith’s manhood. Mailer’s account is riveting, placing us at ringside to witness the terrible event:

  Paret got trapped in a corner. Trying to duck away, his left arm and his head became tangled on the wrong side of the top rope. Griffith was in like a cat ready to rip the life out of a huge boxed rat. He hit him eighteen right hands in a row, an act which took perhaps three or four seconds, Griffith making a pent-up whimpering sound all the while he attacked, the right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken through the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin.

  Notice the rhythm Mailer achieves with three short sentences followed by a long one filled with similes of action and violence. As Paret’s fate becomes clearer and clearer, Mailer’s sentences get shorter and shorter:

  The house doctor jumped into the ring. He knelt. He pried Paret’s eyelid open. He looked at the eyeball staring out. He let the lid snap shut.… But they saved Paret long enough to take him to a hospital where he lingered for days. He was in a coma. He never came out of it. If he lived, he would have been a vegetable. His brain was smashed.

  All that drama. All that raw emotional power. All those short sentences.

  In his book 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, Gary Provost created this tour de force to demonstrate what happens when the writer experiments with sentences of different lengths:

  This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

  So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Review your recent work and examine sentence length. Either by combining sentences or cutting them in half, establish a rhythm that better suits your tone and topic.

  2. In reading your favorite authors, become more aware of sentence length. Mark short and long sentences you find effective.

  3. Most writers think that a series of short sentences speeds up the reader, but I argue that they slow down the reader, that all those periods are stop signs. Discuss this effect with friends and see if you can reach a consensus.

  4. Read some children’s books, especially books for very young children, to see if you can gauge the effect on the reader of sentence length variation.

  TOOL 19

  Vary the lengths of paragraphs.

  Go short or long—or make a turn—to match your intent.

  In a New York Times review, critic David Lipsky tears into an author for including in a 207-page book “more than 400 single-sentence paragraphs—a well-established distress signal, recognized by book readers and term-paper graders alike.” But a distress signal for what? The answer is most likely confusion. The big parts of a story should fit together, but the small parts need some stickum as well. When the big parts fit, we call that good feeling coherence; when sentences connect, we call it cohesion.

  “The paragraph is essentially a unit of thought, not of length,” argues British grammarian H. W. Fowler in Modern English Usage, the irreplaceable dictionary he compiled in 1926. Such a statement implies that all sentences in a paragraph should be about the same thing and move in a sequence. It also means that writers can break up long paragraphs into parts. They should not, however, paste together paragraphs that are short and disconnected.

  Is there, then, an ideal length for a paragraph? In this sequence of paragraphs from the novel Democracy, Joan Didion challenges our assumptions about length:

  See it this way.

  See the sun rise that Wednesday morning in 1975 the way Jack Lovett saw it.

  From the operations room at the Honolulu airport.

  The warm rain down on the runways.

  The smell of jet fuel.

  Can five paragraphs in a row be that short? Three of them sentence fragments? Can a sentence fragment be a paragraph?

  Again I found answers in Modern English Usage. With typical common sense Fowler begins by telling us what the paragraph is for: “The purpose of paragraphing is to give the reader a rest. The writer is saying to him: ‘Have you got that? If so, I’ll go on to the next point.’” But how much rest does a reader need? Does it depend on subject matter? Genre or medium? The voice of the author? “There can be no general rule about the most suitable length for a paragraph,” writes Fowler. “A succession of very short ones is as irritating as very long ones are wearisome.”

  In a long paragraph, the writer can develop an argument or build a narrative using lots of related examples. In Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, the typical paragraph is more than a hundred words long, with some longer than a full book page. Such length gives Fadiman the space to develop interesting, quirky ideas:

  When I read about food, sometimes a single word is enough to detonate a chain reaction of associative memories. I am like the shoe fetishist who, in order to become aroused, no longer needs to see the object of his desire; merely glimpsing the phrase “spectator pump, size 6½” is sufficient. Whenever I encounter the French word plein, which means “full,” I am instantly transported back to age fifteen, when, after eating a very large portion of poulet à l’estragon, I told my Parisian hosts that I was “pleine,” an adjective that I later learned is reserved for pregnant women and cows in need of milking. The word ptarmigan catapults me back ten years to an expedition I accompanied to the Canadian Arctic, during which a polar-bear biologist, tired of canned beans, shot a half dozen ptarmigans. We plucked them, fried them, and gnawed the bones with such ravening carnivorism that I knew on the spot I could never, ever become a vegetarian. Sometimes just the contiguous letters pt are enough to call up in me a nostalgic rush of guilt and greed. I may thus be the only person in the world who salivates when she reads the words “ptomaine poisoning.”

  The writer can use the short paragraph, especially after a long one, to bring the reader to a sudden, dramatic stop. Consider this New York Times passage from Jim Dwyer, in which a group of men struggle to escape from a stalled elevator in the World Trade Center, using only a window washer’s squeegee as a tool.

  They did not know their lives would depend on a simple tool.

  After 10 minutes, a live voice delivered a blunt message over the intercom. There had been an explosion. Then the intercom went silent. Smoke seeped into the elevator cabin. One man cursed skyscrapers. Mr. Phoenix, the tallest, a Port Authority engineer, poked for a ceiling hatch. Others pried apart the car doors, propping them open with the long wooden handle of Mr. Demczur’s squeegee.

  There was no exit.

  This technique—a four-word paragraph after one of sixty-four words—can be abused with overuse, but to create surprise it packs a punch.

  A solid, unified paragraph can act as a mini-narrative, an anecdote that takes a turn in the middle:

  As soon as I had tightened my bow there was a burst of applause, but I was still nervous. However, as I ran my swollen fingers over the strings, Mozart’s phrases came flooding back to me like so many faithful friends. The peasants’ faces, so grim a moment before, softened under the influence of Mozart’s limpid music like parched earth under a shadow, and then, in the dancing light of the oil lamp, they blurred
into one. (from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress)

  The logic of this paragraph by novelist Dai Sijie is cause and effect, the turn occurring when the sweet music softens the faces of the Chinese peasants.

  Another memorable example of a paragraph turn comes from the book How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer:

  From the newspaper accounts of the period, it’s not at all clear that the Jewish team possessed superior talent. But the clippings do make mention of the enthusiastic Jewish supporters and the grit of the players. The grittiest performance of them all came at the greatest moment in Hakoah history. In the third to last game of the 1924–25 season, an opposing player barreled into Hakoah’s Hungarian-born goalkeeper Alexander Fabian as he handled the ball. [Here comes the turn.] Fabian toppled onto his arm, injuring it so badly that he could no longer plausibly continue in goal. This was not an easily remediable problem. The rules of the day precluded substitutions in any circumstance. So Fabian returned to the game with his arm in a sling and swapped positions with a teammate, moving up into attack on the outside right. Seven minutes after the calamitous injury, Hakoah blitzed forward on a counterattack. A player called Erno Schwarz landed the ball at Fabian’s feet. With nine minutes remaining in the game, Fabian scored the goal that won the game and clinched Hakoah’s championship.

  This shapely paragraph helps the writer develop a whole story within a story, complete with exposition, complication, resolution, and payoff at the end.

  Too many paragraphs of such length, however, eradicate the white space on a page, and white space is the writer’s friend—and the reader’s. “Paragraphing is also a matter of the eye,” writes Fowler. “A reader will address himself more readily to his task if he sees from the start that he will have breathing-spaces from time to time than if what is before him looks like a marathon course.”

  WORKSHOP

  1. Read the paragraph above by Anne Fadiman, which contains 203 words. Could you, if necessary, divide it into two or three paragraphs? Discuss your choices with a friend.

  2. Check examples of your recent work. Look for strings of long paragraphs and short ones. Can you take some of the long paragraphs and break them into smaller units? Are the one-sentence paragraphs related enough that they can be joined?

  3. In your reading of journalism and literature, pay attention to paragraph length. Look for paragraphs that are either very long or very short. Imagine the author’s purpose in each case.

  4. In your reading, pay attention to the ventilating effects of white space, especially surrounding the ends of paragraphs. Does the writer use that location as a point of emphasis? Do the words at the end of a paragraph shout, “Look at me!”?

  5. Read this section again, looking for examples of paragraphs that take a turn in the middle. Look for them in all of your reading.

  TOOL 20

  Choose the number of elements with a purpose in mind.

  One, two, three, or four: each sends a secret message to the reader.

  A self-conscious writer has no choice but to select a specific number of examples or elements in a sentence or paragraph. The writer chooses the number and, when it is greater than one, the order. (If you think the order of a list unimportant, try reciting the names of the four Evangelists in this order: Luke, Mark, John, and Matthew.)

  THE LANGUAGE OF ONE

  Let’s examine some texts with our X-ray reading glasses, looking beneath the surface meaning to the grammatical machinery at work below.

  That girl is smart.

  In this simple sentence, the writer declares a single defining characteristic of the girl: her intelligence. We’ll need evidence, to be sure. But, for now, the reader must focus on that particular quality. It is this effect of unity, single-mindedness, no-other-alternativeness, that characterizes the language of one.

  Jesus wept.

  Call me.

  Call me Ishmael.

  Go to hell.

  Here’s Johnny.

  I do.

  God is love.

  Elvis.

  Elvis has left the building. Word.

  True.

  I have a dream.

  I have a headache.

  Not now.

  Read my lips.

  Tom Wolfe once told William F. Buckley Jr. that if a writer wants the reader to think something the absolute truth, the writer should render it in the shortest possible sentence. Trust me.

  THE LANGUAGE OF TWO

  We are told “That girl is smart,” but what happens when we learn:

  That girl is smart and sweet.

  The writer has altered our perspective on the world. The choice for the reader is not between smart and sweet. Instead, the writer forces us to hold these two characteristics in our mind at the same time. We have to balance them, weigh them against each other, compare and contrast them.

  Mom and dad.

  Tom and Jerry.

  Ham and eggs.

  Abbott and Costello.

  Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus.

  Dick and Jane.

  Rock ’n’ roll.

  Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.

  I and thou.

  In The Ethics of Rhetoric, Richard M. Weaver explains that the language of two “divides the world.”

  THE LANGUAGE OF THREE

  With the addition of one, the dividing power of number two turns into what one scholar calls the “encompassing” magic of number three.

  That girl is smart, sweet, and determined.

  As this sentence grows, we see the girl in a more well-rounded way. Rather than simplify her as smart, or divide her as smart and sweet, we now triangulate the dimensions of her character. In our language and culture, three provides a sense of the whole:

  Beginning, middle, and end.

  Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

  Moe, Larry, and Curly.

  Tinkers to Evers to Chance.

  A priest, a minister, and a rabbi.

  Executive, legislative, judicial.

  The Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

  At the end of his most famous passage on the nature of love, Saint Paul writes to the Corinthians: “For now, faith, hope, and love abide, these three. But the greatest of all is love.” The powerful movement is from trinity to unity, from a sense of the whole to an understanding of what is most important.

  THE LANGUAGE OF FOUR AND MORE

  In the anti-math of writing, the number three is greater than four. The mojo of three offers a greater sense of completeness than four or more. Once we add a fourth or fifth detail, we have achieved escape velocity, breaking out of the circle of wholeness:

  That girl is smart, sweet, determined, and neurotic.

  We can add descriptive elements to infinity. Four or more details in a passage can offer a flowing, literary effect that the best writers have created since Homer listed the names of the Greek tribes. Consider the beginning of Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn:

  Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I’m a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I’ve got Tourette’s.

  If we check these sentences against our theory of numbers, it would reveal this pattern: 1-2-5-1. In the first sentence the author declares a single idea, stated as the absolute truth. In the next sentence, he gives the reader two imperative verbs. In the next, he spins five metaphors. In the final sentence, the writer returns to a definitive declaration—so important he casts it in italics.

  So good writing is as easy as one, two, three—and four. In summary:

  • Use one for power.

  • Use two for comparison, contrast.

  • Use three for completeness, wholeness, roundness.

  • Use four or more to list, inventory, compile, and expand.

  WORKSHOP

  1. In your reading, notice passages where the writer uses the number of examples to achieve a specific effect.

  2. Reread exa
mples of your recent work. Examine your use of numbers. Look for cases in which you might add an example or subtract one to create the effects described above.

  3. Brainstorm with friends to list examples of the use of one, two, three, and four. Draw these from proverbs, everyday speech, music lyrics, famous orations, literature, and sports.

  4. Look for an opportunity to use a long list in your writing. (For example, the names of kittens in a litter. The items in the window of an old drugstore. Objects abandoned at the bottom of a swimming pool.) Play with the order to achieve the best effect.

  TOOL 21

  Know when to back off and when to show off.

  When the topic is most serious, understate; when least serious, exaggerate.

  In “Why I Write,” George Orwell explains that “good prose is like a window pane.” The best work calls the reader’s attention to the world being described, not to the writer’s flourishes. When we peer out a window onto the horizon, we don’t notice the pane, yet the pane frames our vision just as the writer frames our view of the story.

  Most writers have at least two modes. One says, “Pay no attention to the writer behind the curtain. Look only at the world.” The other says, without inhibition, “Watch me dance. Aren’t I a clever fellow?” In rhetoric, these two modes have names. The first is called understatement. The second is called overstatement or hyperbole.