Writing Tools

by Roy Peter Clark

  By repeating those conditional "If" clauses and ending four consecutive sentences with "insufficient information," Postman sounds a drumbeat of language, a drumline of persuasion.

  Suddenly I began to see parallels everywhere. Here is a passage from The Plot Against America, a novel by Philip Roth. In one of his trademark long sentences, Roth describes Jewish American working-class life in the 1940s:

  The men worked fifty, sixty, even seventy or more hours a week; the women worked all the time, with little assistance from labor-saving devices, washing laundry, ironing shirts, mending socks, turning collars, sewing on buttons, mothproofing woolens, polishing furniture, sweeping and washing floors, washing windows, cleaning sinks, tubs, toilets, and stoves, vacuuming rugs, nursing the sick, shopping for food, cooking meals, feeding relatives, tidy

  ing closets and drawers, overseeing paint jobs and household repairs, arranging for religious observances, paying bills and keeping the family's books while simultaneously attending to their children's health, clothing, cleanliness, schooling, nutrition, conduct, birthdays, discipline, and morale.

  In this dazzling inventory of work, I count nineteen parallel phrases, all building on "washing laundry." (And look at all those -ings.) But here's Roth's secret: what makes the passage sing is the occasional variation of the pattern, such as the phrase "cleaning sinks, tubs, toilets, and stoves." Roth could have written, "The men worked fifty, sixty, seventy hours a week," a perfectly parallel string of adjectives. Instead, he gives us "even seventy or more." By breaking the pattern, he lends more emphasis to the final element.

  A pure parallel construction would be "Boom, boom, boom." Parallelism with a twist gives us "Boom, boom, bang." A pattern with variation created these now familiar phrases and titles:

  Hither, thither, and yon Wynken, Blynken, and Nod Father, Son, and Holy Ghost Peter, Paul, and Mary Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll

  Superman, we all remember, stands not for truth, justice, and patriotism, but "truth, justice, and the American way," two parallel nouns with a twist.

  Such intentional violation of parallelism adds power to the conclusion of King's speech:

  Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! [That follows the pattern.] But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

  Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every

  mountainside, let freedom ring.

  When King points the compass of freedom toward the segregationist South, he alters the pattern. Generalized American topography is replaced by specific locations associated with racial injustice: Stone Mountain and Lookout Mountain. The final variation covers not just mighty mountains, but every bump of Mississippi.

  All writers fail, on occasion, to take advantage of parallel structures. The result for the reader can be the equivalent of driving over a pothole on a freeway. What if Saint Paul taught us that the three great virtues were faith, hope, and committing ourselves to charitable work? What if Abraham Lincoln had written about a government of the people, by the people, and for the entire nation, including the red and blue states? These violations of parallelism should remind us of the exquisite balance of the original versions.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Examine your recent work with parallelism in mind. Look for examples in which you used parallel structures. Can you find potholes — some unparallel phrases or sentences — that jar the reader?

  2. Notice parallel language in novels, in creative nonfiction, in journalism. When you find a passage, underline the parallel structures with a pencil. Discuss the effects of parallelism on the reader.

  3. Just for fun, take parallel slogans or sayings and rewrite the last element. For example, John, Paul, George, and that drummer who wears the rings.

  4. By fiddling with parallel structures, you might discover that an occasional violation of parallelism — a twist at the end — can lend a humorous imbalance to a sentence. Give it a try.

  Some teach punctuation using technical distinctions, such as the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. Not here. I prefer tools, not rules. My preference shows no disrespect for the rules of punctuation. They help the writer and the reader as long as everyone remembers that such rules are arbitrary, determined by consensus, convention, and culture.

  If you check the end of that last sentence, you will notice that I used a comma before "and" to end a series. For a quarter century, we at the Poynter Institute have argued about that comma. Fans of Strunk and White (that's me!) put it in. Thrifty journalists take it out. As an American, I spell the word color "color," and I place the comma inside the quotation marks. My cheeky English friend spells it "colour", and she leaves that poor little croissant out in the cold.

  Most punctuation is required, but some is optional, leaving the writer with many choices. My modest goal is to highlight those choices, to transform the formal rules of punctuation into useful tools.

  Punctuation comes from the Latin root punctus, or "point." Those funny dots, lines, and squiggles help writers point the way. To help readers, we punctuate for two reasons:

  1. To set the pace of reading.

  2. To divide words, phrases, and ideas into convenient groupings.

  You will punctuate with power and purpose when you begin to consider pace and space.

  Think of a long, well-written sentence with no punctuation except the period. Such a sentence is a straight road with a stop sign at the end. The period is the stop sign. Now think of a winding road with lots of stop signs. That analogy describes a paragraph with lots of periods, an effect that will slow the pace of the story. The writer may desire such a pace for strategic reasons: to achieve clarity, convey emotion, or create suspense.

  If a period is a stop sign, then what kind of traffic flow is created by other marks? The comma is a speed bump; the semicolon is what a driver education teacher calls a "rolling stop"; the parenthetical expression is a detour; the colon is a flashing yellow light that announces something important up ahead; the dash is a tree branch in the road.

  A writer once told me that he knew it was time to hand in a story when he had reached this stage: "I would take out all the commas. Then I would put them all back." The comma may be the most versatile of marks and the one most closely associated with the writer's voice. A well-placed comma points to where the writer would pause if he read the passage aloud. "He may have been a genius, as mutations sometimes are." The author of that line is Kurt Vonnegut. I have heard him speak, and that central comma is his voice.

  More muscular than the comma, the semicolon is most useful for dividing and organizing big chunks of information. In his essay "The Lantern-Bearers," Robert Louis Stevenson describes an adventure game in which boys wore cheap tin lanterns — called bull's-eyes — under their coats:

  We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They

  smelled noisomely of blistered tin; they never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more.

  Parentheses introduce a play within a play. Like a detour sign in the middle of a street, they require the driver to maneuver around to regain the original direction. Parenthetical expressions are best kept short and (Pray for us, Saint Nora of Ephron) witty.

  My great friend Don Fry has undertaken a quixotic quest to eliminate that tree branch in the road — the dash. "Avoid the dash," he insists as often as William Strunk begged his students to "omit needless words." Don's crusade was inspired by his observation — with which I agree — that the dash has become the default mark for writers who never mastered the formal rules. But the dash has two brilliant uses: a pair of dashes can set off an idea contained within a sentence, and a dash near the end can deliver a punch line.

  In his book Propagand
a, Edward Bernays uses both kinds of dashes to describe the purposes of political persuasion:

  Propaganda does exist on all sides of us, and it does change our mental pictures of the world. Even if this be unduly pessimistic — and that remains to be proved — the opinion reflects a tendency that is undoubtedly real.

  We are proud of our diminishing infant death rate — and that too is the work of propaganda.

  That leaves the colon, and here's what it does: it announces a word, phrase, or clause the way a trumpet flourish in a Shakespeare play sounds the arrival of the royal procession. More from Vonnegut:

  I am often asked to give advice to young writers who wish to be famous and fabulously well-to-do. This is the best I have to offer:

  While looking as much like a bloodhound as possible, announce that you are working twelve hours a day on a masterpiece. Warning: All is lost if you crack a smile, (from Palm Sunday)

  Writers store other punctuation arrows in their quiver, including ellipses, brackets, exclamation points, and capital letters. These have formal uses, of course, but in the hands of an inventive writer they can express all the organ stops of voice, pitch, and tone. Here, for example, James McBride describes the power of a preacher in The Color of Water:

  "We . .. [silence] ... know... today... arrhh ... um ... I said WEEEE ... know... THAT [silence] ahhh ... JESUS [church: "Amen!"] ... ahhh, CAME DOWN ... ["Yes! Amen!"] I said CAME DOWWWWNNNN! ["Go on!"] He CAME-ON-DOWN-AND — LED-THE — PEOPLE-OF — JERU-SALEM-AMEN!"

  When it comes to punctuation, all writers develop habits that buttress their styles. Mine include wearing out the comma and using more periods than average. I abhor unsightly blemishes, so I shun semicolons and parentheses. I overuse the colon. I write an exclamation with enough force to avoid the weedy appendage of an exclamation point. I prefer the comma to the dash but sometimes use one — if only to pluck Don Fry's beard.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Make sure you have a good basic reference to guide you through the rules of punctuation. I favor A Writer's Reference by Diana Hacker. For fun, read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a humorous if crusty attack by Lynne Truss against faulty punctuation, especially in public texts.

  2. Take one of your old pieces and repunctuate it. Add some optional commas, or take some out. Read both versions aloud. Hear a difference?

  3. Make conscious decisions on how fast you'd like the reader to move. Perhaps you want readers to zoom across the landscape. Or to tiptoe through a technical explanation. Punctuate accordingly.

  4. Reread this section and analyze my use of punctuation. Challenge my choices. Repunctuate it.

  5. When you gain confidence, have some fun and use the punctuation marks described above as well as ellipses, brackets, and capital letters. Take inspiration from the passage by James McBride.

  When writers fall in love with their words, it is a good feeling that can lead to a bad effect. When we fall in love with all our quotes, characters, anecdotes, and metaphors, we cannot bear to kill any of them. But kill we must. In 1914 British author Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote it bluntly: "Murder your darlings."

  Such ruthlessness is best applied at the end of the process, when creativity can be moderated by coldhearted judgment. A fierce discipline must make every word count.

  "Vigorous writing is concise," wrote William Strunk in the first edition of The Elements of Style.

  A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.

  But how to do that?

  Begin by cutting the big stuff. Donald Murray taught me that brevity comes from selection, not compression, a lesson that requires lifting blocks from the work. When Maxwell Perkins edited Thomas Wolfe, he confronted manuscripts that could be weighed by the pound and delivered in a wheelbarrow. The famous editor once advised the famous author: "It does not seem to me that the book is over-written. Whatever comes out of it must come out block by block and not sentence by sentence." Perkins reduced one four-page passage about Wolfe's uncle to six words: "Henry, the oldest, was now thirty."

  If your goal is to achieve precision and concision, begin by pruning the big limbs. You can shake out the dead leaves later.

  • Cut any passage that does not support your focus.

  • Cut the weakest quotations, anecdotes, and scenes to give greater power to the strongest.

  • Cut any passage you have written to satisfy a tough teacher or editor rather than the common reader.

  • Don't invite others to cut. You know the work better. Mark optional trims. Then decide whether they should become actual cuts.

  Always leave time for revision, but if pressed, shoot for a draft and a half. That means cutting phrases, words, even syllables in a hurry. The paradigm for such word editing is the work of William Zinsser. In the second chapter of On Writing Well, he demonstrates how he cut the clutter from final drafts of his own book. "Although they look like a first draft, they had already been rewritten and retyped ... four or five times. With each rewrite I t ry to make what I have written tighter, stronger and more precise, eliminating every element that is not doing useful work."

  In his draft, Zinsser writes of the struggling reader: "My sympathies are entirely with him. He's not so dumb. If the reader is lost, it is generally because the writer of the article has not been careful enough to keep him on the proper path." That passage seems lean enough, so it's instructive to watch the author cut the fat. In his revision "entirely" gets the knife. So does "He's not so dumb." So does "of the article." And so does "proper." (I confess that I would keep "proper path," just for the alliteration. But "path" contains the meaning of "proper.")

  The revised passage: "My sympathies are with him. If the reader is lost, it is generally because the writer has not been careful enough to keep him on the path." Twenty-seven words outwork the original thirty-six. Targets for cuts include:

  • Adverbs that intensify rather than modify: just, certainly, entirely, extremely, completely, exactly.

  • Prepositional phrases that repeat the obvious: in the story, in the article, in the movie, in the city.

  • Phrases that grow on verbs: seems to, tends to, should have to, tries to.

  • Abstract nouns that hide active verbs: consideration becomes considers; judgment becomes judges; observation becomes observes.

  • Restatements: a sultry, humid afternoon.

  The previous draft of this essay contained 850 words (see below). This version contains 678, a savings of 20 percent.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Compare and contrast my longer draft with my shorter one. Which revisions make the essay better? Have I cut something you would have retained? State your case for keeping it.

  2. Get a copy of On Writing Well. Study the cuts Zinsser makes on pages 10 and 11. See if any patterns emerge. Hint: notice what he does with adverbs.

  3. Watch a DVD version of a movie, and pay attention to the feature called extra scenes. Discuss with friends the director's decisions. Why was a particular scene left on the cutting room floor?

  4. Now review your own work. Cut without mercy. Begin with big cuts, then small ones. Count how many words you've saved. Calculate the percentage of the whole. Can you cut 15 percent?

  5. Flip open to a page of this book at random. Search for clutter. Cut words that do no work.

  This tool celebrates simplicity, but a clever writer can make the simple complex — and to good effect. This requires a literary technique called defamiliarization, a hopeless word that describes the process by which an author takes the familiar and makes it strange. Film directors create this effect with super close-ups and with shots from severe or distorting angles. More difficult to achieve on the page, this effect can dazzle the reader as does E. B. White's description of a
humid day in Florida:

  On many days, the dampness of the air pervades all life, all living. Matches refuse to strike. The towel, hung to dry, grows wetter by the hour. The newspaper, with its headlines about integration, wilts in your hand and falls limply into the coffee and the egg. Envelopes seal themselves. Postage stamps mate with one another as shamelessly as grasshoppers, (from "The Ring of Time")

  What could be more familiar than a mustache on a teacher's face, but not this mustache, as described by Roald Dahl in his childhood memoir Boy:

  A truly terrifying sight, a thick orange hedge that sprouted and flourished between his nose and his upper lip and ran clear across his face from the middle of one cheek to the middle of the other. ... [It] was curled most splendidly upwards all the way along as though it had had a permanent wave put into it or possibly curling tongs heated in the mornings over a tiny flame. ... The only other way he could have achieved this curling effect, we boys decided, was by prolonged upward brushing with a hard toothbrush in front of the looking-glass every morning.

  Both White and Dahl take the common — the humid day and the mustache — and, through the filter of their prose styles, force us to see it in a new way.

  More often, the writer must find a way to simplify prose in service to the reader. For balance, call the strategy familiarization, taking the strange or opaque or complex and, through the power of explanation, making it comprehensible, even familiar.

  Too often, writers render complicated ideas with complicated prose, producing sentences such as this one, from an editorial about state government:

  To avert the all too common enactment of requirements without regard for their local cost and tax impact, however, the commission recommends that statewide interest should be clearly identified on any proposed mandates, and that the state should partially reimburse local government for some state imposed mandates and fully for those involving employee compensation, working conditions and pensions.