by Ben Yagoda
On that idea of “accepted practice” changing, I recognize—as how could anyone not?—that standards evolve over time. There was a time when it was verboten to end a sentence with a preposition, start one with a conjunction, write an e-mail instead of an e-mail message, use hopefully to mean I hope that, and so on. Now all those things are okay. Going back even further, it used to be that the first-person future tense of to go was thought to be I shall go. If you said that today, you would get some seriously strange looks. Awful used to refer to the quality of filling one with, you guessed it, awe; now it means really bad.
But it takes time to change a standard. The mere fact that a substantial number of people do something doesn’t make it right. Take the title of this book. It splits an infinitive, which used to be wrong but isn’t anymore. It also says (for comic effect) Bad instead of Badly. That used to be wrong and still is. Same with something that an unaccountably large number of my students have taken to doing over the past few years; using a semicolon when they should use a colon, the way I just did. Still wrong. So is another strange and new predilection, spelling the past tense of the verb to lead as lead. I would guess it’s so popular because (A) spell-check says it’s okay and (B) people are misled by the spelling of two words that rhyme with led: the metal lead and the past-tense read. In any case, that semicolon use and that spelling may one day attain the acceptance of a split infinitive, but they haven’t yet. (Less than two hours after I wrote those words, I read a New York Times article with the words “what most troubled her was how he had mislead the public.” The change may come sooner than I think!)
Generally speaking, it’s fairly easy to figure out current standards. But a few things are trickier because they are right on the cusp of change. I make judgment calls on these. Probably the best current example is the use of they or their as a singular pronoun—in sentences like Anyone who wants to go to the concert should bring their money tomorrow or I like Taco Bell because they serve enchiladas that are oozing with cheese. The usage is almost completely prevalent in spoken English, in British written English (interestingly enough), in online publications, and, it almost goes without saying, in blogs and e-mails. I predict it will be accepted in American publishing within ten years. But it isn’t yet, and so for my purposes it counts as bad writing.
I mentioned that I mainly take my corpus of writing problems from student papers. Almost all the same things can be seen in the writing world at large. Not so much in books and newspaper and magazine articles, but rather in e-mails, blog posts, comments, and other online documents. These texts are not selected or processed by an editor (and are for the most part not the work of professionals) and thus display in a clear light the way we write now.
Taken collectively, this collection of problems and errors is kind of strange. I think of it as a giant blob of writing woe, slowly shifting as the years pass. To be sure, there have been some constants over the past two decades. When I started teaching, I wasn’t even familiar with the term comma splice. But then I was quickly confronted with innumerable variations of sentences like:
It promises to be a good game, we plan to get there early.
A colleague taught me what this was called. Knowing the name was somehow comforting; at least it gave me something to scrawl on papers. I have scrawled it many times: comma splices, like the Dude in The Big Lebowski, abide. There are variations over time, however, and one recent favorite is what I call the HCS (for “however comma splice”):
Steven Spielberg’s recent films have been box-office disappointments, however his next release is expected to do well.
The person was using however as a conjunction, more or less synonymous with but. For all I know, this will one day be acceptable, but it isn’t now—and so it is entry II.B.4.d. in How to Not Write Bad.
I started seeing the HCS and a lot of other new bad-writing phenomena ten or twelve years ago. Surprise! That was about the time that online writing started to take off: going beyond e-mail to texts, blog posts, Facebook status updates, tweets, product comments, etc. In a lot of ways, this textual revolution is quite cool; for one thing, it’s picked up many people by the napes of their necks and deposited them into the universe of writers. Certainly, it represents a huge positive change from the time not that long ago, when, other than a postcard here and there and the occasional thank-you note, most people didn’t write much of anything at all. (Reports of letter writing in the pre-Internet era are greatly exaggerated.)
Nor do I agree with the complaint you’ll find if you read more than a couple of op-ed pieces about the effect of this online culture on writing. That’s the charge that smiley faces, “LOL”-type abbreviations, and terms like diss or phat are rampant in young people’s prose. I think this is whack. (I realize all my attempts at slang are at least ten years out of date. My bad.) In fact, I don’t remember encountering a single example in all my years of grading, except for a handful of ironic parries. Students realize that this kind of thing is in the wrong register for a college assignment.
But their writing does show an online influence in subtler ways. Writing for the computer is, for some reason, more like talking than writing for print is. That lends it a welcome freshness and naturalness. But there’s a downside. Just as our spoken words disappear into the very air as soon as we utter then, it somehow seems that words on the computer screen aren’t as final as they are on a piece of paper. One has a sense that the text is somehow provisional, that it will always be possible to make more changes. My friend and fellow teacher Devin Harner has said that something—a certain level of paying attention?—is lost when documents aren’t printed out. I think he’s on to something.
The general wordiness that characterizes so much writing today has got to be related to the incredible ease of using a keyboard to create shapely and professional-looking paragraphs. Back in the days when you had to scratch out each character with a quill pen (or even pound a manual typewriter), words were dearer and therefore were parceled out more judiciously. Now, after some stream-of-conscious keyboarding, you’ve got something that looks impressive. But it isn’t. Paradoxically, it takes more effort to be concise than to be prolix, and people are (or think themselves to be) so pressed for time nowadays. As the philosopher Pascal once wisely wrote, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
Don’t worry about the ever-shifting sands of grammar and usage. Learning how to not write bad will, for one thing, attune your inner ear to these changes. Not-bad writing will help you hold on to your readers’ attention, clearly communicate your meaning to them, and sometimes even convince them of your point of view. Without a doubt, it will serve to clarify your own thinking. And if you so desire, it will place you firmly on the road to writing well.
* Full marks, by the way, if you noticed that in this sentence I broke Strunk and White’s colon rule.
PART I
How to Not Write Bad: The One-Word Version
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 ma
kes 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.
There’s a whole other aspect to the one-word solution for not writing bad. This one offers quite a contrast to the massive amount of time reading demands. Indeed, it’s a pretty quick fix. The most effective short-term way to improve your writing is to read it aloud, sentence by sentence and word by word. There was a spoken language before there was a written language, and good writing has always been intimately connected to the ear, whether the short sentences of Hemingway or the near-endless periods of Samuel Johnson and David Foster Wallace.
Gustave Flaubert, renowned as one of the great all-time stylists, used what he called la gueulade: that is, “the shouting test.” He would go out to an avenue of lime trees near h
is house and, yes, shout what he had written. It’s the same principle as scrutinizing a photograph by blowing up its image on the computer screen; you really can identify the flaws.
Reading aloud isn’t a panacea, even if you shout like Flaubert. At first, you may not catch the rum rhythms, the word repetition, the wordiness, the sentences that peter out with a whimper, not a bang. You need to develop your ear, just as a musician does. But eventually you’ll start to really hear your sentences, and at some point you’ll be able to shut up and listen with your mind’s ear.
It’ll give you good counsel, too. One of the favorite go-to rules of writing textbooks and teachers is to cut out the word that in sentences like He told me that I needed to drop one class. Improves the sentence, to be sure. But sometimes this is bad advice, for example, here: Jack believed that Jill was a liar. If you remove the that, you have Jack believed Jill was a liar, which a reader will find momentarily not only ambiguous but downright contradictory. That is, was Jack doubting Jill’s truthfulness or accepting what she was saying? Even momentary reader confusion is bad, so that should stay. It’s possible to come up with a rule for those situations, but the rule would be so complicated as to be nearly useless. (Use the word that after a verb of expression or thought if the verb, in another connotation, can take a direct object.) Much better to read it, hear it, and act accordingly.
Another example is word repetition, as in a sentence like The last person to leave the room should examine the room for any possessions that were left behind. If you’ve made your ear into a fine instrument, it will hear that second room as making a sound akin to fingernails on a chalkboard.
