Writing Well, Part 3: Origins of a Writer

When writers are asked how to write well, they often reflexively talk about their childhood and how they became writers. James Joyce did it, George Orwell did it, and Steven King did it. I thought this was a strange pattern at first, but now I understand it. Writing well is not just about clarity and omitting needless words—it goes all the way down to the core of a person, and so writers tend to tell you about who they are to explain how or why they write as they do.

Many of us had that one teacher. That one horrible teacher who either hated you, or you hated, or both. I thought long about whether I should protect the names of the guilty, but I think we should all be held accountable for our actions, good or bad, and so I’ll tell you that her name was Professor Ellen Cooney of the MIT writing department. I have encountered many people over the years who disagree with me, insult me, or stand in my way, but never before or since Professor Cooney did I actually think to myself, “At least she will probably be dead before me because she’s older.”

Mr. Spock will be born in the year 2230 at Shi'Kahr, Vulcan.Before we get to her, I’ll tell you about what happened eight years earlier, in 7th grade. I was in Algebra I, an advanced math class for a 7th grader, because my 6th grade teacher said I was good at math. I had no idea I was good at math before that as I wasn’t particularly good at arithmetic. (Just as writing isn’t spelling—math isn’t arithmetic, so I’d be ok in that class.) After the first test in that class, my friend got a perfect score and I didn’t do very well. I thought back to all the episodes of Star Trek I watched every weeknight at midnight during the summer, and about how Mr. Spock would have gotten a perfect score, too. And how could anyone not get a perfect score? You just follow things through to their logical conclusion and you get the right answer. From that day on, I was good at math and I liked it (and science, too). That’s where my head was.

Except for a girl, that is. Her name was Jenny Sime. I said I’d mention the names of the guilty, so it’s only fair that I mention the names of the innocent, too. (Dear Jenny: did you notice the ironic double meaning of the word “innocent,” as applied to you?) Jenny and I loved ironic double meanings. I talked to her on the phone often, for hours. She was there when the wet cement of my personality was hardening, and I can still feel her impression. We each delighted in the use of language, always saying things without saying them. We understood each other, and even if our classmates could have listened in, they would not have grasped our subtlety. I learned to choose my words carefully with Jenny Sime, and to give them just the right shade of meaning. She gave me plenty of practice, too. I don’t know how much of language ability comes from nature and how much comes from nurture, but it’s probably no coincidence that I had so much practice with language at that young age, and that I’m so adept with it now.

I got an A on every essay in every English class all four years of high school. I was not “one of them,” though, the literature kids I mean. I wasn’t into poetry or literature or reading any of that squishy stuff. I was the math and science kid who stopped by English class to get his A, usually causing a lot of trouble and debate. English teachers and I never had much regard for each other, and I knew some of them absolutely cringed at giving me those A’s, but what else could they do? I remember thinking at one point in high school that it would be an ultimate joke of the universe after all my hating of English classes if I would somehow end up a writer instead of a mathematician or physicist. (Note to the universe: nice one.)

By the time I encountered Ellen Cooney, I knew how to write and I knew how to get an A on a writing assignment. I started her class by writing a short story in the style of Jack London (my choice) about a man and his dog. I thought it was pretty good. She hated it. The narrator actively judged the man in the first and last sentence of the story, on purpose. She hated that even more.

I didn’t know exactly why she hated it, and I wasn’t used to that kind of reaction. She kept saying, “It’s not literature! We write literature here.” It took me the whole semester to even get an inkling of what literature meant to her. It seemed mostly to mean, “boring stuff written by the students who I personally like talking to in class.” She said my story was too fake and she wouldn’t even accept it, much less grade it. She said I had to write another story instead.

This is what writing feels like most of the time.

I may have some ability at writing, but writing takes me a very long time. What’s worse is that I can’t compartmentalize it from the rest of my life. When I write something, the actual time I spend typing is between 1% and 5% of the total time investment. The rest is spent day dreaming about it, thinking of how the ideas will go together, about this sentence that should appear halfway through, about things I might need to research first, and so on. And when all that’s sorted out, I still have to wait around for the moment when I’m not tired, hungry, or distracted. Then I have to keep waiting even more until I’m also inspired. I believe at least three of the planets must be aligned, too, or two plus a moon at the least. The point is, writing another story was a major time investment.

I don’t remember what happened with that second story, but I bet she hated it too. On the assignment after that, I wrote a story about a man who took a long journey to find a magic coin, but there was some kind of trick about how the guy who told him about the coin was not who he seemed. Yeah, she hated that one even more. I spent a very time long on that one making sure it was well-written, too. She said it was “genre writing,” not literature, and that it could appear alongside any other fantasy writing on a store shelf and blend right in. (Is that an insult or a compliment?) Apparently literature couldn’t contain magic. It also couldn’t be a mystery, have too much action, or much violence, I would later learn. Meanwhile, we read a story about two girls who lived in an isolated country-side and used to play together as children, then they tried to keep in touch as adults but their lives had diverged too much to make the same kind of connection. Now that was literature, she said. I have to admit, even though it had no apparent point, it did feel real when I read it.

She made me write two stories for every one that anyone else wrote in that class. It was an incredible amount of time and work and she hated all of it. I wondered why she made me do all that if I was so terrible, yet none of the other students had to.

I wonder if Mr. Spock ever went to any 3D Chess tournaments. Remember that episode where he programmed the computer to play Chess and it beat him?For my final assignment in that class, I decided to write something I knew enough about to bring to life. I wrote about a young man who was entering his first Chess tournament and the various personalities he encountered at the event. The antagonist was a tricky jerk who had enough experience with how the events were run to mess with the main character’s mind. They would face each other in the tournament, and I even went through the trouble of coming up with a real chess situation that was interesting in itself, and that illustrated the mental sparring between the characters. And I took great care describing this so it wouldn’t be boring or overly technical for non-Chess players.

Guess what, she hated it. She said I was a failure as a writer and I’m guessing she added that I’d never amount to anything, for cliché’s sake. She said, and I quote, “You are a master of linguistic flourishes, but you ultimately have nothing to say.” Wow! Yes, she really said it, exactly like that. A master of linguistic flourishes…but ultimately with nothing to say. That was over ten years ago and I remember it exactly.

I began to wonder if she was right. She was a close-minded bitch, sure, but what was I trying to say with that story about the guy and his dog or about the magic coin? Maybe nothing. At least the Chess story had some point. The year after that in another writing class, I decided to write a comedy about depression (challenging!) and another story about someone who is trapped in his own superstitions, but ultimately realizes that he controls his own destiny in life. I was at least trying to really say something.

A few years later, I had a lot to say. I had competed in and organized numerous video game tournaments, and I kept seeing the same annoying losing attitudes. The players I hung out with didn’t have these hangups, but the ones on the periphery often had the whole concept of competition wrong. So I wrote Playing to Win, Part 1. I finally had something to say, and I never got so much attention for writing anything until then.

William Strunk, Jr. famously said to omit needless words. I’ve come to look at this in a new light, and when I see writing that doesn’t really say anything, I wish all the words were omitted. There are a lot of mechanics involved with writing well, but it doesn’t amount to much unless you have something to say. Having something to say often goes along with taking a stand on something. Research what you’re interested in, live life and accumulate experiences, stand up for what you think is right and fight against what you think is wrong. It takes a certain kind of person to do that. Writing is often about revealing a truth or exposing a lie, so it’s no wonder that so many writers are the kind of people who don’t care what people think of them—they care about the truth and saying what they have to say. I don’t mean pop novelists either, I mean Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. Even Richard Feynman was a great writer in this regard when he wasn’t busy being one of the world’s leading physicists. He even wrote a book called What Do You Care What Other People Think?

I worked with an amazing graphic designer for a while until he quit and went to another company. In our last conversation, the day before he left, I asked him how he became so good. How is it that he’s so much better at what he does than most others who try to do it? He said in art school, there was one Korean guy in his class who really shouldn’t have been in there. The Korean guy already took these classes in his own country, but his credits didn’t transfer over for some reason. My friend said he always studied the Korean guy, how he made this line, how he made that shadow, whether he added decoration here or not, and so on. He told me that when some students presented their projects, they had some big artistic vision they were trying to communicate, but they always fell so far short. My friend never focused on that—he focused on execution instead. His reasoning was that once he had mastered the mechanics of graphic design, he would then be able to think about what artistic statements he wanted to make. I did not take such a conscious journey as my graphic designer friend, but perhaps the result is the same: first, how to put sentences together properly, then having things to say.

Many years ago, I had some things to say about game design, so I wrote them down and shared them with all of you. Then for years I wrote design documents and pitches for games. I wrote them with great care. Not only can I not show them to you, but for reasons unrelated to game design, almost none of them came to life. During this time, I have not said much to you, and maybe it was for the best. Even the horse Mr. Ed will never speak unless he has something to say.

Now I have some things to say again. A little of it will be about game design, a little about competition, and most of it about how to think and how to create. But those things are for another time, we’re talking about writing now.

I'm not sure what she thinks about when she sits down to write, but I'm curious.When I sit down to write, I don’t think about Jenny Sime and the nuances of language I practiced with her all those years ago. Caring about exact shades of meaning is second nature now. But I do sometimes think of Professor Cooney as I write. “A master of linguistic flourishes but ultimately with nothing to say?” I’ll show her, I sometimes think. I’ll prove to her that I do have something to say, and that I’ll say it no matter what the consequences or what anyone thinks. I’ve even developed her same contempt for other people’s empty writing. It was hard to take that criticism back then, but I’m almost willing to admit that she was right.

Maybe being fueled by such a negative fire is a bad thing, but being fueled by no fire is far worse. I’ll leave you with this quote from a guy who’s sold a few books.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair—the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

—Stephen King

--Sirlin

Writing Well, Part 2: Clear Thinking, Clear Writing

Fortunately, the act of composition, or creation, disciplines the mind; writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

–Strunk and White, The Elements of Style

I’ve found Strunk and White’s quote above to be exactly right. When I sit down to write about an idea I have clear in my head, I often find that it was not so clear after all. The act of putting it into writing—making it tangible—often reveals facets of the idea I hadn’t thought about. Clear writing only comes when your thinking is clear, and the process of trying to write clearly can clear up your thinking. The process of writing sloppily leaves your thinking muddled.

George Orwell was concerned with the link between sloppy writing and sloppy thinking. In his time, he witnessed political decisions so bad that they could only be explained with vague, deceptive, muddled language. Unfortunately, this poor language fit right in with the sorry state of English in general. It’s remarkable how applicable Orwell’s frustrations are to our own time.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

I have too much respect for Feynman to give him a jokey picture.The physicist Richard Feynman is one of my favorite thinkers, so it is no surprise that the quality of his writing is excellent. He was intellectually curious, a troublemaker, and acutely aware of the link between clear thinking and clear language. I’ll share with you a couple of his anecdotes from his time at Princeton when he visited the philosophy students and the biology students in an effort to see what the world looked like outside of the physics department.
Feynman sat in on a philosophy seminar where the graduate students were discussing a book called Process and Reality by Whitehead. They talked a great deal about the term “essential object” and Feynman took it as a technical term he didn’t know the definition of. Then the professor leading the seminar asked Feynman if he thought an electron is an essential object. Feynman admitted that he didn’t even read the book (he was just sitting in on this one seminar) but said he’d try to answer anyway if someone could answer for him whether a brick is an essential object.

Feynman’s plan was to then bring up the question of whether the inside of a brick is an essential object. We can’t actually see the inside of a brick; when we break a brick open we create new surfaces, but we believe the inside of the brick is still underneath those surfaces. His point was that an electron isn’t so much a concrete thing like a brick, but more of a concept like the “inside of a brick” that helps us understand the world.

Physicist Richard Feynman casts a powerful spell, giving all nearby creatures a -3 penaltyFeynman didn’t get to make his point. One student said, “A brick as an individual, specific brick. That is what Whitehead meant by an essential object.” Another man said, “No, it isn’t the individual brick that is an essential object; it’s the general character that all bricks have in common—their ‘brickness’—that is the essential object.” Yet another man said, “No, it’s not in the bricks themselves. ‘Essential object’ means the idea in the mind that you get when you think of bricks.”

Feynman couldn’t believe that these philosophers had spent so much time talking about this subject without asking whether something as simple as a brick is an essential object, much less an electron. It’s a safe guess that any papers they would have written about this subject would turn out bloated, fluffy, and vague. You can only write vigorously and concisely if you know exactly what you’re talking about.

After the philosophy incident, Feynman took a biology class for the hell of it, promising he would do all the assignments like any other student, even though he was already a renowned professor of physics. The students laughed hysterically at one of his biology presentations when he talked about “blastospheres” instead of “blastomeres” or some other such thing.

His next presentation was about the nerve impulses in cats. The research paper he was reading often mentioned specific muscles and nerves in the cat, but Feynman had no idea where any of these things were located relative to each other. He then went to the biology library and asked for a map of the cat. “A map of the cat, sir?” the librarian asked, horrified. “You mean a zoological chart!”

Feynman started his presentation to the graduate biology students by drawing an outline of the cat on the board and labeling various muscles. The students interrupted him saying, “We know all that!” Feynman replied, “Oh you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you’ve had four years of biology.” He said they wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

A map of the cat.While the philosophy students hadn’t defined their language well enough to have clear ideas, the biology students were so caught up in language and jargon that they had not spent enough time going beneath the surface. Language is a tool, but it is also a barrier between people and ideas. Using vague language is like trying to see those ideas through a dirty lens. But spending all your time polishing the lens (quibbling over jargon rather than the underlying concepts) is no good either. You have to actually look through the lens of language at the ideas underneath.

While we look down on muddy writers because they only convey muddy thoughts, there is another, greater enemy. The most dangerous type of writing comes from clear-thinkers who write vaguely to deliberately deceive you. (Note: only deliberately split an infinitive if you really mean it.)

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

–George Orwell

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

It’s ironic that Orwell uses the image of soft snow falling upon the facts to blur them when the name of the current US Press Secretary (as of this writing) is Tony Snow. His job is almost entirely based on deception. I hate to subject you to even a snippet of his language because reading it triggers the sensation of sinking into quicksand, but you’ll have to suffer through it anyway. This is a perfect example of inflated language that is intentionally vague and confusing, designed to anesthetize a portion of your brain.

Question: Tony, a couple of minutes ago, you said one of the goals in Iraq is to prevent civil war. Can you take a minute and give us the definition that the President is working with? Because he continues to say it’s not at that state yet; lots of analysts do say it’s at that state. What’s the threshold that the administration is working with –

SNOW: I think the general notion is a civil war is when you have people who use the American Civil War or other civil wars as an example, where people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy within [the land].

[...]

SNOW: At this point, you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it’s not clear that they are operating as a unified force. You don’t have a clearly identifiable leader. And so in this particular case, no.

What you do have is a number of different groups – you know, they’ve been described in some cases as rejectionists, in others as terrorists. In many cases, they are not groups that would naturally get along, either, but they severally and together pose a threat to the government.

I guess someone had to defend the atrocities of the Bush administration with deceptive language. Might as well have been this guy.In case you fell asleep somewhere during that quote, make sure you got the part at the end about how rejectionists and terrorists “severally and together pose a threat to the government.” Tony Snow can’t really tell you the truth—that there is a civil war in Iraq—because that’s not politically good for him to say. He’s forced to play the exact kind of word games that Orwell was trying to unmask.

You can write plainly and clearly, if only you honestly try. Even Tony Snow could, if he had any incentive to. Clear writing is not a skill reserved for professional writers, but it is reserved for those who have their thoughts in order in the first place and for those who aren’t trying to hide the truth. As Strunk and White pointed out, if you don’t have your thoughts in order, attempting to write them down is a good way to help you straighten them out. But if your problem is that you need to hide the truth, then you’re certainly not coming to me for writing tips.

If you’d like a reading assignment, I recommend anything by Richard Feynman. As a physicist, he spent most of his time thinking about how the world works, and was always battling against layers of language. Sometimes it was jargon from other fields, sometimes it was trying to communicate with colleagues who spoke Japanese or Spanish, sometimes it was inflated political language trying to hide the truth. But Feynman was ever-vigilant, cutting through these language barriers so he could understand what the underlying idea really was. Once you truly understand something—and only then—you can explain it clearly to others, leaving out all unnecessary words.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

–Richard Feynman

--Sirlin

Writing Well, Part 1: Sensibilities

You should care about good writing. My English teachers cared about good writing, and they did a good job imparting their writing sensibilities to me, even though most of them hated me. What they never taught me though, was why I should care about good writing. I figured it was like ballet dancing; dancers strive to be the best they can at their craft for its own sake, as well as to impress the judges—that small group who can actually detect the nuances between two different performances.

Writing is not like this.That’s all wrong. Writing isn’t for English teachers or judges of essay contests—it’s for everyone. It is our most pervasive tool for communicating ideas. You should care about writing not for its own sake, but because you care about ideas. You care about clear thinking and the clear and honest expression of that thinking. Incidentally, you’ll be lied to your whole life by marketers, politicians, and business people who deliberately avoid clear language, but that’s the subject of my second essay. For now, let’s focus on the simple mechanics of writing plainly and clearly.

I’ll start by trying to pass on some of my sensibilities to you by examining this letter from a school principal, an example from Zinsser’s book
On Writing Well:

Dear Parent:

We have established a special phone communication system to provide additional opportunities for parent input. During this year, we will give added emphasis to the goal of communication and utilize a variety of means to accomplish this goal. Your inputs, from the unique position as a parent, will help us to plan and implement an educational plan that meets the needs of your child. An open dialogue, feedback, and sharing of information between parents and teachers will enable us to work with your child in the most effective manner.

Dr. George B. Jones
Principal

What an impersonal, pompous, impenetrable way of saying that Dr. Jones would be delighted if you phoned the school to discuss why little Jimmy did so poorly on his English assignment last week (maybe because he read more letters written by Dr. Jones?). The above letter uses far too many words to convey a simple idea. The reader gets lost and confused and the writer doesn’t seem to know what he’s saying in the first place.

Once again, with my notes in red:

Dear Parent:

We have established (already sounds wooden) a special (is it really special?) phone communication system (glomming three nouns together is a sure sign of vagueness) to provide additional opportunities (“to allow” is shorter) for parent input (input is for computers). During this year, we will give added emphasis (emphasize it if you must, but don’t “give added emphasis”) to the goal of communication and utilize (avoid “utilize” whenever possible) a variety of means (name these “means”) to accomplish this goal (this sentence ended up saying nothing at all). Your inputs (into a computer?), from the unique position as a parent (don’t patronize me), will help us to plan and implement an educational plan (you’re going to plan a plan, ay?) that meets the needs of your child (I’m dying here, speak like a normal person, please). An open dialogue, feedback, and sharing of information between parents and teachers (you said the same thing three times) will enable (buzzword) us to work with your child in the most effective manner (wordy, verbose, and too many words).

Dr. George B. Jones
Principal

For contrast, here is one of my favorite paragraphs ever, from Strunk & White’s Elements of Style:

Omit needless words

Vigorous writing is concise. 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 every word tell.

Omit needless words! Vigorous writing is concise! Words to live by. If you intend to write anything, you should own a copy of the Elements of Style and reread it every one or two years. It reminds you to say “Charles’s friend” instead of “Charles’ friend” (on page 1, even). It reminds you when to use “which” as opposed to “that.” Most importantly though, it reminds you to write concisely, precisely, and clearly.

All through the Elements of Style, one finds evidences of the author’s deep sympathy for the reader. Will felt that the reader was in serious
trouble most of the time, floundering in a swamp, and that it was the
duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly
and get the reader up on dry ground, or at least to throw a rope.

–E.B.White

In Why I Write, The excellent writer George Orwell had plenty to say about omitting needless words:

These [bloated phrases] save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, mitigate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render.

Another pervasive writing problem is wandering around a point instead of directly saying it. Don’t say, “Generally speaking, it’s usually a good idea to clean your fireplace once per year.” Instead say, “Clean your fireplace once per year.” Don’t say, “It seems to be the case that our product may have performed more poorly than our competitor’s product under the test conditions.” Say, “Our competitor’s product out-performed ours in tests.” Get to the point, don’t waffle, and mean what you say.

When you know what you want to say and say it, you create vigorous sentences with no fat on them. You strike cleanly like a Samurai beheading his enemy in a single stroke. When you don’t know what you want to say or when you are afraid to really say it, you create serpentine, boring sentences. Don’t pull punches with your writing; say what you have to say honestly.

She just wrote a great sentence.

When you’re looking for words to omit (and you are looking for them, right?), omit adverbs and adjectives first. “He slammed the door, quickly” is redundant. “She smiled at him invitingly” is ham-fisted. “He stupidly studied material that won’t even be on the test” is one word too many—let the reader draw his own conclusions about the man’s stupidity.

The Mistress offers the forbidden fruit. Don't diminish Her power by saying that the fruit was offered by Her (passive voice).

Adjectives aren’t guilty as often as adverbs, but they are close behind. The reader doesn’t learn anything useful about the beautiful sunset, the brown pine-cone, or the cute bunny rabbit. These adjectives are just taking up space, not serving any useful purpose. If it was a radioactive pine-cone or a blue bunny rabbit, those adjectives would pull their weight.

Let nouns and verbs do most of your work and use adverbs and adjectives sparingly. Also make sure to use the active voice rather than the passive voice. “The house was painted by Joe” is awkward and wordy compared to “Joe painted the house.” In the second case, Joe took an action: he painted the house. In the first case, the house was acted on by a force named Joe. “It was believed by the children that Santa came through the chimney” is a maddening way of saying, “The children believed Santa came through the chimney.” With the active voice, a noun takes action. In the passive voice, something is acted upon by some other thing in a vague, boring-sounding way with too many words.

Here is more of George Orwell’s contempt for pretentious language:

In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the ize and de formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

[Dear George Orwell: you wrote a criticism of the passive voice in the passive voice.—Sirlin]

I think of Orwell’s comments every time I’m at the airport and hear that grating recorded voice caution me against accepting any items or luggage from individuals I don’t know. Individuals is not a formal way of saying people; it’s a sad attempt to sound like the voice of authority. “We the people of the United States,” was a sufficient start for the US Constitution, rather than “We the individuals.” Writer Mike Judge pokes fun at this same word in the movie Idiocracy where the words people, suspect, and prisoner are all replaced with the more pretentious particular individual.

“Okay, sir, this is to figure out what your aptitude’s good at and get you a jail job while you’re being a particular individual in jail.”

–A cop in the movie Idiocracy

Orwell had further contempt for the kind of maddening writing that writes itself without any need for human thought. This auto-pilot prose is especially common when people are trying to sound important or formal. It ends up sounding like they are either full of themselves or trying to hide something in the sea of unnecessary words.

Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.

When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in the fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.

At the risk of over-quoting (too late), I feel impelled to include this gem of Orwell’s:

By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: ‘[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write — feels, presumably, that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.

Remember that all this talk about writing clearly and vigorously isn’t so English teachers will be impressed. It’s because you want to express your ideas clearly. If you can’t express your ideas clearly, you might not have clear ideas in the first place. Vague writing leads to vague thinking and usually comes from vague thinking. It is better to be clear and wrong than to cloak your ideas with impenetrable or overly-fancy language.

Sometimes people can't handle the truth, but try saying it anyway. That seemed to work out for Colonel Jessup.The first step in improving your writing is to internalize the sensibilities I’ve been talking about. Ask yourself what Strunk and White would say about your fluffy sentences. Ask what Orwell would think of your hackneyed phrases. Ask what Sirlin would think when you pull your punches because you’re afraid someone might be offended, rather than honestly saying what you need to say.

[Dear Sirlin: You overuse the phrase pull your punches. Think of something original –George Orwell]




I’ll leave you with this short list of guidelines from Orwell. You could certainly do worse than these:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

--Sirlin