Best Guide To Writing Style: Write Right

BEST GUIDE TO WRITING STYLE
Write Right
The aim of most writing should be transparency: the reader can see straight through to the meaning. That entails simplicity, precision and clarity. The rules of construction matter, and the precise meanings of words matter even more. Badly-created sentences slow down reading, distract from the sense and can create ambiguity. Every time a word is ignorantly misused its ability to convey an exact meaning is impaired. That in turn causes confusion and obscurity. Such errors are separate from the wilful misuse for nefarious ends but if we are alert and careful about the one we will be that much better armed against being misled by the other. Pedantry not only makes us easier to understand but can be a protection against being conned. There have been many attempts over the centuries to provide guidance on good and proper writing. The aim has been the same, elegant clarity, but the means of achieving that differ. Even now there are many compilations of advice on grammar and style. One concise version is an advice list widely circulated among American journalists. The origin is obscure though William Safire, who has written regularly on style and grammar, is thought to have been at least partial author. 1. Verbs has to agree with their subjects. 2. Prepositions are not words to end a sentence with. 3. And dont start a sentence with a conjunction. 4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive. 5. Avoid cliches like the plague. 6. Also always avoid annoying alliteration. 7. Be more or less specific. 8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary. 9. No sentence fragments. 10. Contractions arent necessary and shouldnt be used. 11. One should never generalise. 12. Dont use no double negatives. 13. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc. 14. Eliminate commas, that are not necessary. 15. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice. 16. Kill all exclamation marks!! 17. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them. 18. Use the apostrophe in its proper place and omit it when its not needed. 19. Puns are for children not groan readers. 20. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. There have been several such lists compiled and publicised over the years, many of them overlapping. Another popular version, produced by Helen Ferril of the Rocky Mountain News in America and Ernest Tucker of a now dead Chicago paper, has 13 rules encompassing the list above but adds Make each pronoun agree with their antecedent Join clauses good, like a conjunction should. When dangling, watch your participles. Just between you and I, case is important too. Dont write run-on sentences they are hard to read. Correct spelling is esential.
Rules need rules

Not all popular rules are sensible or have a logical justification. The vulgar grammar-maker, dazzled by the glory of the ruling language, knew no better than to transfer to English the scheme that belonged to Latin. What chance had our poor mother-tongue in the clutches of this Procrustes said J W Hales and is approvingly quoted in Fowlers Modern English Usage. In other words, imposing arbitrary rules from classical languages is pointless and confusing. All the same, there are some formulations, like split infinitives, may not be grammatically incorrect but do irritate many readers and so detract from the easy readability of the material.
Copyright 2012- BecketsBest- Best Guide to Writing Style
The point of rules

Careless construction can also make the reader work unnecessarily. For instance, a dangling participle is a problem because it can cause momentary hilarity at the authors confused thinking and so allow the manner to detract from the matter. That is also the reason for the conservative tendency of this collection of guidance. Including modish words or recently-coined phrases may seem to give writing a modernity and immediacy but carries the danger of seeming like condescension and also of dating very rapidly. It also distracts and may leave older readers at a loss.
The origins of these rules

This set of rules originated in guidelines I drew up for journalists when City news editor of The Daily Telegraph, but has been expanded and altered in the light of later experience. My aim was to avoid conspicuous pedantry but without stumbling into solecism, ambiguity, obscurity and error. Journalists are already aware of the need for concise and simple writing or they would not still be employed. Other writers have not had the hard lessons of news editors and sub-editors hacking at their prose every day or complaining about content. So I have here added a few points of assistance for non-professionals.
Help the reader

To make any piece of writing readable and to the point, first decide what you are going to say, to whom and why. It seems obvious but is just as obviously overlooked by the verbose, unfocused and confused productions we have all battled with. For example, if the purpose is to complain about a faulty product, the point is to explain what went wrong and when. The only other relevant facts are when you bought the goods and that you have used them properly. Your circumstances, other peoples reactions etc are of no possible consequence. Which highlights one vital point: never include more information than is needed in the circumstance a surplus merely confuses the issue. As Mark Twain pointed out, few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon. Insecure people fear that a short and simple note will seem ignorant or perfunctory. The very opposite is true. It takes hard work to be crisp and to the point. Pascal once apologised his letter was long because I have not had the time to make it shorter This approach also takes into account who is expected to read the document. Style, approach and vocabulary need to differ between a document addressed to a ten year old child or a university don. A business letter needs a style, pacing and phrasing different from a speech; a bread-andbutter letter is different from an insurance claim. Readers will also influence structure. A dissertation or Civil Service minute follows an established tradition of starting with the background and context and then logically working towards a set of conclusions. For business letters, especially those intended to persuade, grab the reader from the start the first sentence has to be explanatory and punchy. To get a flavour of how to do that, read the first sentences of news items in a literate newspaper. Journalists learn to produce a first sentence that can stand on its own if the rest of the story has to be chopped. When the National Theatre revived Ben Hechts play The Front Page the audience was full of journalists. In one of the scenes the hero is typing the lead story for next days paper. His editor, reading over his shoulder, asks what about the reference to his newspaper having found the criminal. The journalist says he is putting that in the second paragraph. The editor reaches over his shoulder and tearing the paper out of the typewriter yells Who reads the second paragraph? It was greeted with a roar of recognition by the experienced audience. Newspapers since the end of the 20thC have been themselves diverging from that in a flyblown attempt at pulling the reader in with human interest, on the presumed basis the loss of circulation is to other, quicker, sources of factual news. So some news stories now start with that sort of muchlampooned cliche approach: It was a grey wintry morning when Gladys Fortescue climbed out of bed into her cheerless room........... Do not be tempted to emulate such banality. That however is only part of the style requirement. Newspapers are read glancingly and in distracting circumstances so the language as well as the content must keep the reader engaged. That demands simplicity, clarity and a minimum of irritants. Those qualities are useful in other communications as well. It is hard to improve on the basic guidelines suggested by George Orwell in his Politics and the English Language: Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word when a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. On style, one might add bad writers rely on adjectives, good ones make verbs work for them. In any case, adjectives are frequently superfluous. Every word should be so vital it cannot be removed without creating confusion. Words like very, obviously, that, the are often removable without damage. Basically and literally, should never appear. As Auden said, the test of good prose is that the reader does not notice it any more than a man looking through a window at a landscape notices the glass. Pompous constructions, long words, and convoluted sentence structure stem from confused thinking, attempts to seem learned, or to
obscure the truth behind obfuscation. The effect is normally the opposite making the writer seem remote and half-educated, and arousing suspicions about sincerity. Slovenly language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts, and vice versa. Above all, therefore, the rule to remember is that good writing comes from good thinking as the French writer Jules Renard put it poor style is imperfect thought There is also another aspect to style the writers personal way of expressing thoughts. Manuals frequently suggest developing a personal style. That is wrong. No writer should work to produce an individual style. A successful, attractive way of writing derives from two factors: mastering the craft of writing, and thinking well. Teaching the first is relatively easy and this guide is principally concerned with that. Thinking well, like originality, is probably innate and unlikely to be learnt. However, preparation, clearing in the writers mind what the message is going to be will help, and putting that into simple prose as transparent as possible, should go a long way towards that. The craft of writing includes not just grammatical and syntactical correctness. It is not just a matter of helping the reader by avoiding ambiguity and constructing sentences that are easy to read. It is also about picking penetrating vocabulary not just le mot juste but strong, original and right-sounding words in the context. It is having something worthwhile to say and saying it lucidly. Good journalism provides few opportunities for fine writing or individualism. Its main purpose is to convey information concisely and accurately. But even there, more especially in longer pieces and of course in feature articles, and far more in other writing of less constrained purpose such as such as books, there are ways of using a range of rhetorical devices known since the days of classical Athens. Trick of rhetoric include such notions as rhythm, repetition, parallelism, similes, metaphors. Rhythm goes far beyond the immediate metrical value. Sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters, whole books have sets of rhythmic structures. Try reading a passage aloud and those beats will become obvious. That is why Gibbon had at least a paragraph clear in his head before setting pen to paper. He wanted to hear how the words beat against each other, how the sentences balanced, how one paragraph complemented and contrasted with the others around it, and how the rhythm reflected the flow of thought. (Note the parallelism in that sentence: the repetition of how before the clauses.) That balance also implies sentence length should vary not just to maintain stimulating variety, but also to move with the development or elaboration of thoughts they contain. The structure mirrors the message. In the following list an entry without an explanation is there as a guide to spelling.
The approach
In line with its origins, this guidance is unashamedly prescriptivist, an attitude falling out of fashion. Such an approach is called elitist, snobbish and stick-in-the-mud, by people who prefer description on the grounds that language evolves and English is especially flexible and prone to change. There are several reasons however for my approach. The first is good manners. Few people are actually offended by or deterred by slightly old fashioned ways of expression, while many are irritated by what they consider incorrect usage. In successful communication, a major aim of writing, it is unwise to distress or anger your audience. It is easy to lose readers or, at the very least, their patient understanding. It is also inconsiderate to make people cross gratuitously the written materials content may rouse them by intent, but the manner can deter them inadvertently. Kingsley Amis said If you cannot annoy somebody with what you write I think there's little point in writing, but he did so in impeccably correct constructions. A second reason is to avoid looking ridiculous. Nothing fades so fast as fads. Trying to master the latest style of speech in grammar and vocabulary suits only the very young. For anyone over twenty-five it is rather like a middle-aged uncle demonstrating youthful vigour by dancing at a teenagers party. Alternatively it can seem like condescension: look, I can talk like you less educated proles. In any case, slang words and trendy constructions lose their novelty as quickly as clothes and can appear just as embarrassing a few years on. Another reason for the rather staid approach is indeed elitist. Writing style should indeed reflect the usage of the target audience, so these rules would have more limited application in material about, say, popular music and directed at young people. But more generally the assumption behind the guidance is that better speech comes from the educated and intelligent who think clearly and have the means for expressing those thoughts with clarity in an appropriate vocabulary. This is not a matter of class but of acquaintance with good writing and training in lucid thought. These rules tend to follow their practices. Fourthly, if there are no rules, anything goes and communication becomes vague, confusing and misleading.

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BEST GUIDE TO WRITING STYLE

Rules need rules

Copyright 2012- BecketsBest- Best Guide to Writing Style

The point of rules

The origins of these rules

Help the reader

Copyright 2012- BecketsBest- Best Guide to Writing Style

Copyright 2012- BecketsBest- Best Guide to Writing Style

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