Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

by Roy Peter Clark

  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.

  TOOL 10

  Cut big, then small.

  Prune the big limbs, then shake out the dead leaves.

  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 try 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 out-work 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.

  PART TWO

  Special Effects

  TOOL 11

  Prefer the simple over the technical.

  Use shorter words, sentences, and paragraphs at points of complexity.

  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.

  The density of this passage has two possible explanations: The writer is writing, not for a general audience, but for a specialized one, legal experts already familiar with the issues. Or, the writer thinks that form should follow function, that complicated ideas should be communicated in complicated prose.

  He needs the advice of writing coach Donald Murray, who argues that the reader benefits from shorter words and phrases, and simpler sentences, at the points of greatest complexity. What would happen if readers encountered this translation of the editorial?

  The state of New York often passes laws telling local governments what to do. These laws have a name. They are called “state mandates.”On many occasions, these laws improve life for everyone in the state. But they come with a cost. Too often, the state doesn’t consider the cost to local government, or how much money taxpayers will have to shell out. So we have an idea. The state should pay back local governments for some of these so-called mandates.

  The differences in these passages are worth measuring. The first one takes six and a half lines of text. The revision requires an additional half line. But consider this: The original writer has room for fifty-eight words in six and a half lines, while I get eighty-one words in seven lines, including fifty-nine one-syllable words. His six and a half lines give him room for only one sentence. I fit eight sentences into seven lines. My words and sentences are shorter. The passage is clearer. I use this strategy to fulfill a mission: to make the strange workings of government transparent to the average citizen, to make the strange familiar.

  George Orwell reminds us to avoid long words where short ones “will do,” a preference that exalts short Saxon words over longer ones of Greek and Latin origin, words that entered the language after the Norman Conquest in 1066. According to such a standard, box beats out container; chew trumps masticate; and ragtop outcools convertible.

  I am often stunned by the power that authors generate with words of a single syllable, as in this passage from Amy Tan:

  The mother accepted this and closed her eyes. The sword came down and sliced back and forth, up and down, whish! whish! whish! And the mother screamed and shouted, cried out in terror and pain. But when she opened her eyes, she saw no blood, no shredded flesh.

  The girl said, “Do you see now?” (from The Joy Luck Club)

  Fifty-five words in all, forty-eight of one syllable. Only one word (“accepted”) of three syllables. Even the book title works this way.

  Simple language can make hard facts easy reading. Consider the first paragraph of Dava Sobel’s Longitude:

  Once on a Wednesday excursion when I was a little girl, my father bought me a beaded wire ball that I loved. At a touch, I could collapse the toy into a flat coil between my palms, or pop it open to make a hollow sphere. Rounded out, it resembled a tiny Earth, because its hinged wires traced the same pattern of intersecting circles that I had seen on the globe in my schoolroom—the thin black lines of latitude and longitude. The few colored beads slid along the wire paths haphazardly, like ships on the high seas.

  Simplicity is not handed to the writer. It is the product of imagination and craft, a created effect.

  Remember that clear prose is not just a product of sentence length and word choice. It derives first from a sense of purpose—a determination to inform. What comes next is the hard work of reporting, research, and critical thinking. The writer cannot make something clear until the difficult subject is clear in the writer’s head. Then, and only then, does she reach into the writer’s toolbox, ready to explain to readers, “Here’s how it works.”

  WORKSHOP

  1. Review writing you think is unclear, dense with information. A tax form, perhaps, or a legal contract. Study the length of words, sentences, and paragraphs. What have you discovered?

  2. Repeat the process with your prose. Pay attention to passages you now think are too complicated. Revise a passage using the tools described in this section.

  3. Collect examples of stories where the writer has turned hard facts into easy reading. Start by browsing through a good academic encyclopedia.

  4. Look for an opportunity to use the sentence “Here’s how it works.”

  TOOL 12

  Give key words their space.

  Do not repeat a distinctive word unless you intend a specific effect.

  I coined the phrase word territory to describe a tendency I notice in my own writing. When I read a story I wrote months or years ago, I am surprised by how often I repeat words without care. Writers may choose to repeat words or phrases for emphasis or rhythm: Abraham Lincoln was not redundant in his hope that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Only a mischievous or tone-deaf editor would delete the repetition of “people.”

  To preserve word territory, you must recognize the difference between intended and unintended repetition. For example, I once wrote this sentence to describe a writing tool: “Long sentences create a flow that carries the reader down a stream of understanding, creating an effect that Don Fry calls ‘steady advance.’” It took several years and hundreds of readings before I noticed I had written “create” and “creating” in the same sentence. It was easy enough to cut “creating,” giving the stronger verb form its own space. Word territory.

  In 1978 I wrote this ending to a story about the life and death of Beat writer Jack Kerouac in my hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida:

  How fitting then that this child of bliss should come in the end to St. Petersburg. Our city of golden sunshine, balmy serenity and careless bliss, a paradise for those who have known hard times. And, at once, the city of wretched loneliness, the city of rootless survival and of restless wanderers, the city where so many come to die.

  Years later, I admire that passage except for the unintended repetition of the key word “bliss.” Worse yet, I had used it before, two paragraphs earlier. I offer no excuse other than feeling blissed out in the aura of Kerouac’s work.

  I’ve heard a story, which I cannot verify, that Er
nest Hemingway tried to write book pages in which no key words were repeated. That effect would mark a hard-core adherence to word territory, but, in fact, does not reflect the way Hemingway writes. He often repeats key words on a page—table, rock, fish, river, sea—because to find a synonym strains the writer’s eyes and the reader’s ears.

  Consider this passage from A Moveable Feast (the emphasis is mine):

  “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

  As a reader, I appreciate the repetition in the Hemingway passage. The effect is like the beat of a bass drum. It vibrates the writer’s message into the pores of the skin. Some words—like “true” and “sentence”—act as building blocks and can be repeated to good effect. Distinctive words—like “scrollwork” and “ornament”—deserve their own space.

  Observing word territory eliminates repetition, but its best effect is to craft writing with distinctive language in support of the work’s purpose. Consider this wonderful rant written by John Kennedy Toole for the lips of Ignatius J. Reilly, the elephantine hero of A Confederacy of Dunces. The city in question is New Orleans, and the object of scorn is a police officer who has told Reilly to shove off: