Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

by Roy Peter Clark

  In a 2006 article in the St. Petersburg Times, the writer Thomas French showed off this move, describing the memorable life and influential tenure in a Tampa zoo of a chimpanzee named Herman.

  Altogether he lived at Lowry Park Zoo for 35 years. He lasted there longer than any other creature and longer than any of the humans. Each of the 1,800 animals at the zoo is assigned a number. His was 00001.

  In an interview, French explained that the most telling detail in Herman’s story was that number: 00001. Herman was Elvis, No. 1, the primal primate, Adam in this garden of captives. Finding that number—with all those zeros—is good reporting; how French decided to use it is more revealing. He could have listed it in a catalog of details. Instead, to deliver it full force, he placed the magic number at the end of a paragraph at the end of a section in the story’s shortest sentence. “His was 00001.”

  Using short sentences to their full effect is a centuries-old strategy, found in opinion writing, fiction and nonfiction, poetry and plays. It works in a formal speech or in a handwritten letter. Shakespeare, remember, had a messenger deliver the news to Macbeth in six words: “The Queen, my lord, is dead,” a message that could fit easily inside a 140-character tweet.

  A familiar and effective place for the short sentence is at the end of a long paragraph. Here is the critic Greil Marcus in the book The Shape of Things to Come, riffing on the poetry of the beat poet Allen Ginsberg:

  SIN! SIN! SIN! Ginsberg shouted again and again, in scores of other words—single words, elaborate travelogues, sexual fantasies, the American pastoral as it passed by under his eye on the highway, unable to outrun the American berserk in Vietnam. He was there, “lone man from the void, riding a bus / hypnotized by red tail lights on the straight / space road ahead,” to judge the country. And he was there to save it.

  Let’s measure the economy of that final sentence, an efficiency that brings with it the ring of truth: Seven words, all of one syllable. Twenty-one letters. That’s an average of three letters per word.

  There are times when these truth-bearing (truth-baring!) sentences come in a cluster, heightening the drama. The sentences also can appear as stand-alone paragraphs, swimming in white space.

  George Orwell plays with these techniques in Animal Farm:

  It was a pig walking on his hind legs.

  Yes, it was Squealer.… And finally there was a tremendous baying of dogs and a shrill crowing from the black cockerel, and out came Napoleon himself, majestically upright, casting haughty glances from side to side, and with his dogs gambolling round him.

  He carried a whip in his trotter.

  A long sequence of short sentences slows the reader, each period acting as a stop sign. That slow pace can bring clarity, create suspense, or magnify emotion, but can soon become tedious. It turns out that the short sentence gains power from its proximity to longer sentences, as Orwell demonstrates with that final image of the whip appearing after a sentence that stretches to thirty-eight words.

  Another British dystopian, Anthony Burgess, might have learned this trick from Orwell. In the last paragraph of A Clockwork Orange, his savage teenage narrator is about to be liberated from the reprogramming designed to suppress his violent impulses. Listening to his beloved Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, he expresses his joy via an invented gang-slang of the future:

  Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva. And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing movement still to come. I was cured all right.

  Notice the metrical echoes in that final sentence: five words. All of one syllable. None longer than five letters. And with this added benefit: It comes not just at the end of a passage or a chapter, but as the chilling last words of the novel.

  The following passage ends the historical novel Libra by Don DeLillo and describes the burial of John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. You will notice that all the sentences are relatively short, allowing the emotional tension to build. The woman in question is Oswald’s mother:

  Marguerite felt a weakness in her legs. The wind made the canopy snap. She felt hollow in her body and heart. But even as they led her from the grave she heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald spoken by two boys standing fifty feet away, here to grab some clods of souvenir earth. Lee Harvey Oswald. Saying it like a secret they’d keep forever. She saw the first dusty car drive off, just silhouetted heads in windows. She walked with the policemen up to the second car, where the funeral director stood under a black umbrella, holding open the door. Lee Harvey Oswald. No matter what happened, how hard they schemed against her, this was the one thing they could not take away—the true and lasting power of his name. It belonged to her now, and to history.

  Consider the variety of sentence lengths: 7 words, 6, 8, 32, 3, 8, 13, 23, 3, 28, 8. The two shortest verbless sentences of three words (Lee Harvey Oswald) appear immediately after two of the longer sentences. That change of pace, that abruptness, that slamming on of brakes, carries significant meaning, as does that final truth-bearing/baring sentence: “It belonged to her now, and to history.”

  I thank Tom Wolfe for that 1975 lesson on the disproportionate power of the short sentence. It stuck. I owe it to him to restore his original context, that writers can use the short sentence to give even preposterous statements the ring of truth. The bigot can use it to foment hate. The propagandist can slap it on a bumper sticker. But for the writer with good intent, the short sentence proves a reliable method for delivering the practical truth.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Read my book How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times, in which I highlight hundreds of examples of short writing, including many short sentences, such as proverbs, maxims, and aphorisms. Discuss why some of the most memorable historical documents happen to be among the shortest.

  2. In your reading, pay special attention to short sentences, especially when they appear in the work of noted authors. Test the theory that such writers use their shortest sentences to express their most important ideas.

  3. Examine your own work with this theory in mind. Ask yourself, “What is the most important idea I am trying to express in this piece?” Underline the sentence in which that idea is expressed. Try to revise it to make it shorter.

  4. Turn your critical eye to political speech and propaganda in which the short sentence is used to make you believe lies, distortions, or half-truths. Consider writing something that exposes the misuse of this writing tool.

  TOOL 53

  Match your diction to your writing purpose.

  Words should fit tone, theme, content, and audience.

  In my writing and teaching, I’ve come to understand the value of the word “diction” in solving some of my most important language problems. It comes from the Latin word for “oratory” or “speech” and belongs to a cluster of words from the same root, including “dictionary,” “dictum,” “dictation,” and even “dictator.” Imagine taking dictation from a dictator!

  If you have good diction, it means that you enunciate words clearly, the way Lester Holt does as an NBC news anchor, or the way jazz singer Diana Krall performs “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

  But that is not the primary definition. The American Heritage Dictionary defines diction as “choice and use of words in speech or writing.” The key word is “choice.” In most cases, writers choose words that fit their topic and appeal to their audience. You will choose a different set of words if you write for Reader’s Digest than if you write for Playboy. The language of a blogger will differ depending on whether that writer is choosing words for a blog on politics, or sports, or parenting. The grave T. S. Eliot used a different poetic diction from that of the sprightly Ogden Nash.

  Let’s use two very different tabloid newspaper stories as examples. The first comes from the final edition of a very good newspaper, the Rocky Mountain
News, a front-page unsigned editorial titled “Goodbye, Colorado.” The tone is sad, poignant, nostalgic, marking the end of an era:

  We part in sorrow because we know so much lies ahead that will be worth telling, and we will not be there to do so. We have celebrated life in Colorado, praising its ways, but we have warned, too, against steps we thought were mistaken. We have always been a part of this special place, striving to reflect it accurately and with compassion. We hope Coloradans will remember this newspaper fondly from generation to generation, a reminder of Denver’s history—the ambitions, foibles and virtues of its settlers and those who followed. We are confident that you will build on their dreams and find new ways to tell your story. Farewell—and thank you for so many memorable years together.

  Here we see a perfect match between language and purpose, including words and phrases you might use in a powerful piece of oratory: “worth telling,” “striving,” “special place,” “from generation to generation,” “virtues of its settlers,” “build on their dreams.”

  Compare that diction to this language in a New York Post story about mobsters and murder:

  John Gotti sicced his most sadistic hit man on his future son-in-law for smacking around gal pal Victoria Gotti, the Dapper Don’s daughter.

  I love every word of this lead, written by a reporter, Kati Cornell Smith, who has mastered the lingo of underworld overlords. The cheap rhyme “gal pal” and alliterative moniker “Dapper Don” send the sentence over the top, but it is the diction, including words like “sicced,” “sadistic,” and “smacking around,” that matches language to the topic and to audience expectation.

  I once wrote an essay in which I referred to Osama bin Laden—then alive—as “that spelunking meshuggeneh.” That diction surprised some readers, who wondered whether it was appropriate to my topic and available to a general audience. I confess that I still love the phrase and hope that such self-love is not literary onanism, but a form of self-respect, a writerly requirement. You can’t please others if you fail to please yourself.

  I could have, for example, simplified my jelly donut phrase to “that cave-dwelling madman.” Not a single reader would be confused. But “cave-dwelling” seemed too soft and “madman” too common. “Spelunking” is one of my favorite words, and I rarely miss a chance to use it. The word is derived from the Greek and Latin word for “cave”; a spelunker “explores caves as a hobby.” The word, I believe, reduces bin Laden, makes his circumstances more claustrophobic, and adds that wicked middle syllable “lunk”—which just reminds me of “lunkhead.”

  Even better, for me, was “meshuggeneh,” a great Yiddish word that I’ve heard since I was a child in New York City, meaning “a crazy person,” but in a Mel Brooks rather than Sigmund Freud kind of way. It may be the most unlikely word ever to abut “spelunking,” and it exacts, as a Jewish epithet, poetic justice against one of the evil leaders who would just as soon wipe a certain group of people from the face of the earth.

  I cannot ignore the tests of comprehensibility. I’ve often said that writers have a duty to define strange words or make them clear from context. I may be self-indulgent, but I’m not naïve. I can’t envision a caravan of readers marching to the dictionary to get my diction. I guess it’s fair to say that I’m willing to sacrifice those readers to give others a blast of delight, including the reader who told me that, upon meeting the phrase, she “giggled with glee.”

  One of my favorite writers is Olivia Judson, who writes funny books about sex and evolutionary biology. I first encountered her work in an issue of Seed magazine, where I was attracted to the irresistible headline: “Super Sex Me.” The article began:

  Perhaps my all-time favorite organism is Bonellia viridis, the green spoon worm. The female lives in crevices on the sea floor. She’s a sedentary lady: She doesn’t roam in search of adventure; she doesn’t go out in search of food. Rather, she spends her life in one spot, gathering her meals by snuffling around her neighborhood with her long, extensible proboscis.

  Her mate is minuscule: The green spoon worm has one of the most extreme size differences known to exist between male and female, the male being 200,000 times smaller than his mate. Her lifespan is a couple of years. His is only a couple of months—and he spends his short life inside her reproductive tract, regurgitating sperm through his mouth to fertilize her eggs. More ignominious still, when he was first discovered, he was thought to be a nasty parasitic infestation.

  Like a skillful songwriter, Judson matches her diction to her purpose, which is to make science writing accessible to the general reading public. Here’s how she does it:

  • She is not afraid to use technical language or Latin names, but follows the Latin classification with four words of one syllable: “the green spoon worm.”

  • She uses one number to describe size difference, and it’s a beauty: 200,000. A couple of times she even uses the very unscientific phrase “a couple of…”

  • She writes with a quirky human voice, using homey terms like “my all-time favorite” to describe this organism. What kind of woman has an all-time favorite organism and is an expert on its sex life? My kind.

  • She gives these creatures human qualities, a strategy that attracts us to them. The female is a sedentary lady. She lives in a neighborhood.

  • Throughout her essay, she plays with the miniaturized male to remind us of the contemporary status issues of men and women.

  • She chooses a hot spot in her story—the end of the second paragraph—to place her sharpest phrase, “nasty parasitic infestation.”

  That is a lot of great work from a couple of paragraphs, all derived from her diction, her choice of words to match her topic, her intent, and her audience.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Read two newspapers from the same city—either in print or online—especially if one is a tabloid and the other a broad-sheet. To paraphrase a song from Billy Joel, you could read the New York Times and the Daily News. Beginning with the headlines, analyze the differences in diction, or word choice. Make a list of the “high” words in the Times, such as “organized crime,” and the low words in the Daily News, such as “mob.”

  2. Intensify your reading, looking closely at the word choice of writers and editors. Make a list of the kinds of words that seem to characterize a particular book or publication. Based on your study of those words, write a brief description of who you think is the intended audience. Read my book The Art of X-Ray Reading.

  3. As you read a novel, begin to notice the diction that the author gives to various characters through the use of dialogue. What does the language of those characters say about their social status, education, gender, ethnicity, religion, professional interests?

  4. I write above that “spelunking” and “meshuggeneh” are among my favorite words. What does it say about me as a person and an author that I list these particular words as among my favorites? (In response to a question, I once said my favorite word was “colonoscopy.” Having just written a story on that topic, I testified that I found all those “little o’s” irresistible.) Make a list of twenty of your favorite words and ask a friend what those words say about you.

  TOOL 54

  Create a mosaic of detail to reveal character.

  Piece together habits, gestures, and preferences into a vision of life on the page.

  When I first read the New Journalism manifestos by Tom Wolfe in the late 1970s, they changed forever my vision of narrative. In spite of my PhD in English, I realized for the first time that a narrative had parts and that each part lent to a story a power of its own. I began thinking more critically and practically about scenes, then dialogue, then the third-person point of view.

  Wolfe stumped me with his call for status details (“status” being an interesting word in the era of Facebook). I knew that Wolfe often wrote about the tensions created by social class; status in the context of his work must involve the signifiers of wealth and upbringing, whether you attended Brown University
or Rhode Island College, ate at Bern’s Steak House or McDonald’s, drank Guinness or Pabst Blue Ribbon.

  Many of us influenced by Wolfe adopted a broader definition of character than the word “status” suggests. To bring a person to literary life requires not a complete inventory of characteristics, but selected details arranged to let us see flesh, blood, and spirit. In the best cases—when craft rises to art—the author conjures a character who seems fully present for the reader, a man standing against that very light post waving you over for a conversation.

  Beyond the need for details, Wolfe is never specific enough for me on where to find them or how to use them to construct literary character, especially what to include and what to leave out. So I began searching for writers who were good at bringing characters to life on the page. Then, through a process of X-ray reading and reverse engineering, I tried to define the kinds of evidence used by expert writers.

  I found a good model in The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, a history of radical Islam leading up to 9/11, which won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2007. I served on that Pulitzer jury and still remember how Wright’s narrative distinguished itself (with two other finalists) from among more than four hundred entries. If I can adapt a catchphrase to describe the heart of Wright’s accomplishment, it’s this: He is an expert at keeping it real.

  About halfway through the text, Wright introduces us to John O’Neill, chief of the FBI’s counterterrorism section. O’Neill will be assigned to lead a team on a mission: to bring back Ramzi Yousef, suspected in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, from Islamabad to the United States. As is Wright’s habit, he offers a full paragraph to describe O’Neill’s character, personality, and values: