by Ben Yagoda
I talk a lot about “not-bad” writing. Another term for this is the middle style; sometimes it’s claimed to be “transparent” prose. That’s because it’s clear, precise, and concise and doesn’t call attention to itself, for good or ill. William Hazlitt gave it some other names, and a good characterization, back in 1821: “To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity.” If you’ve ever seen a transcript of actual conversation, you know that you don’t want to write exactly like that; too many false starts, too many ums, ya knows, and likes. Yet as Hazlitt recognized, not-bad writing is conversational to the core and reciting your work will help you master it.
Even good writing—such as the highly literary style of a Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, or John Updike, or the irony of a Joan Didion or Sarah Vowell—reads aloud well. The worst of academic, bureaucratic, or legal prose doesn’t; you have to take multiple breaths before you get to the end of a sentence, and the dull or vague or merely stiff wording just hits you over the head. It brings to mind what Harrison Ford supposedly said to George Lucas (always more of a visual than a word guy) on the set of Star Wars: “You can write this shit, George, but you sure can’t say it.”
A word you see a lot nowadays is mindfulness. I confess I don’t know exactly what it means; something having to do with meditation and/or yoga, I believe. But the concept can definitely, and profitably, be adapted to writing. The opposite of mindful writing is careless, unexamined, unattended-to prose: what Truman Capote may have had in mind when he said (referring to Beat Generation authors), “That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.” Mindless writing is a data dump and one sees it far too often nowadays.
I hope I don’t sound like the “Get off my lawn!” guy too often in this book, but I’ll briefly embrace this persona for a rant about multitasking, that is, the predilection of youth (broadly defined) to do several things at once, most or all of them electronic. Much attention, research, and verbiage has been devoted to this subject, and I freely confess that I haven’t studied the accumulated wisdom and thus am not an expert. However. I am convinced that multitasking—either the act itself or a multitasking state of mind—promotes the mindless writing I am confronted with every day. Without a doubt, if you have several things going on at once, you are perfectly capable of expressing an idea along the lines of Dude, where should we eat? or OMG, did you see what she’s wearing? But anything more complicated than that—and anything you would want to write for a broader public is more complicated than that—well, it just can’t be done.
In other words, I would bet a lot of money that the student who wrote the following sentence had several other things going on:
Not only do journalists possess an undying passion to uncover and showcase relevant information to enhance the public’s knowledge on current events, but exhibit a willingness to go to great lengths to obtain stories fit to print.
It has all the telltale signs of mindless writing: wordiness, clichés, and catchphrases poorly used; subjects and verbs that don’t line up; incorrect use of words; faulty parallelism. It might not be a bad idea to copy it down and put it up on your bulletin board as an example of what not to do. And make no mistake: merely listening to music while trying to write constitutes multitasking, not to mention texting, watching TV, scanning a computer, and so forth. Any of these things takes the necessary attention away from the task at hand. So if you don’t want to write badly, don’t do them.
A big part of mindful writing is an awareness of and attentiveness to the (hypothetical or actual) person who will eventually be reading your words. Ideally, you look him or her in the eye, as it were. You note a spark of interest or a puzzled look or the glazed expression that indicates incipient boredom, and respond accordingly. Few of us are lucky enough to have a real live person ready and willing to hear our stuff. But that’s okay. Cooking a stew, you don’t need an outside opinion; you just take a taste now and again. It’s the same with writing. Reading aloud—literally or figuratively—will help you take one step away from your work and single-handedly become what Robert Graves called “the reader over your shoulder.”
So read.
PART II
How to Not Write Wrong
Note: In Parts II and III, examples of what not to do will be crossed out or [set in brackets].
A. The Elements of House Style
Which is correct, 6 PM, 6 P.M., or 6 p.m.?
The answer is, all of them!—and I apologize for starting off this part of the book with a trick question. This is an issue of style in the sense of The AP Stylebook and MLA Style—basically, a set of rules and conventions having to do with abbreviation, capitalization, and so forth that is followed by a particular publication or organization. If your professor, company, or publication subscribes to a certain house style, follow it. If not, the most important thing is to be consistent. That is, if on page 1 you write 6 p.m., spell out the number fifteen, and put “Gone with the Wind” in quotation marks, make sure you do things the same way all through your text.
1. NUMBERS AND ABBREVIATIONS
That said, not-bad writers tend to follow some general style guidelines. Most prominently, they try to stay away if at all possible from numerals, abbreviations, capitalization, and symbols like &, %, #, +, >, /, and @. The underlying reason for this has to do with the whole read-aloud thing. In reciting the sentence below, for example, you wouldn’t say “St.” or “Dr.”; and fourteen just reads more fluently than 14.
[The Dr. has had his office @ #321 Livingston St. for >20 years.]
It’s better to write it as you would say it:
The doctor has had his office at 321 Livingston Street for more than twenty years. (Street addresses are always given in numerals, hence the 321.)
As for state names, never abbreviate when they’re four letters or less, or when they’re standing alone.
He hails from Calif. California.
It isn’t wrong or necessarily bad to abbreviate a state name when it immediately follows a city, but note that the Associated Press stopped doing this in 2010. That is, the AP now refers to Albany, New York, not Albany, N.Y.
It’s similar with months. Always spell out the months from March through July. For the rest, spell out when alone (I was born in February); when it’s followed by the day, abbreviation is okay, as long as you’re consistent (I was born on Feb. 22).
Of course, it would look silly to spell out terms customarily given by abbreviations, initials, or acronyms—to write, that is:
[The band played a song from its new compact disk on Mister David Letterman’s talk show, which airs on the Columbia Broadcasting System.]
The band played a song from its new CD on David Letterman’s CBS talk show.
Long-established custom dictates that numbers above 100, sports scores, dates, temperatures, ratios, betting odds, prices, street addresses, phone numbers, and generally stuff referring to numbers as numbers be presented in numerals rather than words.
The Yankees beat the Red Sox yesterday by a score of 5–2. The two teams have met 223 times; the Yankees lead, 130–93.
Otherwise, you won’t go wrong if you follow a simple principle: when in doubt, spell it out.
2. CAPITALIZATION
A similar strategy goes for capital letters. They’re called on, most frequently, to indicate proper nouns, which are, generally speaking, the official names of people, places, trade names, and organizations. For example: General Electric, the University of Southern California, the Atlantic Ocean, the Rolling Stones, Mars, Albany, John Glenn, Excedrin, and France. (But not my Wife, the Ocean, an Antibiotic, or the Supermarket.)
Titles and honorifics that come before a name are also capitalized; Mr., Mrs., Miss, Ms., and Dr. are abbreviated as well. But if you are merely giving a description of the person or naming his or her job—even before the name—use lowercase.
>
The panelists will be lawyer Mike Jones, anchorwoman Claudia Axelrod, and President Barack Obama.
After a name, even titles are lowercased:
Barack Obama is the president, Benedict is the pope, and Harvey Weill is the district attorney.
Seasons, directions, and relatives (for some reason, the three most commonly wrongly capitalized categories) are rendered in lowercase as well:
[Every Summer, my Mother and Father and I got in the car and drove West.]
Every summer, my mother and father and I got in the car and drove west.
3. ITALICS
A surprising number of people don’t realize that, in a text, italics or underlining indicate exactly the same thing. In typewriter days, it wasn’t possible to indicate italics, so we underlined for emphasis. Now that everybody writes on computers, underlining isn’t necessary, so don’t do it. Use italics, but only for emphasis, for titles of books and other compositions (as long as you’re consistent), to indicate words as words (as is done throughout this book), and for words in languages other than English. Putting a word in all capital letters is not an acceptable way to indicate any of these things, except in dialogue, where all-caps can suggest shouting at a very high volume, or, occasionally, in informal writing, where it can be amusing.
The foreign-language item demands some amplification. If a foreign word is familiar enough that readers will understand what it means—think joie de vivre, siesta, zeitgeist, espresso—don’t italicize it. However, sometimes you may have reason to use a more obscure foreign word or a short quotation from something said or written in a foreign language. Italicize the word or quote—and make sure you quickly translate it.
One complication with italics is e-mail. Some e-mail programs allow italicization, but others play dumb when you hit the appropriate keys, or instead give you a Spanish tilde sign or some other odd piece of punctuation. Some people compensate for this by using special cues for emphasis, like *this* or _this_ That’s okay for e-mail, but stay away for it in any other setting.
4. THERE IS NO REASON EVER TO USE BOLDFACE IN A PIECE OF WRITING, EXCEPT FOR A SECTION HEADING (LIKE THIS)
Students commonly use bold instead of the proper typographical way to indicate emphasis or a title, which is italics. Aside from being counter to standard usage, it’s jarring; each boldfaced word makes the reader jump.
[Why do they insist on putting Hamlet in bold?]
Why do they insist on putting Hamlet in bold?
B. Punctuation
1. ’
a. Plurality’s Pluralities
Punctuation isn’t sexy, but it’s actually a key to not-bad writing. That’s because of the concept I discussed at the end of the last chapter, “mindful writing.” You can dismiss apostrophes—and punctuation in general—as just a series of technical details. I prefer to look at them as measures of mindfulness. When you write carelessly or automatically—mindlessly, that is—the chances of apostrophizing correctly are pretty slim. They steadily improve as you begin to pay attention.
An easy thing to remember is not to use apostrophes—ever—to indicate a plural, no matter how tempting it seems. Doing so will get you pilloried in a book like Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
[They have three TV’s on the first floor and four on the second, so if you don’t like what’s on, you can just walk into another room!]
Should be TVs, just as it should be IOUs, SUVs, and C.D.s. (The first two examples don’t have periods between the capital letters; the third does. That’s a matter of house style and will vary by publication. The rule about no apostrophe before the s is the same in either case.)
The same goes for decades and centuries, which are in fact plurals (an accumulation of ten years for a decade, 100 for a century). Some publications countenance the 1800’s or the 60’s, but it’s wrong. The 1960s, the ’60s, and the sixties are all okay, as long as you’re consistent.
A small number of students instinctively and wrongly reach for the apostrophe to indicate the plural of a y-ending word: several country’s instead of several countries. The move is a bit more understandable with proper nouns, but equally incorrect. That is, the correct forms are:
Six Kennedys attended the ceremony.
and
Over his career he’s won seventeen Grammys.
Other writers mess up by pluralizing y-ending words when the intention is merely to indicate a possessive:
[When the mom took away the babies’ pacifier, he started crying.]
When the mom took away the baby’s pacifier, he started crying.
And that brings us to the next topic.
b. Possessed
The basic form of possessive apostrophes is blank’s thingamajig, where both words are nouns and thingamajig belongs to or is associated with blank. Another way to look at it is that an apostrophe is called for if you can change the wording to the thingamajig of blank. This is incredibly common in speaking, writing, and singing, as exemplified in the songs “Mickey’s Monkey,” “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” and “John Brown’s Body.”
The basic form is easy enough. It can get a little trickier when you’re indicating a possessive of a noun ending with the letter s. Here’s a two-step way to deal with it. (1) An apostrophe always follows the s. (2) If the word is a singular, or a proper name, you put another s after the apostrophe. If not, you do not.
Phyllis’s dress’s zipper is broken.
However (and this is step 3), if the word is a plural, most style guides have you leave out the second s, on the theory, I guess, that it’s not pronounced.
The first half of the twins’ birthday party is being held at the Smiths’ house and the second part at the Joneses’.
That example brings two further guidelines to mind. First, the plural of Jones is indeed Joneses. Most s-ending common and proper nouns follow an add -es form; the most common exception is series, the plural of which is series. Second, if you want to put a sign outside your house—a questionable idea to begin with—inscribe the plural of your name followed by an apostrophe, that is, The Yagodas’; “house” or “place” is understood. An apostrophe-less The Yagodas just makes it seem like a verb is missing. And The Yagoda’s makes no sense, except in reference to the domicile of a person who refers to himself as “The Yagoda.”
A final apostrophe issue is where (if anywhere) it’s placed in formulations like Farmers Market, Boys Club, and Stockholders Meeting.
I confess that I find this a toughie. What helps clear it up for me is pretending that the first word in the phrase is men—or women or children or any plural that doesn’t end in s. You would never write men room, men department, or men club, and you obviously shouldn’t write mens room, mens department, etc. (because there is no such word as mens). Instead, the correct forms would be men’s room, men’s department, and men’s club. It works out that almost always the apostrophe should follow the s. And the above examples should be Farmers’ Market, Boys’ Club, and Stockholders’ Meeting. In fact, in phrases like this, the apostrophe should almost always follow the s. (The exception, such as farmer’s tan, Mother’s Day, or, speaking of songs, “It’s a Man’s World,” comes where the reference is to the prototypical singular farmer, mom, or man.)
c. This Should Not Be Necessary, but…
Do not write your (possessive of you) instead of you’re (contraction of you are) or it’s (contraction of it is) instead of its (possessive of it), or vice versa. If you do, it looks very bad and you will be mocked. Spell-check will not help you out. You just need to be mindful.
d. An Incredibly Geeky Point
In typewriter days, the keyboard provided a single vertical mark to indicate apostrophe, opening single quote, and closing single quote. But in a published text, these are not the same. The apostrophe and the closing single quote are the same and look like this: ’. The opening single quote looks like this: ‘.
This was no problem back then: if a typewritten (or handwritten) text was going to be published, typesetters would
take care of sorting out the apostrophes and single quotes. The trouble came with the arrival of word processing programs. Computer keyboards also have a single key for those three symbols, but the programs offer print-style fonts and think they are smart enough to figure out which symbol you want in a particular situation. That’s not always the case, however. Consider the following sentence, which I let Microsoft Word have its way with:
[Rock ‘n’ roll was very big in the ‘60s.]
There should be an apostrophe before n and 60s, to indicate stuff that is left out, the same way the apostrophe works in contractions like can’t or I’m. Instead, there is an opening single quote. I admitted this was a geeky point, and the fact is that 99 percent of people, or more, won’t notice the problem. But to me it counts as bad writing. If you agree and want to correct the error, there are various workarounds. The one I use is to trick the program by typing a second apostrophe after the incorrect one:
[Rock ‘’n’ roll was very big in the ‘’60s.]
Then if you delete the incorrect one, you will be left with true apostrophes:
Rock ’n’ roll was very big in the ’60s.
2. -
Hyphenation can cause vexation. It certainly did in one of my students, who handed in an article containing this sentence:
[Our day began with a run down of the up-coming shark cage diving experience.]