How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem

by Ben Yagoda

  For some reason, many writers tend to needlessly repeat proper names, apparently forgetting that at their disposal are the very useful pronouns he and she—which have the added value of being the category of common words, mentioned above, that can be repeated with near impunity.

  Johnson is the youngest representative in the legislature. At twenty-three, he defeated the Republican incumbent.

  Moving to something a little more challenging, here’s one that requires some mindful pruning. (Note, in passing, the use of the passive voice. It’s a problem in the original because, among other reasons, the identity of “they” is not given. But contrary to what’s often written, the passive can be effective, and I think it is in the revision.)

  [During the journey children were abducted and taken into captivities where they turned the boys into child soldiers carrying guns twice the size of the young boys.]

  During the journey, the boys were abducted, taken into captivity, and turned into soldiers carrying guns twice their size.

  Sometimes, writers seem to develop a repetition compulsion regarding a particular word:

  [Whether they are nice robots like Rosie the robot maid in the Jetsons, C3PO in Star Wars; or mean robots like the robot overlords in the Matrix, robots are a steady figure in popular culture.]

  Whew. Robot much? I think my approach to this would be to embrace the repetition, somewhat, specifically going from five iterations to three, and meanwhile fixing the punctuation and changing that phrase steady figure. So it would become:

  Whether they are nice robots like Rosie the maid in The Jetsons and C3PO in Star Wars, or mean robots like the overlords in The Matrix, robots are recurring figures in popular culture.

  (Or you could just take out every robot except the last one. Your choice.)

  Here’s an insider’s tip. Take a look at the example I gave a few paragraphs up, the one about de Kooning. Did anybody notice I replaced paintings with work? Well, I did, and I maintain that even though it’s a substituted word, it’s not elegant variation. The trick is, when there’s no readily apparent way to avoid repetition, it often works to find a word referring to a broader or narrower category of the first one. So painting/work is okay (broader), as is painting/neo-expressionistic portraits (narrower). But paintings/canvases is elegant variation.

  2. START STRONG

  Here is the most underrated writing tip I know: when possible, make the subject of a sentence a person, a collection of persons, or a thing. When you choose a concept or some other intangible as a subject, you’re generally forced into an awkward verb or, at best, the passive voice.

  [Intelligence is a quality shared by every member of the family.]

  Everybody in the family is smart.

  [Benefits an organization gains when reusing water include sustainability, good publicity, great economic incentives, and good relations with water conservation programs, said Huang.]

  Huang said that when an organization reuses water, it gains many benefits: sustainability, publicity, economic incentives, and good relations with water conservation programs.

  [Qualities such as imagination and engagement are qualities the admissions board ways heavily.]

  Qualities such as those qualities; ways instead of weighs. Hard as it may be to believe, I certify this is an actual student sentence. Anyweigh, I mean anyway:

  The admissions board is always on the lookout for qualities like imagination and engagement.

  [Unusual flavor pairings are what best characterize Chef Juan Garces’ restaurants.]

  Chef Juan Garces is known for pairing unusual flavors.

  The following three-sentence excerpt from an article about a city council meeting is a symphony of weak openings. And by the way, either that is a spell-check error in the first sentence or it was an extraordinarily tense meeting.

  [The opening of the meeting was similar to past openings with mediation and the pledge of allegiance. Applause was loud when Mayor Funk hugged and congratulated Rose Gallante, Anita Hunter, Harry McKenry, Judy Miller, and finally Euretta Schultheiss on their contributions to the Newark Police Department. The years of dedication ranged from three years of service to eighteen.]

  The meeting opened with the customary moment of silent meditation followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. Mayor Funk congratulated Rose Gallante, Anita Hunter, Harry McKenry, Judy Miller, and Euretta Schultheiss on their service—ranging from three to eighteen years—to the Newark Police Department. As he was hugging them, spectators erupted into thunderous applause.

  3. END STRONG

  [Having a strong ending is as important as having a strong beginning for a sentence.]

  I hope you see how the sentence above—while being grammatically correct, precise, and relatively concise—violates the very maxim it offers, and as a result ends up as weak as the beer at a college mixer.

  Unfortunately, a great many of our first-draft sentences seem to want to end with a whimpering trail of prepositional phrases, nonessential details, and other extraneous material. One word for this is anticlimax. Once you’ve recognized the problem—a key step, as always—the first thing to do is figure out which word represents the most important idea, then see if you can make this the last word. In the example, it was pretty easy to figure out that this magic word was ending and to shove it to the end:

  Possibly the most important principle in constructing sentences is having a strong ending.

  You usually won’t go wrong if you end with a direct object. Concluding prepositional phrases are unavoidable, to a certain extent, but never double or triple them. Thus The priest went back to his homeland is fine, but not The priest went back to his homeland after his vacation. To fix that one, how about:

  After his vacation, the priest went back to his homeland.

  It’s not always that simple. Consider:

  1. [He’s going to attack a lot of these problems about global warming in the future.]

  2. [The winner of the lottery was an employee of the firm named Henry Galston.]

  3. [In a flurry we grabbed some plastic containers filled with sprouts and kimchi, spending about $12.75 on these ingredients for dinner.]

  One helpful strategy for the first two is, rather than look for the most important concept, to take almost the opposite tack: gather together the trailing-off stuff and front-load it, either at the beginning of the sentence or before key nouns and verbs. By the way, both 1 and 2 are not only weak but have ambiguity problems. In 1, are we talking about future problems or a future attack?; and in 2, a reader briefly wonders if this firm might conceivably be called Henry Galston.

  After front-loading, number 1 becomes:

  In the future, he’s going to attack a lot of these global-warming problems.

  Number 2 is better served by flipping the whole thing around:

  An employee named Henry Galston won the lottery.

  The third sentence, meanwhile, is better served by being cut in two:

  In a flurry we grabbed some plastic containers filled with sprouts and kimchi. The damages were $12.75.

  Much more often than not, you will want your last word to be a noun. I just took a look at a “Talk of the Town” piece by a good New Yorker writer named Nick Paumgarten (“Big Picture,” July 11 and 18, 2011) and calculated that (not counting quotations), thirty-nine of the forty-five sentences in it end with nouns, pronouns, or proper names. All of these are either direct objects (as in the second sentence in the following passage) or the object of prepositional phrases (as in the first). The article is about a newfangled Polaroid camera, which is operated by a woman named Jennifer Trausch:

  The strobe flash made a loud pop, and Trausch began slowly pulling the paper through the machine. She laid the print on the table and after ninety seconds peeled back the protective layer to reveal a stately black-and-white image edged in a chemical sludge they call “goop.”

  Of the six non-noun-ending sentences in the article—all of which are good sentences, by the way—four end with
verbs and two with adjectives. An example of the first category is a long sentence that discusses Polaroid enthusiasts’ efforts “…to try to make new film, using different chemicals and processes, since the old ones were environmentally hazardous or difficult to duplicate.”

  An example of the second (referring to the director Oliver Stone, three photos of whom were taken with the camera) is: “Stone and the camera crew stood over them, trying to choose which was best.”

  Going through the other parts of speech, you will never (except for stunts) end a sentence with an article or conjunction. Adverbs can work when it’s the adverb you’re stressing:

  He played relentlessly and well.

  That leaves prepositions. In the last chapter, I said it’s not in fact true that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition. However, you normally shouldn’t, because prepositions are so often weak that you could make the case they are inherently so. Consider:

  [Abernathy lives in the neighborhood the cougar was found in.]

  Yuck—and note the repetition of in. The fix that will usually first come to mind involves the word which, which leads in this case to:

  [Abernathy lives in the neighborhood in which the cougar was found.]

  That’s not so good, either. It’s wordy, and pretty obvious you’re trying to avoid a preposition at the end. The way to go here is to flip things around:

  The cougar was found in Abernathy’s neighborhood.

  To be sure, prepositions can work as endings. You just have to take each sentence on its merits.

  What in God’s name are you talking about?

  I wish those cougars would go back where they came from.

  Don’t come in.

  4. LENGTHY IS DESIRABLE SHORT IS GOOD (II)

  Early in this part, I talked about using the shortest word that expresses your meaning and used a passage from The Elements of Style to illustrate the point. The same is true of sentences. Here is a famous passage from the original edition of the book, published as a pamphlet by William Strunk in 1918, in which Strunk explains what he means by the motto “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.

  Frankly, I am not so wild about Strunk’s use of the words unnecessary and needless. They wrongly imply, it seems to me, that there is one right way to express any particular thought, and that the way to achieve it is just to pare away all extraneous words until you get there. But I get what he means and I certainly concur with the sentiment “Vigorous [or “not-bad”] writing is concise.” I like his acknowledgment that a good long sentence can be very cool. And I love his use of the old-fashioned verb tell (in the old-fashioned subjunctive voice, no less). In a not-bad sentence, every word is serving a purpose. You should be able to identify what that purpose is. A good deal of revision involves going over your sentences and identifying words that aren’t serving a purpose and, as Strunk would say, omitting them.

  Writing concisely is both selfish and generous. It’s generous because it contains an implicit acknowledgment that the reader’s time is valuable and that you do not intend to waste it. It’s selfish because, compared to verbosity, it is a much more effective way to get your point across.

  Admittedly, it takes a good deal of time and effort to achieve. It’s much easier to write long than to write short. You could call it the Dickens Fallacy: somehow, we all seem to have an ingrained sense that we’re being paid by the word. Once you get that excessive sentence down, then examining it for those needless words is laborious in itself. And when you’ve spotted them, you generally can’t just pluck them out and be done with it; the sentence has to be reshaped. But all this has always been the case.

  Below are some pieces of verbosity from students’ work, with edits.

  [The book compiles fifty-two pieces of work from forty-five different writers each and every one of whom has a special connection to the tiny state of Delaware.]

  The book has fifty-two pieces of work from forty-five writers, each with a Delaware connection.

  [Cromartie hopes students leave the presentations with a better appreciation and understanding of the people of Uganda, the strife they are living with daily and the impoverished conditions from which they are trying to rise above through the education of children and vocational training for adults.]

  Cromartie said he hoped students would leave the presentations with a better understanding of both the people of Uganda and the efforts they’re making to improve the terrible conditions there.

  [City council members expressed inspections are to insure the healthy living environments residing within rental properties as well as to protect the city from future incidents.]

  That one combines wordiness with vagueness. It’s missing information, and I have used my poetic license to provide it.

  Two city council members made the point that inspections are important, both to promote the health of residents and to protect the city from lawsuits.

  [In an age that could not have even anticipated news being spread via the Internet, broadcast journalism took the media world by storm and allowed reporters to pledge their allegiance through trustworthy pieces aimed to satisfy the public interest.]

  In the 1950s and ’60s, broadcast journalism became more popular and effective.

  [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.]

  The best journalists are passionate about their work and indefatigable in tracking down stories.

  5. THE PERILS OF AMBIGUITY

  a. Crash Blossoms

  In a New York Times Magazine “On Language” column in 2010, Ben Zimmer described how Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Japan, was bemused by an article in a local newspaper about the successful musical career of a young musician whose father had died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash. Specifically, he was bothered by the headline—VIOLINIST LINKED TO JAL CRASH BLOSSOMS—which made him wonder, “What’s a crash blossom?” O’Connell and another editor, Dan Bloom, thereupon coined Crash Blossoms as a term for such vexingly ambiguous headlines. Zimmer listed some prime examples:

  [MCDONALD’S FRIES THE HOLY GRAIL FOR POTATO FARMERS]

  [BRITISH LEFT WAFFLES ON FALKLANDS]

  [GATOR ATTACKS PUZZLE EXPERTS]

  And two all-time greats, used by the Columbia Journalism Review for its collections of misleading headlines:

  [SQUAD HELPS DOG BITE VICTIM]

  [RED TAPE HOLDS UP NEW BRIDGE]

  The classic Crash Blossom is born out of the compression demanded by headlines, and the confusion can often be eliminated by adding missing words or changing the verb from present tense to something more appropriate:

  MCDONALD’S FRIES ARE THE HOLY GRAIL…

  THE BRITISH LEFT IS WAFFLING…

  ALLIGATOR ATTACKS ARE PUZZLING EXPERTS

  b. If Only English Were German

  But Crash Blossoms are not limited to headlines. The English language has a lot of tricks up its sleeve, and once a sentence gets beyond a “See Dick run” level of complexity, the ordering of the elements within it takes on a crucial strategic importance. As E. B. White observed, sometimes trying to cogently set down a thought requires “sheer luck, like getting across the street.” Certainly, ambiguity is a frequent problem in my students’ prose. Below, some of their sentences are grammatically correct but ambiguous if not misleading because of the way the elements of the sentence are ordered; snarky (mis)interpretations follow.

  1. [I went back to visit the house I grew up in last week.]

  Growing up in a week is a prett
y neat trick.

  2. [Ashley finished painting the new garage door that she put up yesterday this morning.]

  Wait, did she put up the door yesterday or this morning?

  3. [Gannett is sponsoring a panel about blogging in the Perkins Auditorium.]

  What about blogging outside the Perkins Auditorium?

  4. [Lincoln University has dropped its controversial three-year-old requirement that students must take an exercise class with a Body Mass Index greater than 30.]

  Weird-sounding class.

  5. [We saw the film that won the Oscar and went home.]

  And where exactly does the film live?

  6. [[Bert] Blyleven…a wily veteran with a wicked curveball who was finishing a twenty-two-year career with the California Angels.]

  That’s some career for a curveball. (The above quote was taken from the New York Times).

  7. [I smile to see my Christmas stocking still hanging on the fireplace, and smell a savory, homemade ravioli dinner escaping the kitchen stove.]

  I hope you didn’t have cleanup duties that night. Ravioli can be messy.