Writing Tips
Deflate those Inflated Phrases
Keep it simple! These are some great suggestions.
SHARE your really bad writing with us in the comments!
The Style Invitational is a humorous word play contest that runs weekly in the Washington Post. These really bad analogies come from the contest results of a 1995 invitational, http://wapo.st/13zgzDS .
What other needless words and phrases can you think of?
Using ‘And’ and ‘But’ to Start Sentences
Many people have learned in school that you should not begin sentences with a conjunction, in particular ‘and’ or ‘but.’ What is strange about this “rule” is that it is extensively considered a myth. That is, you actually can use conjunctions to start sentences. Why were we taught not to use ‘and’ or ‘but’ to start sentences when we can and sometimes should?
Photo from hellowithcheese.com
There are several sources, over hundreds of years, that have supported the use of conjunctions at the beginning of sentences. How it became “bad english” is not quite clear, but aside from not sounding as “intellectual” as the alternatives, one motivation for discouraging the use of conjunctions to start sentences may have arisen from the fact that they are commonly and unnecessarily overused. It’s been found that even many professional writers and journalists will use ‘and’ or ‘but’ when they are not necessary for clarity. (For an overview of some of the errors we see, you can check out Grammarly’s comments and reviews.)
Unfortunately, the overuse of conjunctions to start sentences may be encouraging teachers to forbid the use of them rather than teach students how conjunctions can effectively be used in this way. Here are a few pointers that might help you:
1) Use conjunctions more often. Get over your fear of starting a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but.’ You won’t always need to use a conjunction, but don’t be too afraid to add one here and there where your writing will be helped by them.
2) Delete conjunctions when they’re unnecessary. Because we use ‘and’ and ‘but’ often in speech, it can be easy to overuse them in your writing. When you’re editing, be sure that each ‘and’ or ‘but’ is enhancing your writing. Often, a sentence starting with ‘and’ does not, in fact, need the conjunction.
3) Readers love simple writing, but use synonyms from time to time. To prevent your writing from sounding choppy, it’s good to use some synonyms for ‘and’ and ‘but.’ Yes, ‘however’ sometimes seems too academic, but always using monosyllabic conjunctions will make your writing sound repetitive.
How do you use conjunctions in your writing?
Guest Post: Using Basic Rhetorical Tropes to Get What You Want
When I took my first rhetoric and composition class during freshman year of college, I was bored to tears. It wasn’t until years later, while studying rhetoric in greater depth, did I understand the importance of studying the finer points of persuasive writing. Its importance should not be reduced to developing sound communication skills to improve career prospects. Rather, knowing how to write (or alternatively, speak) persuasively is the key to getting what you want in almost anything in life. Using this line of thinking is an effective way of explaining the importance of rhetoric to your students, who may have difficulty understanding why they should even bother.
Employing persuasive writing techniques always starts with the basic building blocks of rhetoric, which include the four “master tropes”—metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony. For a more student-oriented approach, let’s look at these master tropes and how they may be employed in a common scenario—convincing your parents to give you more money.
Metaphor
Very few people realize how often metaphor is employed in every day speech and writing. A metaphor is usually defined as a figure of speech in which one tangible object or idea is used to represent something less concrete. In broader terms, a metaphor simply links two objects or ideas that are otherwise dissimilar but are alike in an important way. For example, let’s see how we may begin a note to the folks asking for much needed funds using metaphor:
Dear Mom and Dad,
Hope you are doing well. Thankfully, I’m doing okay. I cannot, however, say the same for the status of my bank account. It is an empty vessel, and I am powerless to refill it.
Here, comparing one’s bank account to an empty container brings home the idea of being broke.
Metonymy
Often, metonymy falls into the domain of metaphor, but there is an important distinction. Metonymy is a trope in which one object stands in for a set of objects or ideas. One common example is using “the Crown” to stand in for the various officials that make up the British monarchy. Continuing with our letter, let’s throw in some metonymy:
The reasons for my depleted bank account are various. I’ve tried to rectify this situation by taking action myself, but instead I thought I’d write you a note. As they say, “the pen is mightier than the sword.”
In this example, “pen” stands in for writing, while “sword” represents action.
Synecdoche
This funny-sounding word, often mispronounced, (it’s syn-EK-dah-key, for the record), is essentially the inverse of metonymy. With metonymy, a whole stands for associated parts, while with synecdoche, a part is made to stand for the whole. Going back to our letter:
I’m not writing to beg. Far from it—I am writing to request funds that will be wisely invested in various educational ventures, the returns of which you will see once your child finishes school and benefits from such an enriching intellectual experience. After all, “man does not live on bread alone.”
In this example, we have two instances of synecdoche. “Man” represents, in a larger sense, all of mankind. “Bread”, although only part of what makes up food in general, stands for any sort of nutritional sustenance.
Irony
By far the most complex of rhetorical tropes, irony can mean several different things, and there is still an ongoing debate about what counts as ironic. The most basic definition of verbal irony can be summed up as this—the use of a word or phrase that is intended to mean its opposite, often to humorous effect. In terms of our letter, an ironic statement was earlier expressed: “I am not writing to beg.” Although clothed in language that “sounds” logical, this is precisely what the student is doing—begging. This discord between the denial of begging and the reality thus creates a humorous effect that the parents may find endearing.
Of course, these are just a few of the basic tropes used in rhetoric, and this is only one instance, if a little superficial, in which a writer may use them. Framing tropes in this sense, however, gives students insight into what constitutes good writing. Effective writing isn’t only about being rational. It’s about giving writing some style, by using these tropes, to interest and entertain readers. In the process, you may just get what you want after all.
Author Bio:
This is a guest post by Nadia Jones who blogs at online college about education, college, student, teacher, money saving, movie related topics. You can reach her at nadia.jones5@gmail.com.
“Killed to death,” huh?
A writing tip:
Avoid redundancy.
Blog post: Avoiding fragments and run-ons.
How to Write With Style by Kurt Vonnegut
Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.
These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful —- ? And on and on.
Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead —- or, worse, they will stop reading you.
The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.
So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.
1. Find a subject you care about
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way —- although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.
2. Do not ramble, though
I won’t ramble on about that.
3. Keep it simple
As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.
Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
4. Have guts to cut
It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.
5. Sound like yourself
The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.
In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.
All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.
I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.
6. Say what you mean
I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable —- and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.
Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.
7. Pity the readers
They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school —- twelve long years.
So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify —- whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.
That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.
For really detailed advice
For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.
You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.
In Sum:
1. Find a subject you care about
2. Do not ramble, though
3. Keep it simple
4. Have guts to cut
5. Sound like yourself
6. Say what you mean
7. Pity the readers
from: How to Use the Power of the Printed Word, Doubleday
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Image Source: Pamela Bliss’s mural on Massachusetts Avenue
