Ben Yagoda - How to Not Write Bad - The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem

[ What he wanted to stress was that credit cards are dangerous. ]

He stressed that credit cards are dangerous.

7. WHEN YOU CATCH A PREPOSITION, KILL IT

Pardon me for paraphrasing the title of one of my books, which I stole from Mark Twain: “When you catch an adjective, kill it.” Adjectives can indeed be a problem. They are the prime culprits of telling-not-showing, which I feel is the single biggest general prose misstep. They can be wordy and sleep inducing, especially when mashed together in pairs or triplets.

But in my experience, prepositions are worse. Prepositions, of course, are the part of speech indicating relationship: in, of, to, with, from, under, over , and so on. They are absolutely necessary, but they are inherently weak and often imprecise. Calling someone a person with plans or a man of his word leaves so much open to speculation! Moreover, after a certain point, prepositions turn a sentence into a drawn-out blah. They actually do bring a sort of rhythm with them, but it’s an unfortunate, numbing rhythm, the anapest. This is the duh-duh-DUM-duh-duh-DUM of limericks and “’Twas the night before Christ mas and all through the house. ” Lastly, prepositions are also often the perpetrators of the sorts of ambiguities and confusion described previously in the book.

My general rule is to allow one preposition per sentence, or two at the most. Any more than that and you have to cast an extremely cold eye.

The problem is, prepositions flow so naturally out of one’s fingers! As proof that they happen to the best of us, I give you a sentence — part of a review of a reality show called Sweet Home Alabama —by Ginia Bellafante, a TV critic for the New York Times and one of the top writers at the paper. (I’ve underlined the prepositions.)

[ Here Devin, a pretty, blond student in a cowboy hat at the University of Alabama, is made to select from 20 bachelors, 10 of them “country,” and the rest mostly from the Northeast or Los Angeles. ]

How to fix? Well, of the six prepositions, the real culprits are the first two, in and at; they, and the unfortunate prepositional phrases they initiate, trail behind Devin like a pair of tired, shambling dogs. The last three are innocuous, though the repetition of from isn’t ideal. I’m also struck that the sentence is pretty long. So…

Devin, a pretty, blond University of Alabama student who is almost always seen in a cowboy hat, is made to select from 20 bachelors. Half are “country,” and half come from Los Angeles or the Northeast.

Better, right? A description of how often she is shown in a cowboy hat (which I admittedly made up) is funnier, more precise, and more vivid than the vague in. The transplanted U of Alabama reference illustrates the way you can often strengthen a sentence by rejiggering a prepositional phrase and putting it before the noun. Thus The owner of the shop becomes The shop’s owner or The shop owner; a guy with a bald head becomes a bald guy.

As I said, English is not German, where complex and endless adjectives can be constructed, so sometimes you have to figure out exactly how a string of prepositions can be condensed.

[ I said hello to a friend with a T-shirt with a picture of Bart Simpson on the front. ]

I said hello to a friend in a Bart Simpson T-shirt.

8. to Use to Be or Not to Use to Be

a. Abstract Nouns

Preposition abuse is often linked to a couple of other weak sisters of language: the verbs to be (often in the form of the passive voice) or to have, the definite article (that is, the ), and abstract nouns, especially ones ending in — tion. The problem is especially vexing in my field, academia. But you also find it in government, business, and various other outposts of bureaucracy, where passing the buck and generally not saying what you mean is valued. In this (admittedly extreme) example, abstract nouns are in bold, to be verbs in [brackets], the s in italics , and prepositions underlined.

Going forward, the solutionto the dissatisfaction[will be] a reconsiderationof the initiativethat [was] offered by the administration.

(I threw in a current cliché, going forward , just for fun.)

So much mealymouthed dancing around the subject, so little meat. The point, such as it is, seems to be:

Students have made it clear that they hate the new policy, so the administration will change it.

Here’s a simple two-part way of sussing out if a to be verb is a problem.

1. If the back half of the sentence takes the form to be + pos-sessive/article/identifier + noun or to be + adjective , you’re probably okay. Using song titles again, that would give you:

We are the world.

The song is you.

You’re the top.

The lady is a tramp.

The gentleman is a dope.

I am the walrus.

You are so beautiful.

We are family.

2. However, if the sentence takes the form noun + to be + prepositional phrase or to be + noun + who/that/which + verb phrase, there’s a strong chance it could be beefed up, usually with a stronger and more specific verb. For example:

[ Obama is the beneficiary of the union’s donations. ]

The union gave money to Obama.

[ Rizzotti is the student who won this year’s citizenship award. ]

Rizzotti won this year’s citizenship award.

b. The Passive Can Be Used, but Not Always

Don’t use the passive voice is one of those rules — like change “the fact that” to “that” or don’t use fragments —that many writing books are a bit too quick to proclaim. The passive can be deployed quite effectively. The previous sentence is an example, I would submit — certainly of the passive voice, but also of not-at-all-bad writing. Not only is it perfectly okay as is, but if you switched to active, you would produce a dull monstrosity along the lines of: Many writers deploy the passive voice quite effectively. Who are these faceless writers? (Take a memo: we’re adding many to the list of words that should be avoided if possible.)

Putting the matter in general terms, the passive is fine if your emphasis is properly on the object of the verb, rather than the subject, or if a quality of the subject isn’t knowable. The passive President Kennedy was shot earlier today is better than the active An unknown gunman shot President Kennedy earlier today.

The passive is a problem if and only if it leaves in its wake an insistent question that begins with the word Who? The classic non-apology-apology was made famous, if not originated, by Ron Ziegler, President Nixon’s press secretary, in 1973, in reference to what he had previously said about the Washington Post ’s Watergate coverage: “We would all have to say that mistakes were made in terms of comments.” That quote went down in history because Ziegler tried to fudge the key point: who made the mistakes?

Scientific writing apparently demands the passive voice. However, in other forms, it should be used sparingly. In the passage below, it appears four times in three sentences.