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

Why a book on how to not write bad (or badly, if you insist)?

I’m glad you asked. Simply put, this is a crucial and seriously underrepresented county in the Alaska-size state of books about writing. From the all-time champ, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style , through more touchy-feely works like Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird , texts on this subject virtually all have the same goal. Sometimes it’s implicit, and sometimes it’s right there in the title, as in William Zinsser’s classic guide, On Writing Well.

That emphasis is fine, but it has its limitations. In a way, it reminds me of the “vanity sizing” favored by the apparel industry — the custom of labeling thirty-four-inch-waist pants as thirty-two so as to make customers feel good about themselves (and buy that company’s pant, needless to say). I have spent the last twenty years teaching advanced journalism and writing classes in a selective university, and the majority of my (bright) students put me in mind of what Jack Nicholson famously shouted to Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men. The Cruise character couldn’t handle the truth, Nicholson said. Well, most students, I’ve found, can’t handle writing “well.” At this point in their writing lives, that goal is simply too ambitious.

It’s not just my students, either. My colleagues at various institutions say they encounter the same problems I do. And I’ve run into these issues when I’ve taught workshops all over the country and, of course, in that new and universal forum for written expression of every conceivable kind, the Internet.

You can certainly understand why people would want to aim high, especially in the United States, where self-esteem is fed to toddlers along with their Cheerios, and all the children are apparently above average. But you have to crawl before you walk, and walk before you run. And you have to be able to put together a clear and at least borderline graceful sentence, and to link that sentence with another one, before you can expect to make like David Foster Wallace.

In the 1950s, the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott coined the term good-enough mother (now more commonly and equitably expressed as good-enough parent ). It’s proved to be an enduring and very useful concept, referring to mothers and fathers who don’t have superpowers, who can’t solve every problem and address every need of their children, who make mistakes, but who provide a level of attention, concern, and care that may seem merely adequate but that turns out to do the job quite well. What I’m talking about here is good-enough writing. As with parenting, it isn’t necessarily easy to achieve, but it’s definitely achiev able . And it’s a decidedly worthwhile goal.

* * *

Words are the building blocks of sentences, and sentences are the building blocks of any piece of writing; consequently, I focus on these basics. As far as I’m concerned, not-writing-badly consists of the ability, first, to craft sentences that are correct in terms of spelling, diction (that is, word choice), punctuation, and grammar, and that display clarity, precision, and grace. Once that’s mastered, there are a few more areas that have to be addressed in crafting a whole paragraph: cadence, consistency of tone, word repetition, transitions between sentences, paragraph length. And that’s all there is to it! (I know, I know, that’s plenty.)

I’ve mentioned my students but this book isn’t just for classroom use. It’s for everyone who wants to improve his or her prose. Let me be more precise. The best way to measure or think about the badness of a sentence, or an entire piece of writing, is to imagine the effect it has on someone who reads it. This could be a teacher or professor; an editor who’s deciding whether to publish it in a magazine; a hypothetical person out in cyberspace who has just come upon a new blog post; or a coworker confronted with an interoffice memo. In all cases, bad writing will induce boredom, annoyance, incomprehension, and/or daydreaming. The less bad it is, the more that real or imaginary soul will experience the text as clear, readable, persuasive, and, in the best case, pleasing. And the more that reader will keep on reading.

The book is also for high school and college teachers. Not only are they weary of writing “awkward,” “comma splice,” “faulty parallelism,” “dangling modifier,” and such over and over again on student work, they have good reason to fear that stating and restating these epithets is as hurtful as name-calling and just about as effective in changing someone’s ways. Directing students to the appropriate entry in the book, by contrast, may actually help them learn what they’re doing wrong and how to address the issue.

In the last couple of paragraphs, I talked about things like clarity, precision , and grace , about a text being clear, readable, persuasive , and pleasing. You will rarely hear such words from me again, at least in this book. It operates on the counterintuitive premise that the best road to those goals is by way of avoiding their opposites. Telling someone how to write well is like gripping a handful of sand; indeed, the sheer difficulty of the task may be why there are so many books on the subject. An analogy is with a nation’s or state’s laws. They don’t say, Be considerate to others or Give money to charity or even a Jerry Lewis statute like Be a nice lady! Instead, they are along the lines of Do not lie on your income tax return or Do not shoot or stab individuals. The thinking is that if bad behavior is proscribed, good behavior will emerge. (Western religions are a little more willing to tell you what to do, but not that much so. The only positive two of the Ten Commandments are number four, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” and five, “Honor your father and your mother.”)

Consequently, this book is mainly about the things that writing badly entails. For example, I don’t tell you, Be sure to choose the right word. It’s not that I disagree with that — how could I? It’s rightfully a staple of how-to-write-well books, often accompanied by a spot-on Mark Twain quote: “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” Good stuff and good advice, but how the heck are you supposed to carry it out? Here, in a nutshell, is my “accentuate the negative” approach to word choice:

Don’t use a long word when there’s a shorter one that means the same thing.

Avoid word repetition. Do not avoid it by means of “elegant variation”—the use of a synonym for the express purpose of avoiding word repetition. (If the original sentence is, “The boy I’m babysitting tomorrow is usually a well-behaved boy,” the elegant varyer would change the last word to “lad.”) Rather, use pronouns and/or recast the whole sentence — in the example above, “The boy I’m babysitting tomorrow is usually well behaved.”

If you are considering a word about whose spelling or meaning you have even a scintilla of doubt, look it up.

And you’re on your way.

You are holding a slim volume in your hands. (If you’re holding an electronic device in your hands, you’ll have to trust me on this one.) That’s because the body of common current writing problems isn’t very big. On the basis of some back-of-the-envelope ciphering, I conclude that I’ve read and graded something like 10,000 pieces of written work over the last two decades — articles, reviews, memos, research papers, essays, memoirs, and more, from a fairly diverse (in skill, intelligence, training, interests, and background) group of students. Maybe 95 percent of the corrections and comments I make on their work have to do with about fifty errors and problems. Those are the entries in How to Not Write Bad. If you master them, you might not be David Foster Wallace, but you’ll be ahead of almost all your fellow writers.