How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem (2 page)

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:

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.

The nature of the fabulous fifty may be a little surprising; a lot of them don’t get much press. Even when they do try to address common writing errors, most writing guides and handbooks are off the mark, it seems to me. Often, they display a weird time lag. I remember being puzzled in junior high school to read in my grammar book that it’s incorrect to write of someone “setting” in a chair, rather than “sitting.” No one I knew in New Rochelle, New York, ever talked of “setting” in a chair. Only later, after becoming familiar with
The Beverly Hillbillies
and Ma and Pa Kettle films, did I realize that the reference was to a widespread rural locution of the forties and fifties.

Fast-forward to the second decade of the twenty-first century. The most (deservedly) popular writing guide is
The Elements of Style
, based on a pamphlet Will Strunk distributed to his Cornell students circa 1918. E. B. White updated it in 1959, and subsequent editions have made minimal changes. Rule 6 of
Part I
(“Elementary Rules of Usage”) is “Do not break sentences in two,” and the example given is, “I met them on a Cunard liner many years ago. Coming home from Liverpool to New York.” The trouble is not merely that almost everyone born after 1950 will be mystified by the phrase
Cunard liner
; it is also that twenty-first-century American citizens almost never are guilty of this particular kind of sentence fragment. Don’t ask me why. They just aren’t. Another Strunk and White example of what not to do is this sentence: “Your dedicated whittler requires: a knife, a piece of wood, and a back
porch.” Again, leave aside the sketchy cultural reference to dedicated whittlers. The problem here is that standards have changed such that a colon after anything but a complete sentence—the problem, to S. & W.—is now kosher. You might disagree with me on this, but you have to grant that to the extent it is a problem, it’s one that comes up extremely rarely. (The
your + noun
formulation—“Your dedicated whistler”—has pretty much gone by the boards as well.)

Then there are the more comprehensive writing books, such as
The Bedford Handbook
, which I have right in front of me and which qualifies for the final word in its title only if you have a really big hand. That is, it’s long—818 pages, plus index. It aims, as the second sentence in it says, to “answer most of the questions you are likely to ask as you plan, draft, and revise a piece of writing.” I’ll say. Pretty much everything is in here: common mistakes, uncommon mistakes, and lots of things that all people who grew up speaking English (and lots of nonnative speakers as well) know without giving them a second thought. Plus, it goes for $56.59 on amazon.com.

How to Not Write Bad
has three parts.
Part I
gives and expands on a one-word answer to the challenge posed by the title, and goes on to talk more generally about what it means to be a not-bad writer.
Parts II
and
III
explain the most common writing problems and give examples I’ve taken from actual student assignments.
Part III
(to jump ahead for a second) deals with writing choices that aren’t strictly speaking wrong but are, well, ill-advised: awkwardness, wordiness, unfortunate word choice, bad rhythm, clichés, dullness, and the other most frequently committed crimes against good prose.

The mistakes in
Part II
are, literally,
mistakes
: of punctuation,
spelling, wording, and grammar. There’s a lot of talk afoot about “grammatical errors,” so you might be surprised to find that grammar is the least of the problem, as I see it. Misspelled or just-plain-wrong words and train-wreck punctuation have gotten more prevalent over the years, for reasons I’ll get into later. And spelling and punctuation (more so than grammar) follow hard-and-fast rules, so there really is a clear sense of right and wrong.

As for grammar or syntax, linguists are fond of saying that a native speaker is incapable of making a grammatical mistake. Linguists are also fond of exaggerating, but they have a point, up to a point. No one born and raised in this country would say or write,
He gave I the book
, and to the extent that a book like
The Bedford Handbook
explains why the third word in that sentence should be
me,
it is wasting paper and ink and its readers’ time. In my experience, students are generally aware of and comfortable with grammatical standards. They tend to go off course in a relatively small number of areas (all of which are attended to in
Part II
). That would include: use of subjunctive (
If I was/were king
), pronoun choice (
He gave the books to John and I; Who/whom did you speak to?
), dangling modifiers (
Before coming to class today, my car broke down
), subject-verb agreement (
A group of seniors were/was chosen to receive awards
), and parallelism (
We ate sandwiches, coleslaw, and watched the concert
).
^*

Beyond these and a couple of others, most recurring grammar issues are fine points. That is, they are easily corrected or looked up and don’t have much bearing on writing or not writing badly.
What’s more, accepted practice will probably change fairly soon so as to condone what the student has done. (Now, if you are
not
a native speaker or if you are don’t have some of the important rudiments of grammar, spelling, and so forth, you need something more basic than this book.
The Bedford Handbook
or a similar reference work would be a good place to start.)

On that idea of “accepted practice” changing, I recognize—as how could anyone not?—that standards evolve over time. There was a time when it was verboten to end a sentence with a preposition, start one with a conjunction, write
an e-mail
instead of
an e-mail message
, use
hopefully
to mean
I hope that,
and so on. Now all those things are okay. Going back even further, it used to be that the first-person future tense of
to go
was thought to be
I shall go.
If you said that today, you would get some seriously strange looks.
Awful
used to refer to the quality of filling one with, you guessed it, awe; now it means really bad.

But it takes time to change a standard. The mere fact that a substantial number of people do something doesn’t make it right. Take the title of this book. It splits an infinitive, which used to be wrong but isn’t anymore. It also says (for comic effect)
Bad
instead of
Badly.
That used to be wrong and still is. Same with something that an unaccountably large number of my students have taken to doing over the past few years; using a semicolon when they should use a colon, the way I just did. Still wrong. So is another strange and new predilection, spelling the past tense of the verb
to lead
as
lead.
I would guess it’s so popular because (A) spell-check says it’s okay and (B) people are misled by the spelling of two words that rhyme with
led
: the metal
lead
and the past-tense
read
. In any case, that semicolon use and that spelling may one day attain
the acceptance of a split infinitive, but they haven’t yet. (Less than two hours after I wrote those words, I read a
New York Times
article with the words “what most troubled her was how he had
mislead
the public.” The change may come sooner than I think!)

Generally speaking, it’s fairly easy to figure out current standards. But a few things are trickier because they are right on the cusp of change. I make judgment calls on these. Probably the best current example is the use of
they
or
their
as a singular pronoun—in sentences like
Anyone who wants to go to the concert should bring their money tomorrow
or
I like Taco Bell because they serve enchiladas that are oozing with cheese.
The usage is almost completely prevalent in spoken English, in British written English (interestingly enough), in online publications, and, it almost goes without saying, in blogs and e-mails. I predict it will be accepted in American publishing within ten years. But it isn’t yet, and so for my purposes it counts as bad writing.

I mentioned that I mainly take my corpus of writing problems from student papers. Almost all the same things can be seen in the writing world at large. Not so much in books and newspaper and magazine articles, but rather in e-mails, blog posts, comments, and other online documents. These texts are not selected or processed by an editor (and are for the most part not the work of professionals) and thus display in a clear light the way we write now.

Taken collectively, this collection of problems and errors is kind of strange. I think of it as a giant blob of writing woe, slowly shifting as the years pass. To be sure, there have been some constants over the past two decades. When I started teaching, I wasn’t
even familiar with the term
comma splice
. But then I was quickly confronted with innumerable variations of sentences like:

A colleague taught me what this was called. Knowing the name was somehow comforting; at least it gave me something to scrawl on papers. I have scrawled it many times: comma splices, like the Dude in
The Big Lebowski
, abide. There are variations over time, however, and one recent favorite is what I call the HCS (for “however comma splice”):

The person was using
however
as a conjunction, more or less synonymous with
but
. For all I know, this will one day be acceptable, but it isn’t now—and so it is entry II.B.4.d. in
How to Not Write Bad.

I started seeing the HCS and a lot of other new bad-writing phenomena ten or twelve years ago. Surprise! That was about the time that online writing started to take off: going beyond e-mail to texts, blog posts, Facebook status updates, tweets, product comments, etc. In a lot of ways, this textual revolution is quite cool; for one thing, it’s picked up many people by the napes of their necks and deposited them into the universe of writers. Certainly, it represents a huge positive change from the time not that long ago, when, other than a postcard here and there and the occasional
thank-you note, most people didn’t write much of anything at all. (Reports of letter writing in the pre-Internet era are greatly exaggerated.)