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

changed years ago from
neighbour
and
colour
to the
u
-less versions.) More troubling are very common mistakes like confusing
your
and
you’re, its
and
it’s
, and
there
and
their.
And worst of all are the howlers that result when spell-check’s suggestions are blindly taken. As I described in more detail in entry II.I.C.2., I have had students refer to wearing a
sequence-covered dress
, to
the Super Attendant of Schools
, to a
heroine attic
, and to an athlete who had to miss several weeks of the season because of
phenomena
, which baffled me till I realized it was supposed to be
pneumonia.
    Then there’s punctuation, which once again, you learn far more thoroughly by reading widely than by studying. Not having read widely, most young writers today don’t have a clue. Or, rather, they haven’t mastered the rules, so are guided by intuition and/or sound, which are sometimes helpful but more often aren’t. The intuition leads to the currently hugely popular “logical punctuation”, which I have just used—it consists of putting periods and commas outside quotation marks, when the situation seems to call for it. This style has long been standard practice in the United Kingdom and various outposts of the British Empire, but not the United States. However, in the last five years or so, it’s become inescapable on the Web—and in my classroom, despite repeated sardonic remarks from me that we are in Delaware, not Liverpool. On the logic that while this might be logical, and might become established sometime in the future, it is wrong now, I’ve begun to announce and enforce a one-point penalty on every assignment for infractions. Ineach class, a couple of (bright) students found this so irresistible that they kept on doing it till the end of the term. Go figure.
    As for sound, students tend to insert commas at places where they would pause in speaking the sentence. This has about the same reliability as the rhythm method for birth control. In particular, it has led to the current vogue for commas after sentence-opening conjunctions. It works the other way as well. The majority of my students would write
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is his hometown
—leaving out the (required) comma after
Pennsylvania
because they
wouldn’t
pause at that point in the sentence.
    The benefits of reading extend far beyond protocol and rules. When you have read all kinds of (preferably good) prose by writers with diverse styles and approaches, your inner ear gets exposed to an amazing range of ways to perpetrate a sentence. They subtly but surely become part of your own repertoire. Trying to be a not-bad writer without having read your share of others’ work is like trying to come up with a new theory in physics without having paid attention to the scientists that came before you, or writing a symphony without having listened to a lot of music. It’s possible, I guess, but extremely difficult.
    I quoted Faulkner earlier; now let me invoke some advice from his chief rival in twentieth-century American literature, Ernest Hemingway. In the book
Death in the Afternoon
, Hemingway counseled, “Write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.” That has a nice ring to it, certainly more so than the clichéd motto of creative writing classes, “Write about what you know.” But they both make the same basic point and they are both absolutely true. If Joe is a mediocrewriter who knows his subject to the very depths of his soul (let’s say his expertise is the qualities of a good video game), and Jane is an accomplished writer who’s to a certain extent at sea (she’s writing about the validity of the idea of global warming), Joe’s essay is going to be stronger and better every time. Jane’s will hem and haw and qualify and fudge, use passive voice and abstract nouns; it will circle around the subject to try to cover up all the gaps in her knowledge, and in so doing will just make the reader