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

tired.
    I imagine the write-what-you-know bromide is mocked because it implies, or seems to imply, that you’re required to write about what you’ve
already
learned or experienced at the time you sit down at the keyboard: your childhood, your daydreams, your dog-walking routine, the layout of your bedroom, and so forth. But that isn’t the case at all. Whatever your topic—and this is true of fiction as well as nonfiction—your writing will improve in direct proportion to the amount you read, research, investigate, and learn about it. I guarantee it.
    There’s a whole other aspect to the one-word solution for not writing bad. This one offers quite a contrast to the massive amount of time reading demands. Indeed, it’s a pretty quick fix. The most effective
short-term
way to improve your writing is to read it aloud, sentence by sentence and word by word. There was a spoken language before there was a written language, and good writing has always been intimately connected to the ear, whether the short sentences of Hemingway or the near-endless periods of Samuel Johnson and David Foster Wallace.
    Gustave Flaubert, renowned as one of the great all-time stylists, used what he called
la gueulade:
that is, “the shouting test.” He would go out to an avenue of lime trees near his house and, yes, shout what he had written. It’s the same principle as scrutinizing a photograph by blowing up its image on the computer screen; you really can identify the flaws.
    Reading aloud isn’t a panacea, even if you shout like Flaubert. At first, you may not catch the rum rhythms, the word repetition, the wordiness, the sentences that peter out with a whimper, not a bang. You need to develop your ear, just as a musician does. But eventually you’ll start to really hear your sentences, and at some point you’ll be able to shut up and listen with your
mind’s
ear.
    It’ll give you good counsel, too. One of the favorite go-to rules of writing textbooks and teachers is to cut out the word
that
in sentences like
He told me that I needed to drop one class.
Improves the sentence, to be sure. But sometimes this is bad advice, for example, here:
Jack believed that Jill was a liar.
If you remove the
that
, you have
Jack believed Jill was a liar
, which a reader will find momentarily not only ambiguous but downright contradictory. That is, was Jack doubting Jill’s truthfulness or accepting what she was saying? Even momentary reader confusion is bad, so
that
should stay. It’s possible to come up with a rule for those situations, but the rule would be so complicated as to be nearly useless. (
Use the word
that
after a verb of expression or thought if the verb, in another connotation, can take a direct object.
) Much better to read it, hear it, and act accordingly.
    Another example is word repetition, as in a sentence like
The last person to leave the room should examine the room for any possessions that were left behind.
If you’ve made your ear into a fine instrument,it will hear that second
room
as making a sound akin to fingernails on a chalkboard.
    I talk a lot about “not-bad” writing. Another term for this is
the middle style
; sometimes it’s claimed to be “transparent” prose. That’s because it’s clear, precise, and concise and doesn’t call attention to itself, for good or ill. William Hazlitt gave it some other names, and a good characterization, back in 1821: “To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity.” If you’ve ever seen a transcript of actual conversation, you know that you don’t want to write
exactly
like that; too many false starts, too many
um
s,
ya know
s, and
like
s. Yet as Hazlitt recognized, not-bad writing is conversational to the core and reciting your work will help you master it.
    Even
good
writing—such as the highly literary