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

style of a Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, or John Updike, or the irony of a Joan Didion or Sarah Vowell—reads aloud well. The worst of academic, bureaucratic, or legal prose doesn’t; you have to take multiple breaths before you get to the end of a sentence, and the dull or vague or merely stiff wording just hits you over the head. It brings to mind what Harrison Ford supposedly said to George Lucas (always more of a visual than a word guy) on the set of
Star Wars:
“You can write this shit, George, but you sure can’t say it.”
    A word you see a lot nowadays is
mindfulness.
I confess I don’t know exactly what it means; something having to do with meditation and/or yoga, I believe. But the concept can definitely, and profitably, be adapted to writing. The opposite of mindful writing is careless, unexamined, unattended-to prose: what Truman Capotemay have had in mind when he said (referring to Beat Generation authors), “That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.” Mindless writing is a data dump and one sees it far too often nowadays.
    I hope I don’t sound like the “Get off my lawn!” guy too often in this book, but I’ll briefly embrace this persona for a rant about multitasking, that is, the predilection of youth (broadly defined) to do several things at once, most or all of them electronic. Much attention, research, and verbiage has been devoted to this subject, and I freely confess that I haven’t studied the accumulated wisdom and thus am not an expert. However. I am convinced that multitasking—either the act itself or a multitasking state of mind—promotes the mindless writing I am confronted with every day. Without a doubt, if you have several things going on at once, you are perfectly capable of expressing an idea along the lines of
Dude, where should we eat?
or
OMG, did you see what she’s wearing?
But anything more complicated than that—and anything you would want to write for a broader public is more complicated than that—well, it just can’t be done.
    In other words, I would bet a lot of money that the student who wrote the following sentence had several other things going on:
    Not only do journalists possess an undying passion to uncover and showcase relevant information to enhance the public’s knowledge on current events, but exhibit a willingness to go to great lengths to obtain stories fit to print.
    It has all the telltale signs of mindless writing: wordiness, clichés, and catchphrases poorly used; subjects and verbs that don’t line up; incorrect use of words; faulty parallelism. It might not be a bad idea to copy it down and put it up on your bulletin board as an example of what not to do. And make no mistake: merely listeningto music while trying to write constitutes multitasking, not to mention texting, watching TV, scanning a computer, and so forth. Any of these things takes the necessary attention away from the task at hand. So if you don’t want to write badly, don’t do them.
    A big part of mindful writing is an awareness of and attentiveness to the (hypothetical or actual) person who will eventually be reading your words. Ideally, you look him or her in the eye, as it were. You note a spark of interest or a puzzled look or the glazed expression that indicates incipient boredom, and respond accordingly. Few of us are lucky enough to have a real live person ready and willing to hear our stuff. But that’s okay. Cooking a stew, you don’t need an outside opinion; you just take a taste now and again. It’s the same with writing. Reading aloud—literally or figuratively—will help you take one step away from your work and single-handedly become what Robert Graves called “the reader over your shoulder.”
    So read.

PART II
    How to Not Write Wrong
    Note: In Parts II and III, examples of what
not
to do will be crossed out or [set in brackets].
    A. The Elements of House Style
    Which is correct,
6 PM, 6 P.M.,
or
6 p.m.
?
    The answer is, all of them!—and I apologize for