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Authors: Gary Provost

100 Ways to Improve Your Writing (Mentor Series) (15 page)

BOOK: 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing (Mentor Series)
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Titles of articles in magazines, poems, songs, paintings, and sermons are set off in quotation marks:
 
 
The words
Yes
and
No
are put in quotation marks only when they are directly quoted:
 
CHAPTER TEN
 
Twelve Ways to Avoid Making Your Reader Hate You
 
1. Avoid Jargon
2. Avoid Clichés
3. Avoid Parentheses
4. Avoid Footnotes
5. Don’t Use Transitions to Conceal Information
6. Don’t Acknowledge When You Should Explain
7. Don’t Hide Behind Your Words
8. Don’t Intrude
9. Don’t Play Word Games.
10. Don’t Play the Tom Wolfe Game
11. Don’t Play the Mystery Game
12. Don’t Cheat
1. Avoid Jargon
 
Jargon is nonsensical language, unintelligible words, or phrases that somehow get a foothold in the language and are repeated so often that we forget they don’t mean anything. Shallow phrases such as
in terms of, in point of
fact, and
interface situation,
are jargon.
 
We’re all guilty. I use jargon. You use jargon. From time to time every person utters something that is without meaning or doesn’t mean what he or she wants it to mean. In spoken language this is forgivable; after all, when we speak, we’re all working in the first draft. But writers should certainly be able to keep jargon under control.
 
Because I can’t possibly cover thoroughly the subject of jargon here, I recommend two books:
Strictly Speaking
by Edwin Newman (Bobbs-Merrill), and
On Language
by William Safire (Times Books).
 
Here’s a tip: If you can make a man sound like an idiot simply by quoting him, he’s probably using jargon.
 
2. Avoid Clichés
 
Clichés are a dime a dozen. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. They’ve been used once too often. They’ve outlived their usefulness. Their familiarity breeds contempt. They make the writer look as dumb as a doornail, and they cause the reader to sleep like a log. So be sly as a fox. Avoid clichés like the plague. If you start to use one, drop it like a hot potato. Instead, be smart as a whip. Write something that is fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack. Better safe than sorry.
 
3. Avoid Parentheses
 
Parentheses are used to enclose material that would otherwise be an annoying interruption. If you are using parentheses more than three times in a ten-page story, you are either interrupting the reader too much, or you are using parentheses unnecessarily. The writer usually turns to parentheses out of laziness, not out of need, and there is usually an unobtrusive way to include the information without parentheses.
 
Mark Twain wrote, “A parenthesis is evidence that the man who uses it does not know how to write English or is too indolent to take the trouble to do it; ... a man who will wantonly use a parenthesis will steal. For these reasons I am unfriendly to the parenthesis. When a man puts one into my mouth, his life is no longer safe.”
 
Twain, as you can see, didn’t much care for the parenthesis.
 
I wouldn’t say you should never use parentheses, but I think you should use them rarely.
 
4. Avoid Footnotes
 
Footnotes are a requirement for research papers and are sometimes necessary for other kinds of writing. They are used to acknowledge sources, and sometimes they provide the reader with supplementary material that is valuable to the reader but not compatible with the overall tone of the story.
 
Use them if you must for those purposes. But please don’t use footnotes as a junkyard for all the words you cut from the text but couldn’t bear to part with. Footnotes are distracting, ugly, and they frequently work against you because the reader can’t remember what he knows from the text and what he knows from the footnotes.
 
The last word on this matter belongs to John Barrymore. He said, “A footnote in a book is like a knock on the door downstairs while you are on your honeymoon.”
 
5. Don’t Use Transitions to Conceal Information
 
As a writer, you have entered a covenant with the reader. The whole writing reading process depends on the writer and reader having faith that the other will not violate the terms of the covenant. If the covenant were written out, it would contain a clause concerning transitions that would look like this:
 
 
Reader agrees that a transition such as “Sam drove to the church” can encompass all the routine acts of starting a car, taking left turns, etc.
 
In turn Writer agrees not to use such transitions to deprive reader of information which belongs to Reader.
 
 
 
In other words, you shouldn’t use the transition “Sam drove to the church” if later in your story you are going to mention that Sam had a horrible accident and killed a carload of lawyers while driving to the church.
 
Don’t cheat readers on the grounds that you wish to surprise them later in the story. Readers know the difference between being cheated and being surprised.
 
6. Don’t Acknowledge When You Should Explain
 
Many writers try to force transitions to do work that should have been done by the writer elsewhere in the story or article.
 
In the 1930’s, adventure serials with cliff-hanger endings were popular in the London monthlies. At the end of one installment, the writer had his hero, Ben, trapped at the bottom of a dark and slippery twenty-foot pit with no tools, no ladder, and nobody around to hear his cries. For a month people all over London discussed Ben’s plight. How would good old Ben get out of this mess? Unfortunately, the writer of the serial was wondering the same thing, and by the time his deadline arrived he had not come up with a clever solution. So he began his episode with, “After Ben got out of the pit, he proceeded to walk toward the city,” a transition which put his readers into a lynching mood and did serious damage to the writer’s career.
 
“After Ben got out of the pit” would be a perfectly decent transition if climbing out of a twenty-foot pit were as routine an activity as driving to a church. The reader will accept your acknowledgment of changes in time or place only if those changes could have been accomplished in normal, routine ways, or in unusual ways that you have made believable earlier in your story. If you tell us on page 1 that Superman can fly, we will have no trouble later on accepting the transition “On Tuesday Superman flew to Clinton, Massachusetts.”
 
When you find yourself having difficulty moving from one section of an article to the next, the problem might be due to the fact that you are leaving out information. Rather than trying to force an awkward transition, take another look at what you have written and ask yourself what you need to explain in order to move on to your next section.
 
7. Don’t Hide Behind Your Words
 
You should be willing to put yourself into what you write. That doesn’t mean you should write everything in the first person, or that you should meticulously insert your feelings and observations into every memo. What it does mean is you should not be afraid to climb onto the page when your presence will strengthen what you have written.
 
Let’s say there’s a disastrous hotel fire in Providence, Rhode Island, and you were staying in the hotel at the time. It would be unthinkable to leave yourself out of the story. You, after all, are an eyewitness. You felt the heat, you saw the people leap from windows, you heard the lower floors cave in beneath you. Your experience, your feelings at the time, can bring the reader right into an article like nothing else:
 
 
BOOK: 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing (Mentor Series)
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