Writing Tips and Advice
Introduction
We are all miraculously brilliant at speaking English: at writing, not so much brilliant. That’s because writing is very difficult. Speaking is easy and natural, and often seems to involve no thought at all. Writing is the opposite on all three counts. Writing is difficult. If it’s not difficult, you’re not doing it right.
Sorting out jumbled and entrangled thoughts, putting them in order, using exactly the right words, then making those words work well together – these are very demanding tasks and they won’t be dealt with at the first time of asking. Hence the secret to any good writing – rewriting.
Other suggestions and tips
- Make a plan
- Don’t do the introduction or first sentence first -- because they're usually the most important
- Make one point per paragraph
- Keep words and sentences as short as possible
- Use physical words rather than abstractions
- Keep the reader in mind
Re-read to check for sense and effect, and proof-read to spot errors, of fact, spelling, everything. Top tip – change the font, to counter staleness of eye.
(A fuller and more detailed explanation of these suggestions is given in the ebook, The Rules of English.)
Things to look out for:
Repeating words
Especially the key words of the subject. More on this in Repetition.
Sentences with no main verbs
Of course, they can exist, but verbless sentences have to be used for special effect. Like this. Normal sentences, like this one, must have main verbs.
Adverbs and adjectives
Use them only if they pass the one-question exam: are they necessary?
Connecting words
Bits of a sentence, sentences and paragraphs should be linked properly, often with a connecting word or phrase that makes it clear what the connection is. It’s always good to vary connecting words (like “however”, “nonetheless” and “nevertheless”) and to make sure they’re the right ones – is it a “furthermore” you need or an “on the other hand”?
Mealy-mouthed qualifiers
“Fairly”, “sort of”, “kind of”, “a bit”, “a little”, “somewhat” – have confidence in the word you’re going to use; don’t undermine it, even if this is being done to signal jocularity: “By closing-time, Alan and yours truly were somewhat inebriated” – ugh.
Jargon
This is often unavoidable in any specialist or academic writing. However if you do have to use jargon, to maintain your own clarity, I’d strongly recommend a constant translation, if only in your own head, into simple words.
Overloading sentences
It’s very easy for a sentence to suffer from TMI. Unpack into separate sentences.
Placing the subject
Usually, keep the subject at or near the start of a sentence. Also, as a rule, try to keep the subject close to its verb.Final reminder
No matter what you write – text, email, off-the-cuff tweet – you are legally, morally and in every other way responsible for it. Could you stand up in court and justify this? Is there some way this could come back to bite you? What if, for example, the person you’re slagging off gets hold of this? No matter how informally or casually, even ironically or sarcastically, what you write is your announcement in a public arena and open to public assessment. It might be a private bit of jokey banter to your dirty-minded pal, makes no difference – you have to take complete responsibility for anything you write. You must treat everything that leaves your screen as though it’s about to be quoted on the front page of the Daily Mail.
Repetition
I haven’t seen it identified in any of the other manuals but I have found that unskilled writing tends to suffer most from one particular feature: repetition. Especially of keywords and, even worse, clumps of them.
It was only a few years ago, when I started to teach writing skills, that it dawned on me that one of my main tasks has been to avoid using the same word twice in a sentence. This can apply to any word within a sentence, even an “a” or a “the”. Let’s take a perfectly harmless example – “She lives in Toronto in Canada” – unless those two “in”s are there to help make a point or as a deliberate rhetorical flourish, are they necessary? On reflection, no – which other Toronto would this be other than the Canadian one? As ever with repetition, the first solution is to delete – “She lives in Toronto”.
However, the biggest problem isn’t repetition of little, common words but of the most important – the word or phrase of the main topic. As exhibit A, here’s an email I have, by happy chance, just received from my accountant:
Dear Harry
Many thanks for your email and I confirm safe receipt of all the information regarding your tax return. My colleague Alex (also copied into this email) and I will be working on preparing your tax return so you may receive emails from either of us regarding your tax return. We will be in touch with you in due course regarding your tax return.
Best wishes
I already knew this email would be regarding my tax return, because I’d just sent my tax return to her and because the subject line said, “Tax Return”. But lest I was still not sure what she was writing to me about, she told me, four times in three sentences. Not counting the “Dear Harry” and the “Best wishes”, there are 63 words in that email; about 12% of them are “tax return” and nearly 20% are “regarding your tax return”.
Mindful of the first solution, how about keeping the first mention and deleting all the others?
Many thanks for your email. I confirm the safe receipt of all the information for your tax return. I have copied my colleague Alex into this email because we will both be preparing your accounts. One of us will be in touch with you in due course.
(I don't like those two "emails" but I've kept them in to be realistic rather than bow-tie-twirlingly aesthetic.)
Although avoiding repetition has been a major part of my working day for the best part of four decades, I first became consciously aware of it as a stylistic problem when I began a very enjoyable stint helping PhD students with their thesis-writing. These postgrads were from all disciplines and departments but whatever they were studying, they certainly told you what it was. Again and again and again and again. Here’s a made-up example from a non-existent thesis titled “An Evaluation of the Portuguese Ship-Building Industry, 1300-1399”:
The fourteenth-century Portuguese ship-building industry was vital to the expansion of the Portuguese empire. Three important factors helped the Portuguese ship-building industry in the fourteenth century: the Portuguese ship-building industry had access to high-quality timber; high-quality craftsmen were available to the Portuguese ship-building industry, and the Portuguese ship-building industry also had in addition the advantageous benefit of many harbours along Portugal’s long Atlantic coastline which helped the westward and southward expansion of the Portuguese empire.
That’s top-of-my-head nonsense: the giveaway is that there aren’t nearly enough abstractions for it to have been from a real thesis (and with a couple of semantic repetitions – “also” + “in addition”; “advantageous benefit” – thrown in just for fun.)
Here’s keyword repetition in real life, from a recently published book called Upheaval by Jared Diamond, one of America’s leading intellectuals and the author of one of the truly great books of our time, Guns, Germs and Steel. A truly great book and a well-written one, but 22 years later in Upheaval, Diamond’s style had become stiff and dry, his lustreless sentences plodding step by dutiful step, taking care to specify what they are talking about at all times. This is a typical paragraph, from page 95, which helpfully has the main subject in capital letters at the top – “Finland’s War With The Soviet Union”:
When the Soviet Union issued its demands to Finland in October 1939, Finland did not respond by offering the economic and political involvement that it eventually adopted. Even if Finland had made such an offer then, Stalin would probably have refused the offer; it required Finland’s ferocious resistance in the Winter War to convince Stalin to leave Finland independent.
The word “Finland” appears a total of 15 times on page 95, where the phrase “Finland’s national identity” appears three times within nine lines. Various other terms are repeated as well, including “independence”, which in one sentence turns up three times. Something approaching this level of repetition is very common in any kind of cautiously written document. It comes from a very commendable desire – to specify the subject, to make sure precisely what is being dealt with and not something else, such as the Spanish ship-building industry or the Portuguese one in the fifteenth century. However, that constant, conscientious specification comes at a great cost – prose that’s dull and slow, clogged-up and sparkle-free, prose that forces the reader to trudge grimly through one cautious, dutiful sentence after another.
There are three main solutions to the problem of repetition.
- Delete. It’s surprising how often a sentence survives when a problematic word, in this case a repeated keyword, is simply taken out – more than that, how often and how much a sentence thrives with pruning.
- Refer to the subject by pronouns or determiners – ie, with a word like “it” or “those” or “this”. The one and hugely important condition is that the “it” or “they” or “that” has to refer to the most recent noun or noun phrase – so in my made-up example, “it” could be used only after the colon in the second sentence (“it had access to …”) otherwise “it” would refer to the Portuguese empire rather than the ship-building industry.
- Rejig the sentence. For example – “The fourteenth-century Portuguese ship-building industry had three important advantages: high-quality timber, very skilled craftsmen and many harbours on a long Atlantic-facing coastline.” Note the mahoosively reduced word-count.
Tips for emailing
Which word to start with – since texting and the like took over most of the personal and informal stuff, email has come to be used mainly for more formal communications, which have become much less formal as a result. It’s now common practice to start with a “Dear” on the first email to someone you don’t know and a “Hi” by the second. This is unlike some other languages which have retained a greater formality, especially in work emails – in Italian, for example, some of the formulas deserve a quill pen.
Although English’s emails are usually unadorned with fancy frills, it’s very easy to overdo the informality. If you are uncertain about which convention to use and what tone to adopt, then err on the side of caution, and take your cues from the emailee.
Tone
A straightforward, no-edge, no-side tone is much the safest. There’s always the danger that sarcasm or irony or any other approach where you say the opposite of what you mean will be read as genuine. Similarly, take care with informalities like exclamation marks, emojis and new abbreviations – use them only when you’re sure that your reader(s) will appreciate them in the spirit you want. (Readership’s date(s) of birth is one obvious factor to bear in mind.)
Negative content
Don’t write while outraged or enraged. It might feel good to get things off your chest and go on the offensive, in both senses, but insults and condemnation tend not to be very effective, in fact tend to be the opposite of effective. With any important message but particularly any sort of negative one, it’s always a good idea, before pressing Send, to step away from the screen, have a walk around the block or a restorative biscuit, then return for a final assessment to make sure this message will not be one you might regret.
Text
Keep emails as short as possible, and use short paragraphs, sentences and words. Frame it with short formulas for the start and the end – “I hope you are well” / “I look forward to hearing from you” – even if you’ve got something specific to use (“Hope you and Griselda had a great weekend at the naturist colony” / “See you downstairs for Adrian in Accounts’s birthday cake”).
To / CC / BCC
Use the “To” slot for the person or people you are addressing directly; “CC” for people who are being copied in on this email with their addresses listed; “BCC” for people who are being sent this email but whose address can’t be seen by anyone else and who can’t see who else is listed. It’s a good idea to mention, either at the beginning or the end, that there are people being CC’d, and maybe explain why. As my poor, abused accountant did.
Subject
The title of the email should be short, to the point, usually specific rather than general (ie, not “Financial enquiry” but “Tax return 21-22”).
Reply / Reply all
Use “Reply all” only when you really do want to reply to all of those all. Also, when you are quite sure that all of those people need or want to receive it.
Attachments
Use these for longer documents – emails are best kept short.
Check
Before you hit Send, check everything – proof-read the contents of the email but then make sure you’ve got everything right above the content line as well. In both senses, above all, check that the email is really going to the person or persons you want it to go to. It’s a new communications pitfall – the unfortunately mis-sent message: eg, writing, “Alan’s new haircut looks awful!” and sending it to Alan by mistake. Consequences range from the mildly hurtful to the outright cataclysmic.