| This is a work in progress: lots of writing, formatting, revising, proofing left to do! — David McMurrey |
If your writing resembles what you see to the left, you desperately need this book. If the writing of your co-workers or students resembles it, then they need this book. If you want to overcome writing like this or if you struggle simply to understand this style of writing, then you need this book. This book is designed for people who do a lot of writing on the job but who are not professional writers. To use this book and benefit from it, you don't have to remember the grammar terminology you learned way back in grade school. You need to practice identifying the kinds of writing problems presented in this book and practice fixing those problems. Roll up your sleeves!
People often assume that the path to good writing involves studying grammar. That may be true for kids in the early grades (poor little devils), but not necessarily for people who do a lot of writing on the job but who are not professional writers. Most contemporary scholars of rhetoric and composition do not believe that teaching grammar and usage rules is the most effective way to help on-the-job writers improve.
Real grammar. Just what is grammar? Grammar in its strictest sense is the essential rules that we use to create meaningful statements. For example, the following statement breaks lots of grammar rules:
Her gave book the John to.
English grammar requires a certain word order; the preceding wildly violates that requirement. Except in some cases, subjects must precede verbs; verbs must precede indirect objects; indirect objects must precede direct objects; prepositions must precede their objects; and articles must precede their nouns. In this respect, grammar is like the basic laws of physics—like gravity, or like Newton's Laws of Motion. By the time they enter their early teens, few people need to study grammar at this level.
Usage-oriented grammar. Another sense in which grammar is understood involves what is better referred to as usage. Usage is more a matter of social conventions and traditions. Usage "rules" are more like dress codes or table manners. Violating them causes distractions, embarrassments, unintended humor—like walking around in public with your zipper down, strolling out of the restroom trailing toilet paper, or belching at the dinner table. True, violating some usage rules causes serious comprehension problems, but more often people wonder about the violator's education or upbringing. (See the table below for examples of usage errors.)
However, studying grammar, usage, and punctuation rules may, in fact, lead to better writing—but through the back door. When you learn these rules, you also learn about the language, its components, and how they work together. In other words, you learn about the tools you can use to communicate with.
For example, you might learn that a noun clause or gerund phrase acting as a subject, even though it may be loaded with plural nouns, still takes a singular verb. But in passing, you have also learned what a noun clause or a gerund phrase is, and you just might start using those things in your writing more effectively.
Similarly, you might learn that an appositive with an embedded dependent clause is not a complete sentence; instead, it's a fragment. However, you have also become aware of appositives and complex ones at that, which just may find their way into your writing.
Studying grammar and usage rules indirectly makes you more aware of the structure of the sentence, more aware of the tools available in the language. You no longer see sentences as one damn word after another but strings of clauses and phrases that are in grammatical relationships to each other.
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Traditional Grammar–Usage Problems
Do errors (highlighted) in any of the following prevent comprehension—the ability to understand the message?
Subject-verb agreement error
The intended audience for these instructions are beginning mosaic artists.
Pronoun-reference agreement error
The beginner is encouraged to start with a simple design, concentrating on textures, colors, and techniques while creating their first project.
Pronoun case error
The software company hired a JavaScript programmer and I to set up its employee and customer questionnaires online.
Fragment error
You can also use the "notes" section to list "areas of concern." For instance, if a customer requests a partial massage and wants to target a specific part of the body.
Run-on, comma splice error
In a role-playing game, enabling players to see the dice that determine the outcome of a combat is impractical, it slows down the game or takes up valuable screen space.
Dangling- and misplaced-modifier error
When using a sphygmomanometer, blood pressure is measured in millimeters of mercury.
Parallelism error
At a minimum, you will have to decide on an aquarium size and shape, whether it will be glass or plastic, and its location.
Punctuation error
Any disease process that causes a change, in peripheral blood flow, alters cardiac output or increases blood thickness characterizes secondary hypertension.
Capitalization error
The left half of the screen displays the directories and files that are on the Hard Drive of your Computer.
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So just what is it that helps people improve their writing—if it does not involve studying grammar and usage rules? Many more things than are covered in this book. (You just witnessed a fragment!) For one thing, it depends on your age and experience with the language.
If you are under ten years old, you are still learning to put complete sentences together and to get them down on paper. But even 6-year-old children may have few grammar problems, as strictly defined above.
If you are a teenager or an undergraduate, you are learning how to organize your thoughts on paper and express them as clearly as possible. You are focused writing effectively for a specific group of readers, sticking to a main point. That takes years; some of us never get the hang of it! Even so, highschoolers and undergraduates are acquiring the writing disease variously known as academese, bureaucratese, gobbledygook—and, in this book, known as sentence-style problems.
What we are fighting . . .However, if you have graduated from college and are out there in the workforce, or if you are a graduate student working on your thesis, grammar, usage, and punctuation problems are not likely the areas where you need the most work. Instead, you may have contracted the disease of sentence-style problems—after years of reading pompous, wordy prose during your career in government, business, or academia. This disease manifests itself primarily in the ways described in the chapters of this book. To the left is another example like the one that greeted you at the beginning of this preface.
This book focuses on the kinds of writing problems that plague writers who write a lot on the job but who are not professional writers. This book calls those problems sentence-style problems. Sentence style is the collection of choices you make when you write sentences. These choices have little to do with grammar and usage rules. Nor do they have to do with one of the connotations of the word "style": flowery, fancy, classy, hip, suave, and so on. Think of the term style, instead, as the choices you make in expressing something. Depending on your choices, your style can be wordy, pompous, direct, firm, authoritative, and so on. You achieve a certain style in writing, in part, by making choices from amongst categories like those in the list just below and to the left.
Sentence-style problems are choices in these areas that can cause writing to be unclear, wordy, hard to read, lacking directness or emphasis. You can have a document that is perfectly free of grammar, usage, and punctuation errors but that is still perfectly incomprehensible—perfectly impossible to understand! And as a matter of fact, if you work in business or government, you have probably encountered plenty of this kind of thing. Writers contract the disease of sentence-style problems because they may be trying to sound formal like their peers, trying to impress others with their professionalism, hiding the fact that they have little to say, or struggling with a topic that they just don't understand. (Or perhaps they are just tired and want to go home.)
This book does not pretend to cover everything you need to become a better writer—only one important area. In some ways, focusing on sentence-style problems is rather artificial. Focusing on the sentence by itself neglects all the strategies and problems involved in getting from one sentence to the next. You must be able to write sentences so that they seem to flow naturally and logically from one to the next. That's called coherence and cohesion, which require strong transitions and good organization. That's not covered here, nor are audience analysis, organization, content, development, unity. Nor are other important topics such as format—headings, lists, tables, illustrations. All of these things work alongside sentence style to produce effective writing.
But, alas, one book cannot do everything and do it thoroughly and with practice materials included.
This book is built on the notion that writing concepts (rhetorical principles, if you are somewhere near an English department) are rather self-evident and easy to understand. For example, do you need to be lectured on ideas like those shown below and to the left under "Obvious Rhetorical Principles"? What could be more obvious? The real problem occurs when we try to put these simplistic ideas in to practice. Just how do you avoid wordiness? How do you be specific? Thus, practice in these areas is essential. And that's what this book provides—lots of practice on over a dozen common sentence-style problems. Not only will this book enable you to spot and fix problems involving passive voice, nominalizations, and expletives, but it will equip you to spot other sorts sentence-style problems—combinations, hybrids, ones we don't even have names for yet.
This book, and others like it, is the result of some twenty years of developments in a movement loosely known as the the Plain Language Movement, or the Plain English Movement. The story of its beginning seems apocryphal—in other words, the stuff of legend and myth rather than historical fact.
As the story goes, one Chrissie Maher took up the battle in England for crystal-clear language after seeing two elderly ladies die because they couldn't understand an application form for housing benefits. After fighting on her own for ten years, she launched Plain English Campaign (www.plainenglish.co.uk/) as a full-time movement in 1979, galantly shredding forms in Parliament Square.
However, the Plain English movement was actually—and still is—a cultural movement in much of the English-speaking world, rather than the creation of one heroic individual. The St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company radically simplified the language of its policies in the 1970s. Writers like William Safire and Edwin Newman began regularly lambasting pompous writing in articles and books starting in the 1970s. U.S. President Clinton issued his Presidential Memorandum on Plain Language during the 1990s. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission developed its Plain English Handbook, which eventually went online at www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/englishhndbk.htm. One of the first and most successful textbook-style treatments of sentence-style problems was Joseph M. Williams' Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. This book—the one you are reading at this moment—continues in the spirit established by Williams' pioneering work by adding more and simpler exercises, explaining concepts at a level the general public can better understand, and covering additional types of sentence-style problems.
This book introduces you to a number of the most common sentence-style problems. Each chapter focuses on one of these problems, provides plenty of explanation and examples, followed by exercises arranged from easy to complex.
When you use this book, read the explanations carefully, but—just as importantly—do the practice items. In fact, when you go through the examples in the discussion, cover up the revisions, and see if you can mentally do the revisions yourself. Exercises are also provided online with each chapter. These give you further practice.
As for the "correctness" of those revisions, remember that sentences with style problems can be fixed in more than one "correct" way. Remember too that nothing is intrinsically wrong with the passive voice, the expletive, a nominalization, or most of the other sentence-style issues covered here. They are options that you have as a writer and can be used effectively. But somehow we also learn highly ineffective ways of using them. (Perhaps this book should be called A Dozen Bad Habits of Highly Ineffective Writers!)
This book tries hard not to assume anything about your familiarity with English grammar terminology, but sometimes fails. The bare essentials of real grammar are provided in the appendix. Links to these bare essentials are provided in the chapters where they are relevant. If you're not sure whether you can tell a dependent clause from an independent clause or a subject from a verb—take the links to these appendixes.
In this preface, you've read that nothing is intrinsically wrong with the passive voice, nominalizations, expletives, or even noun stacks. This point is made again and again throughout this book: most of the things that cause sentence-style problems are legitimate writing choices in themselves. It's just that these innocent darlings get misused—sometimes intentionally—and turn into bad writing habits.
However, there is another dimension. In certain contexts, some writers actually seek to achieve the bad effects of sentence-style problems. People in authority positions use such stylistic choices as passive voice, nominalizations, noun stacks, redundant and wordy phrasing to achieve a firm, authoritarian tone. Many of the sentence-style problems discussed in this book set up distance between writer and reader and create an icy, frigid, stern authoritative tone.
If you work for the police or the military, you may want to or be expected to sound like this:
Employees are expected to make arrangements to ensure their attendance at the Friday afternoon ice-cream social. Business-casual attire is required. Those individuals not in attendance shall be required to perform weekend overtime time allotments.
To many people, the tone is "professional," "take charge." It "means business." (But the rest of us are busy looking for other jobs.) For these same people, personalizing writing, using "you," is a touchy-feely "new-agey" style that is totally inappropriate.
Can you exercise authority and get people to cooperate without sounding like a dictator or a drill sargeant? This book doesn't answer that one, but at least you can understand the effects of your sentence-style choices and at least ensure the clarity and economy of your writing—no matter what personality you wish to convey.
Plain English Campaign in England—from the founders of the "movement": www.plainenglish.co.uk
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Plain English Handbook—a whole online handbook on how to write in plain English! www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/englishhndbk.htm
Word Centre, one of many companies offering plain-English services. This one lists savings from using plain English: www.wordcentre.co.uk/business.htm
Plain Language Action Network (National Partnership for Reinventing Government): www.plainlanguage.gov
Plain Train. Guidelines developed by the U.S. Veterans Benefits Administration: www.web.net/~plain/PlainTrain
Rules for Regulation Writers. Developed by Canada's National Literacy Secretariat: www.blm.gov/nhp/NPR/tutorial/regwr_01.html
John Kimble. "Answering the Critics of Plain Language": www.plainlanguage.gov/library/kimble.htm
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