"A preposition is something you should not end a sentence with."
Reminds me of a joke:
A southern belle is on spring break with her friends when a couple of preppy types settle in next to her on the beach. She tries to be friendly to the nearest girl and says "where are y'all from?"
The snooty girl says "I'm from somewhere where they teach you not to end sentences with a preposition."
Without missing a beat, the southern girl says "where are y'all from, bitch?"
General principle: short sentences convey speed, long and meandering sentences will give the reader a sense of drawn out time. A pitfall many writers fall into is over describing their action scenes, which makes them seem oddly sluggish and dull.
The revision shown in the article to "A Bad Uncle lifted Captain Samson over his head and hurled her over the edge of the catwalk," is an example of this problem. The reader knows how you throw someone, they don't need an explanation.
"The Bad Uncle hurled Captain Samson over the edge." (Presumably the reader knows they are on a catwalk, too, so "the catwalk" is unnecessary.)
If it is really important to convey that the Bad Uncle is very strong you could do "The Bad Uncle hurled Captain Samson over his head, off the catwalk," or something similar.
Edit: Also, the article discourages adverbs, but doesn't mention that adjectives are similarly bad. Most adjectives can be better conveyed through an action or specific detail. Don't say "she was nice", but do show her helping a lost child.
Churchill is probably getting at the distinction between Germanic and Latinate root words in English. Hemingway used to write with a obvious preference for Germanic root words, which were short and tough and had a pleasing sound. Latinate root words are usually long ten-cent words lacking the same utilitarian grace of their Germanic root analogs.
I always thought it would be a fun project to use an etymology database to make a Latinate-to-Germanic thesaurus, something you could use just like spell check on a document to suggest Germanic alternatives to Latinate words.
I always thought it would be a fun project to use an etymology database to make a Latinate-to-Germanic thesaurus, something you could use just like spell check on a document to suggest Germanic alternatives to Latinate words.
struck me funny that more than half of these words are 6+
I write quite a bit, and my start-up project is aimed at writers. Writing is a lot of fun, if only to serve as a break from programming. Although I would argue they are rather similar activities, particularly once you get to refactoring.
National Novel Writing Month (http://nanowrimo.org) is a great way for people to get started, as are local writers' circles. Writing circles are generally very accepting of new people/outsiders, because everyone is on the look out for new perspectives.
When I found out about National Novel Writing Month, I declared February to be an extra November in my personal calendar, and wrote a 204-page fantasy book. It actually came out a lot better than I expected; my writing improved enormously, and once I was a couple chapters in, I was producing something that was actually fun to read. (It was still hugely embarrassing, but fun to read.)
I can't recommend this strongly enough. When November comes along, if you have any interest in writing, you should participate in NaNoWriMo if at all possible.
Although targetted at fiction, it's relevant to documentation and other technical writing. We all bemoan the quality of technical writing, but good writing is hard, and these hints apply across the board (with some liberal interpretation).
I'd bet innate intelligence mostly works on heuristics.
It's interesting how English especially has evolved to consistently reduce complexity. We've lost gender, all noun inflection, some verb tenses, etc., which are exactly the tools that keep a language well-ordered and unambiguous. We've reduced clear structure and precision, but increased in flexibility.
Of course, making sense out of ambiguous, constantly-changing, and often contradictory things is the goal of most intellectual pursuits, and as we augment our intelligence with tools like Google, we need less and less to put things precisely into a priori categories or define complex systems of rules in general.
English is a mess compared to programming languages. As a natural one it is one of the simplest.
The "search and replace" tips given in the article would fail in most languages. From the top of my head I can think of 4 different ways to say "There was" in Portuguese, and I bet there are many more.
Not that it's good or bad. It's just a characteristic.
> As a natural one [English] is one of the simplest.
Strongly disagree. I think it's one of the most baroque, with too many special cases, irregulars, and gotchas. It doesn't have specific types of complexity. For example, its morphology[1] seems pretty bare, at least if you compare it to other Indo-European languages, but even there it's more complex than Japanese or native Hawaiian. To your point, that makes it mostly amenable to search-and-replace filters, which is convenient.
[1] Changes to the word reflecting grammatical usage, such as "-ness" signifying a noun or "-ed" signifying a past tense. These are usually the bits of other languages that English-speakers think are "hard."
"The main problem with "it" is that it's a pronoun, so you must be absolutely clear about what "it" refers to. "
Absolutely false. The use of "it" without an antecedent is called "expletive," and is perfectly valid. I agree that it's often bland, but there's no need to go around asking yourself "What does 'it' refer to here?"
You are correct that the English idiom "It's raining" is just the normal way to say that in English. The corresponding Russian sentence Идет дождь would translate literally into English as "goes rain," while the Chinese sentence 下雨 would translate as "falls rain," with the unusual word order being an example of topicalization in those languages.
This reminds me of the following bit from a marvelous NPR piece a couple weeks ago where they interviewed Elmore Leonard and his sons in front of an audience. (Transcript at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1252532..., but one part was marked "unintelligible" so I've filled it in from memory). C Leonard is one of the sons (Chris) and E is Elmore:
Mr. C. LEONARD: Well, Elmore, you gave me advice. I told you that I was writing a novel and you said, good. Don't use any other words but "said" for dialogue and leave out the parts that people tend to skip. I think those were the two things you said.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. C. LEONARD: And they're both good, I have to tell you.
There is an excellent book that no writer should be without: "On Writing Well," by William Zinsser. A joy to read -- it flows well and instructs without being tedious.
Perhaps the biggest danger is a lack of any structure that encourages the reader to follow through the whole item. If you can give a teaser for the pot of gold that is buried at the end of the rainbow so much the better.
I find mind maps really help me enormously in getting that right structure. My first draft or two is purely at the Mind Map level. It's amazing how letting my thoughts simmer away suggests some new angle or aspect of the subject. I find FreeMind very user-friendly and I endorse it wholeheartedly. I have no connection with the creator(s). I'm just a very satisfied customer.
Thanks for posting this. I enjoy blogging but have found linear writing difficult to organize -- I'll have sections above and below, filled with thoughts, and try to merge them together.
Just yesterday I was playing around with FreeMind and it seems promising -- I think my next post is going to evolve from a mind map.
* The passive voice is to be avoided.
* You want to not split your infinitives with a negative.
* In order to streamline your text, take out superfluous filler like "in order to".