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skills for general, academic, and creative writing – plus publishing

skills for general, academic, and creative writing - plus publishing

Planning a Dissertation

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planning, structure, headings, and creating order

Planning a dissertation – what is it?

A dissertation is a piece of academic writing normally submitted as part of a Bachelors or a Masters degree (BA or MA). In some cases the term ‘dissertation’ might be used interchangeably with thesis, which (in the UK) is normally reserved to describe work at PhD level.

A dissertation can comprise anything from 8,000-10,000 words up to as many as 20,000 words, depending on the subject, and is normally shorter than a PhD thesis. It is written to show that you can produce an original idea, engage in academic research, and follow the conventions of argument and written presentation at this level.

The main problem for most people is that they’re unlikely to have written such a long piece of work before. Dealing with large amounts of information and producing a long and coherent piece of writing isn’t an easy task. The conceptual skills required and the burden of generating so much writing can seem overwhelming. For this reason it is vital that you create a plan before you start.

Planning a dissertation

The following guidance notes give an explanation of what’s required and a template to help you make that plan. The notes are a series of headings which will help you to clarify your ideas and create the outline or structure for what you have to do. They are not a timetable and they don’t cover the reading and research work involved in producing a dissertation. That part of the process is covered under Managing a dissertation.

Use these headings to generate an outline plan before you start any serious writing. The plan can be modified or enhanced as you go along – but at any given time you will have an overview of the project. This will help you to identify (name) any writing on which you’re working and decide its relevant position within the overall scheme. It will also save you from feeling ‘lost’ amongst your notes and your research materials.

It’s helpful to create your initial writing as chunks, or parts of the whole piece, rather than conceiving of the finished object at this stage. This gives you the opportunity to work on any one chunk whenever it’s convenient for you without becoming overwhelmed.

The title

You should have at least a rough idea of what you are going to write about. The provisional title does not have to be exact, and you can change it slightly as you go along. The act of creating a title forces you to clarify in your own mind the most important elements of your project.

It’s possible to start out with a long and possibly a slightly hazy title. But as you do more work generating the dissertation, the title should become shorter and more clearly expressed. [Some science subjects might require longer titles because of the complex names of chemicals or biological processes.]

The prime importance of the title is that it should specify exactly what your dissertation is about. Its secondary purpose is to act as a reminder while you’re writing that each part of the work should be directly related to its stated purpose. Your dissertation might be –

  • an argument
  • a survey
  • an investigation
  • a project
  • an analytic study

But the title is the most succinct expression of its subject and purpose.

The summary

Many dissertations also require an abstract or summary. This is a digest or a shorter version of the work as a whole. The abstract draws out in shortened form what’s contained in the complete thesis. It might also be known as a précis or a synopsis.

This might well be one of the last things you finalise. A summary is difficult to write before you’ve produced the work as a whole. But even a provisional summary will help you to keep the overall project in mind This too can be modified and updated as your work progresses.

The introduction

As in the case of the title and summary, the introduction might be something you only finish writing after you’ve done the main work of the dissertation. After all, it’s not easy to introduce something that’s not yet been written. However, you should have some idea of how you will introduce the main body of the work. It might be something like any of the following:

  • a description of what follows
  • the historical context to the subject
  • the origins of a problem to be studied
  • a summary of recent opinions
  • a digest of current research

Once again, even if you decide to change part of the dissertation as your work progresses, it’s better – at any given point – if you have a stated intention of how you propose to introduce the main body of your work. This ‘intention’ will help you to conceptualise the work as a whole and keep its structure alive in your mind.

Literature review

If the regulations call for it, you’ll need to include a section or chapter offering a literature review. This is a survey of the recent research findings on your topic or subject. You need to show not only that you have read the latest studies, but that you are able to digest their findings and arguments.

This is something that you can quite easily work on and store separately whilst you’re working on the rest of your dissertation. The exact position of the review in your plan will be determined by the conventions of your subject. It usually precedes the methodology, and will almost certainly come before any results.

Methodology

Planning a DissertationThis is an optional section, depending on the subject of your dissertation. Subjects that involve any sort of scientific or quantitative investigation will require an account of the methods used. This account will include an explanation of how the research has been designed and implemented, and why the particular collection of data and the method of analysis has been chosen. The methodology might be qualitative, quantitative, or experimental, and it might involve gathering information and subjecting it to close scrutiny and analysis. Arts and humanities subjects tend not to have quasi-scientific methodologies, but rely on the close examination and analysis of materials and texts, followed by the your own persuasive arguments.

Structure

A dissertation is often organised into a number of parts or chapters. The subject under enquiry might suggest or determine what these parts or chapters could be. Splitting your work into separate parts will make the process of composition easier. It means that whilst working on one part, you can temporarily separate it from the others. The arrangement of these parts might be determined by –

  • chronological order
  • logical progression
  • steps in a process
  • narrative sequence
  • equal significance
  • category groupings

The following are three practical examples based on this notion of creating structure. One further advantage of following this procedure is that the total word-count for the dissertation can be (roughly) divided between these sections or chapters (plus the introduction and conclusion) to produce a well-balanced whole.

  • A historical study of economic depression in the 1930s might be split into four main chapters covering the years 1930-1933, 1934-1936, 1937-1939, and 1939-1940
  • A study of Shakespeare’s tragedies might have four separate main chapters, one each on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth
  • A study of inner-city pollution might be structured by separate sections on traffic density, open green spaces, air pollution, and housing density
Conclusion

You might not know the final conclusion of your dissertation project until you finish writing, but you can fill in this section with what you think or hope it might be.

This is a very good case where the title of your dissertation might be of help. If your dissertation title includes ” … show the influence of X on the work of Y …” you know that your conclusion must discuss examples of the work of Y and should reveal instances of the influence of X.

Bibliography

Colleges and universities usually have their own house guidelines for the manner in which bibliographic information is presented. In addition to this, various subjects and disciplines follow their own conventions – or they might adopt internationally recognised systems such as the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA), the Harvard System, or the Modern Language Association (MLA) system for bibliographic presentation.

It’s very important that you acquaint yourself with the system used for your subject and make sure you know all the small details of referencing, citation, and the listing of sources – including references to materials on the Internet.

Fortunately, this part of the dissertation is easy to produce, because you simply add to the list of texts and secondary sources you have used as you go along. The bibliography might even be divided up into primary and secondary sources.

Planning a dissertation – related study guides

How to fail your dissertation
Comic but very useful tips on how to avoid common mistakes

How to write a thesis abstract
A tutorial on how to create a one-page summary for longer works

How to solve research problems
Study tips for recovering from common errors and bad planning

Definitions of a thesis at Wikipedia
Structure, style, and variations by country, plus web links

How to write a thesis and which software tools to use
Data management, mind maps, creating structure, and bibliographies

© Roy Johnson 2015

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Print Journalism

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essays on journalism – from print to the Internet

More than 12.5 million national newspapers are sold in Britain every day. The figure goes up to 14 million on Sundays. And for every copy of the Guardian sold each day, ten copies of the Sun cross the counter – which is what led former Sun editor Kelvin McKensie to rather cruelly call the Guardian ‘the world’s worst newspaper’. This publication covers every possible aspect of print journalism, and I suspect it has been produced in the hope of becoming a standard text in departments of journalism and media studies.

Print Journalism The chapters are written by ex-journalists now teaching at four universities – City London, Sheffield, Cardiff, and Lincoln – so it seems there must be a regular career path leading out of the Street of Shame and showing other people the best way to get there. Articles in the first section deal with the history, structure, and the financing of print media. Who owns what; which titles sell most copies; and how they make a profit.

There’s a certain amount of overlap and repetition here, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing, because the newspaper and magazine publishing business is a lot more complex than it appears on the surface. The second section gets straight down to practical advice for would-be journalists: how to be a reporter; how to conduct interviews; what makes a good news story; how to write good introductions and structure paragraphs.

Then, moving into the newsroom itself, there are chapters on the role of news editor, what sub-editors do, and how pictures are captioned. The individual essays could profit enormously from more illustrative examples, and almost every page is crying out for graphics.

The would-be journalist is given a detailed breakdown of news features, and more importantly how to successfully pitch your ideas to editors, then how to write them if and when they are accepted.

Once you have written your piece and checked it several times over for style, content, accuracy, spelling, and grammar, it then goes to a features editor who will edit it all over again. There’s a whole chapter explaining this process. It’s a tough world, and this is required reading for anybody who wants to make a success of freelance writing.

You are unlikely to be invited to write comment or opinion pieces, but you could break into print via reviewing. How to write them is explained in detail – and these days its as likely to be reviewing radio and TV programmes as traditional books and theatre performances.

Print journalism is now as we know being challenged by the online world – though you are even less likely to earn income from it. There are essays which analyse the differences between newspapers’ print and online versions, and technical advice on how monitor screen and web browsers affect how and what we read on screen.

There’s also advice on writing blogs and wikis, before the collection winds up with essays on the ethics and law in journalism, copyright, and intellectual property rights – which is one of the best short explanations of a complex issue I have seen for quite some time.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Richard Keeble (ed), Print Journalism: a critical introduction, London: Routledge, 2005, pp.347, ISBN: 0415358825

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Proofreading your writing

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how to check your work for publication

Proofreading and making corrections is the very last stage of preparing a document for publication. At this point the main content of what you have written should already be finalised – checked for accuracy of content, grammar, spelling, completeness, and layout.

Proofreading looks at the presentation of the text in great detail – mainly for matters of bibliographic and typographic consistency. You will be checking on features in the document such as the following, checking for regularity and consistency.

  • Capitalization of headings
  • Font size and style
  • Spacing between paragraphs
  • Regularity of indentation
  • Use of italics and bold
  • Page numbering
  • Hierarchy of headings
Word-processors

Word-processors take a lot of the strain out of proofreading. Spell-checking will be easy, and matters such as letter-spacing and line-spacing are automatically regularised.

The basic appearance of writing on the page (or screen) is also controlled automatically.

For instance, text justification can be set as left-aligned or fully-justified. Left-aligned text creates regular spaces between words, but the right-hand edge of the text will be uneven – which is called ‘ragged right’ or ‘unjustified’. Choice of justification will be determined by the document type.

Fully-justified text creates an even left and right-hand margin – but there may be uneven spaces between words. These gaps can cause what are called ‘rivers’ of white space to appear in the text. These are created by irregular spaces between words.

Word-processors can usually give you control of a number of features in a document. These can be set automatically, and therefore eliminated from the number of tasks involved in proofreading.

  • Hyphenation on and off
  • Picture captions
  • Headers and footers
  • Size of titles and sub-titles
  • Treatment of numbers
  • Use of quotation marks
  • Bibliographic citations
  • Punctuation of lists
  • Page numbering
  • Hierarchy of headings
Proofreading example

The following extract contains several elements that require an editorial decision. That is, where choices of house style must be made about the use of capitals, quotations, commas, numbers, and so on. The passage does not contain any mistakes.

In 1539 the monastery was ‘dissolved’, and the Abbot, in distress of mind—recognising that there was no alternative but to co-operate with the King’s officers—blessed the monks (they numbered fifty-seven), prayed with them, and sent them out from the abbey gates to follow their vocation in the world.

There are eight issues here that call for editorial decisions on the styles used in presentation of text.

  1. Dates are shown using numbers [1539]
  2. Quotations are shown using single quote marks [‘dissolved’]
  3. Capitals used for titles of specific office holders [Abbot, King]
  4. No capitals for informal references to institutions [monastery]
  5. Em-dash used for parenthetical remarks [—]
  6. Use of -ise not -ize for endings [recognising]
  7. Numbers up to 100 shown in words [fifty-seven]
  8. Use of the serial comma

These details make all the difference between an amateur attempt at document production, and a successful and professional piece of work.

Inconsistencies in any of these style issues will cause problems for the reader: For instance, Abbot is an official title, whereas abbot is merely a term to describe the type of clergyman.

House style

House style is the term given to a set of conventions for the presentation of printed documents in an organisation.

The conventions might be formalised as a printed style guide [The Economist Style Guide, New Hart’s Rules] or they might be an informal set of guidelines governed by tradition and convenience.

Any company that wishes to appear professional will have its own house style. It can decide on its own protocols, some of which might contravene traditional practices.

The organisation could be any form of business or official body:

  • Publishing company [a newspaper or magazine]
  • Government body [Department of Education]
  • Legal institution [Courts of Justice]
  • Commercial enterprise [IBM, Amazon]

These organisations have a house style so that there will be consistency and uniformity in the way they present themselves visually to the world.

They might wish to specify the size and font style of their titles, headings, and sub-headings. They are likely to specify how graphics are to be displayed, and they might have policies regarding the use of foreign or emotionally loaded terms.

For instance, newspapers have to make policy decisions on how to describe a dictator’s staff – as a ‘government’ or a ‘regime’.

Proofreading method

The first choice you will need to make is between proofreading on screen or on paper. Many people find it easier to spot mistakes if they print out a document and do the editing and proofreading by hand.

The advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches are essentially as follows.

Editing directly on screen has the advantage that you do not have to transfer corrections from paper to screen. The disadvantages are that any changes you make will over-write the original text. It is also harder to see small details on screen than on paper.

It is true that you can save each separate version of an edited text. This means you have a record of your earlier versions. But each new version leads deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of complexities when making comparisons to select the best.

Editing by hand on a printed document has the disadvantage that all corrections will need to be re-typed, The main advantage is that the original text will still be visible if second thoughts arise.

For details of the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches, see Editing documents on screen and paper.

You might find it difficult to concentrate on all the small details of proofreading. This is because it is very tiring to hold a number of issues in your head at the same time.

If this is the case, try this tip to make things easier. Split the task into a number of separate stages. Proofread for just one feature at a time. Go through the work checking only on your use of capitals in headings; then go back again to check only on your use of italics, and so on. Use the list of features below as a guide.

Abbreviations Full stops
Apostrophes Hyphens
Bold Italics
Brackets Numbers
Capital letters Quotation marks
Colons Semicolons
Commas Spelling
Dates Titles

Further detailed guidelines on

Proofreading Editing your writing

Proofreading marks

There is also an elaborate system of marks used in professional proofreading for correcting the proofs of printed documents. These are for the specialist, and it is unlikely that the average writer would need to use them. But they might be of interest.

Proofreading marks

© Roy Johnson 2013

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Publish your academic writing

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getting your academic work into print – and on line

If you want to get ahead in the world of colleges and universities, there are no two ways about it – you will have to face the challenges of academic publishing. It might be articles, reports, or the results of a research project. It could be chapters from a thesis, or the whole work itself – re-drafted into book form.

Quite apart from your subject, there are two important things to keep in mind. The first is that your work will be scrutinised not only by the publisher, but by specialist reader(s) who are experts in your subject. They will be looking at the quality of your work in terms of commonly accepted academic standards; and they will checking to see that you have demonstrated that you are up to date with the latest research in your field of study.

If they give your work the thumbs up, the publisher will them be making sure that you have presented your work in compliance with their own house style guides. Publishers are increasingly demanding these days : they use economic arguments to transfer a lot of the work of compositors and editors back onto authors.

Writing for Academic Journals
Rowena Murray is an experienced writer on the subject of academic writing. She is author of How to Write a Thesis and How to Survive Your Viva. What she says in this guide should be encouraging for people in ‘new’ universities, people in disciplines which have only recently been considered academic, and those in professions such as the NHS which are under pressure to become more academic.

She deals with the important issue of getting to know your target publications. There’s really no way round this: you need to know what they’re looking for, and how they want it presented. For those who might not have written a scholarly paper before, she shows you how to analyse one and uncover its basic structure and arguments – with a view of course to constructing your own.

The next part of the book deals with how to find a topic and develop an argument. You can do this by mining your reading notes, expanding a brief presentation, or maybe adapting a chapter from your dissertation or thesis.

There’s also lots of sound advice on planning, outlining, and the art of writing abstracts. She also shows you how to draft your text and create the appropriate style. This is followed by the process of revision and editing,

Although it is aimed at those writing for publication, this book will in fact be useful for anyone who wishes to sharpen their academic writing skills and understand something about the process of preparing a text for its public launching.

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Getting Published
Jerry Wellington starts by looking at the variety of positive reasons why people write and publish – as well as the numerous fears which might prevent others from doing so. He argues largely in favour of publishing in established, printed journals on the grounds that they offer the author more credence and protection. Next comes advice in taking account of the publication in which your writing will appear. You need to take into account its readership, and most crucially the type of article or review and how it will best fit the editor’s requirements.

He then goes through the process of submitting an article for publication – both from the writer’s and publisher’s point of view. Much of this is taken up with the pros and cons of the peer review process. Then comes the case of publishing in book form. After warning quite rightly that you shouldn’t write a word until you have a contract, he then shows you how to prepare a publication proposal in great detail. Finally he looks at future possible trends in publishing – which focus largely on electronic journals and what’s called ‘self-archiving’ – which is covered next.

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Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads
This is a review of the arguments for and against electronic publishing of academic writing – largely the work of Stephen Harnad. His argument is that scholars working in what he calls the ‘esoteric’ fields of narrow specialisms (particularly the sciences) do not need to publish on paper; they merely wish to be read by their peers.

And since they don’t expect to be paid for what they make public, why shouldn’t they put their work straight onto the Net in preprint form. Once their work is on the Web, they can invite comment, make whatever revisions they feel warranted, then archive the finished article in digital form. By following this procedure, peer review is maintained, but the system works more rapidly and less expensively. Most importantly, they can avoid the dinosaur procedures and high costs of traditional print journals. As he puts it himself (in characteristically succinct form):

“What scholars…need is electronic journals that provide (1) rapid, expert peer-review, (2) rapid copy-editing, proofing and publication of accepted articles, (3) rapid, interactive, peer commentary, and (4) a permanent, universally accessible, searchable and retrievable electronic archive.”

The more books one reads on electronic publication, Hypertext, and digital technology, the more one realises how convenient, comfortable, portable, and aesthetically pleasing the printed book remains – produced by what Nicholas Negroponte describes as “squeezing ink onto dead trees”. But this does not invalidate Harnad’s proposal: if a text is urgent, hot, and written for a minority – we’ll read it on-screen, add comments, and send it back within the hour, rather than wait for the Dinosaur Publishing methods (and timescale) of ‘getting it onto paper’.

This is a book for specialists, but it encompasses issues which are part of the profound effect of the forces of digitisation and the Internet. The vested interests of commercial publishers and academic institutions may take some time to shift, but their fault lines are remorselessly exposed here. Harnad’s vision and his debate with contemporaries gives us a view of a world which is breaking apart, in the very process of being overtaken by the forces of New Technology.

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Academic publishing Towards Electronic Journals
Carol Tenopir takes a similar view and considers it more-or-less inevitable that print production costs will push academic writing towards digitised publication. The Web was actually created so that academic researchers could share their findings across the Internet – doing so quickly and free from any commercial restrictions.

If you write a paper on rocket science, you can put the results directly onto a web site and announce the fact to special interest groups. That way, you can invite feedback, critical comment, and peer review – and receive it fairly quickly, instead of having to wait up to two years as you would if the paper was put into the slow-moving production methods of commercial publishers.

Scholarly journals take a long time to produce; they are very expensive; and very few people read them. Why bother then, when the same results can be made available fast, free of charge, and to a much wider audience? How much does it cost? What are the trends in scholarly article authorship and readership? What are the overall implications of electronic journals to publishers, libraries, scientists, and their funders? These are some of the fundamental issues underpinning this book.

The argument on costs is overwhelming. Electronic publishing saves on printing costs, re-printing costs, storage costs, archiving, and inter-library loan costs. And all the other arguments return again and again to the obvious advantages of electronic publication.

They point out that readers both inside and outside universities will continue to demand materials in printed form. Which is true. It’s amazing how many people continue to print out documents – for the sake of convenience, and habit. But to quote Nicholas Negroponte again, the future is digital.

This is a study which is aimed at researchers, librarians, publishers, and anyone interested in electronic publication, and they go out of their way to provide hard evidence for decision-makers.

If you are interested in one of the lesser-known but burgeoning forms of electronic publishing – then you should find this a rich source of hard facts for the debate.

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© Roy Johnson 2009

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Publishing on the Internet

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a selection of resources

What if your ambitions are for publishing on the Internet? After all, many writers now launch their work in writers forums, creative writing groups, and even in personal weblogs. The Internet has made it possible to reach a worldwide audience with just a few IT skills – and it’s all for free!

You have the chance to place your work in writers’ groups, you might create your own web site, or you could start blogging. In addition, you could promote your work via a personal website and an email newsletter. Whichever route you choose, you should be aware of the difference between writing for the screen and the printed page.

What follows is guidance and resources covering all these new possibilities. You need to know what is available for writers on the Internet, and where to find it. eBooks and email publishing are a very attractive and cost-effective option you can learn about easily. Blogging is cost-free and currently very hip. And knowing the difference between writing for the screen or for print will show that you know what you are doing.

Publishing on the InternetThe Internet: A Writer’s Guide
The main strength of Jane Dorner’s book is that she is a professional writer who practices what she writes about. She writes for both print and screen, and promotes her work via a personal web site. This book explores both the new opportunities for writers created by the Internet and the practicalities of publishing on your own site.

She touches on writing groups which exist in the form of mailing lists, websites, newsletters, chat groups, and conferences, and she also deals with eBooks plus annotated lists of all the sources a writer could possibly wish for – from libraries to bookshops, dictionaries to writing circles, newspapers to writing style guides, electronic publishers to free Internet service providers.
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Creative Web Writing - book jacketCreative Web Writing
If you are mainly interested in traditional creative writing Jane Dorner has another book which shows you the skills you need if you want to put your writing onto the Internet. She is speaking to those people who have been creating poems and stories in their back rooms and getting nowhere. This guide covers collaborative story-telling, research online, interactivity and flexible text, as well as the nuts and bolts of styling for screen reading. Most importantly, she explains the range of new markets, new technologies, and how to apply them.

Creative genres are covered, including autobiography, poetry, broadcasting, screen-writing and writing for children. She also describes how to look carefully at contracts, how to submit your writing to an electronic publisher, and how to deal with Print on demand (POD) outlets. There’s a very useful survey of the various delivery methods and payments for eBooks. This is one of the most popular methods for aspiring authors to reach new readers. This section will be required reading if you are thinking of venturing into this world.

The central part of the book deals with new forms of writing using Web technologies. This is one field in which she has clearly done her homework. She shows examples of writing in the form of Blogs (Web-logs) email (epistolary) narratives, fictions illuminated by graphics, the weird world of MUDs and MOOs, Flash-animated writing, and phonetic poetry.
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The Internet Writer's HandbookThe Internet Writer’s Handbook
Karen Scott’s book is a detailed guide to publishers of the two formats which are most digital – e-zines and e-books. It’s in the form of an international A-Z of the best websites for writers to target, with full contact details for all websites listed. She offers plenty of detail on how to submit your work , how much publishers will pay, and even how they are most likely to respond. The topics these eBook publishers cover range from poetry and fiction, through non-fiction feature writing, to specialist technical and hobbyist publications.
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return button Publish your writing

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Style – ten lessons in clarity and grace

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how to refine your writing style

This is a twenty year old book already in its sixth edition, and the author admits that it’s still ‘evolving’, which is a good sign that serious thought is going into its composition. Style ten lessons in clarity and grace is based on a course Joseph Williams teaches at the University of Chicago. His approach is based on two principles – that ‘it’s good to write clearly, and anyone can’ – and the second part of the proposition is what he’s teaching here. His approach is to draw attention to the finer issues of clarity in prose, and to show how language can be used with subtelty to effect it.

Style ten lessons in clarity and grace His ten seperate chapters deal with each of these issues in turn, and his own prose style is engaging and friendly – which both proves his point and shows that he knows what he is talking about. He starts with a brief and amusing guide to bad prose and what creates it, and he ends with the most celebrated advice on creating effective prose – that good writing is about ‘rewriting’. His general advice is that improvement can be made – if you go slowly. So what then are his ten ‘lessons’?

  1. Write with readers in mind
  2. Write clearly
  3. Write concretely
  4. Write in an active mode
  5. Put the subject at start of sentence
  6. Put rhetoric at end of sentence
  7. Edit, edit, edit; and cut, cut, cut
  8. Get the verb in the main clause
  9. Create structure
  10. Write ethically

It’s pitched at a fairly sophisticated level, suitable for intermediate to advanced users. Williams assumes that readers know the basics of what is right and wrong, but want to improve in matters of clarity and elegance. He makes an interesting and useful distinction between three types of correctness – and offers different levels of response to them.

There are are exercises in each chapter with suggested answers, which I think makes this a text which might be more popular with tutors than with the students for whom it was presumably written. You’ve got to put up with a lot of grappling with ‘nominalizations’, ‘resumptive modifiers’, and elimination of the passive voice, as well as the same examples worked over and over until they’re right.

There’s a particularly good chapter on deleting redundant expressions, writing more concisely, and eliminating ‘metadiscourse’ [signposting or ‘writing about writing’]. He gives one example where a fifty word statement is edited down to a sentence of six. His advice includes one point I write on something like fifty percent of all student essays: ‘Put the subject at the start of the sentence, and follow it as soon as possible with the verb’.

Towards the end of the book he tries to ‘teach the unteachable’ – elegance and ‘good style’. This section requires quite a sophisticated level of literary experience, and strangely enough he ends on punctuation – but pitched at quite an advanced level.

This isn’t a book for beginners. It’s for people who want to improve their existing writing skills, who want to rid themselves of officialese and cloudy abstraction and garbled syntax so as to produce writing which is clear and efficient. If you follow his advice, read carefully what he’s got to say, and complete the exercises, I think you’ll find it money well spent.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Joseph Williams, Style: ten lessons in clarity and grace, New York: Addison Wesley, (6th edn) 1999, pp.309, ISBN: 0321024087

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The Art and Science of Screenwriting

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creative writing guide for the cinema and television

This is a practical handbook on screenwriting, an explanation of what a screenplay is, a guide to getting your own ideas into the correct format, and an account of all the stages that follow the production of a first draft. Philip Parker starts off by explaining the key concepts of any dramatic narrative and showing their relationship to each other in what he calls a ‘creative matrix’. These are story, theme, form, plot, genre, and style. He explains how each of these is relevant, then takes you through what he calls ‘the tools of the trade’ – the original Proposal, the Outline, the Treatment, the Step Outline, and the Screenplay Layout.

The Art and Science of ScreenwritingThese are all progressively longer documents which specify exactly what the film is about and what happens in it. He shows you how to produce these documents, and even how to lay out their contents on the page. He also shows how to develop screen ideas out of novels and stories, contemporary events, historical happenings, even newspaper stories or your own life or dreams. There is also an explanation of the differences in writing for television and the cinema.

The most basic elements are how to establish credible characters and how to best arrange the sequence of events in a multi-strand narrative. To demonstrate this in practice, he offers examples and analyses of film scripts for both television and cinema, showing how scenes are paced and edited, and how narratives are controlled.

He also identifies what he calls the ‘ten basic stories’ and ‘eight basic themes’. I’m not sure that all narratives can be so reduced, but it leads to a lot of useful discussion of genres and stereotypes – and how to recognise them. He also goes on to show the different styles in which films can be shot appropriate to their genre.

He finishes with two important chapters. First, having written the initial draft of your screenplay, how to go about re-writing it to produce a sharper version. Second, how to get your work accepted, deal with agents, cope with rejections, and strike deals which lead to your getting paid.

It’s suitable for anyone who has an interest in screenwriting – from would-be first time writers, to experienced professionals such as directors, producers, and media teachers.

What he emphasises is that producing for the screen is an industry in which the screenwriter is only one part. It might be an important part, but you have to be prepared to co-operate with other people. There are useful suggestions for further reading, but one thing that’s missing is a glossary of technical jargon. That’s one for the next edition.

I still don’t know why screen scripts present their instructions in ugly continuous capitals, but he shows you exactly how to do it. If you want to get on in this business, you have to conform to its rules.

© Roy Johnson 2000

The Art and Science of Screenwriting   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Philip Parker, The Art and Science of Screenwriting, Exeter: Intellect, 2nd edn, 1999, pp.219, ISBN: 1841500003

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The First Five Pages

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a writer’s guide to staying out of the slush pile

Noah Lukeman is a New York literary agent with a number of top-ranking authors as his clients. He has also written a number of books on the craft of writing (see The Art of Punctuation for instance) so he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the literary marketplace – in which it must be said so many people wish to make their mark. Publishers and literary agents receive hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts each month – almost all of which are rejected. The First Five Pages is his advice for staying out of the slush pile.

The First Five PagesIt’s the job of these publishing professionals to be discriminating, and it’s the job of the writer to produce a manuscript that stands out among the competition. Those outstanding qualities, Lukeman argues, have to be apparent from the first five pages – otherwise no agent or publisher will bother reading further. In fact he claims – and I believe him – that five sentences is enough. His advice when it comes is quite bracing. First of all he dismisses the supremacy of plot, and lets you in to a secret from the professional’s office:

Agents and editors often ignore synopses and plot outlines; instead, we skip right to the actual manuscript. If the writing is good, then we’ll go back and consider the synopsis

The other thing which creates an immediate impression on agents and publishers is the physical presentation of text. He takes a really strict line here.You should use clean, new A4 paper, and the text should be printed at high quality, double spaced with one inch margins and indented dialogue and paragraph first lines. The slightest falling off in these standards gives the reader every reason to chuck your work into the reject bin.

Next comes the surgical removal of excessive adjectives and adverbs – the most common mistake of would-be writers. This is followed by advice on the sound of language, and how to avoid unwanted alliteration, assonance, and verbal echoes. The same is true for any comparisons or metaphors you use. They should be fresh, original, and to the point – otherwise, leave them out.

On literary style his advice is to avoid mannerism and extremes, and he nails down two excellent examples of the ‘academic’ and ‘experimental’ style of writing.

There’s a section on dialogue and eradicating all that ‘he said … she retorted’ sort of thing. He warns specifically against the easy trap of using dialogue to fill in the back story. That is, having characters explicate matters they would both already know (for the benefit of the reader). The rule – as ever – is show, don’t tell.

The same sort of rigour is well-advised over point of view and narrative mode. Many amateur writers use the first person mode thinking it will allow them the chance to show off, but all they end up doing is littering their story with too much biographical dross, and failing to create a consistent and credible or interesting narrator.

Next comes the creation of character. This is a difficult topic on which to generalise. Some great novels have memorable characters about whose appearance we know very little (Kafka’s Joseph K for instance) and others are memorable merely for what they do – such as Catherine Earnshaw, who even dies half way through Wuthering Heights.

The later chapters deal with some of the more subtle points of being creative – knowing what to leave out, striking the right tone, how to stay focused on the main event, and how to deal with setting and pace.

Many aspiring writers will complain that their favourite authors ignore these guidelines – and Lukeman admits that great writers break all the rules. But what he’s offering here is a guide to common mistakes which should be avoided. As he says, would-be writers from California to England to Turkey to Japan … do exactly the same things wrong

To get into print in the first instance you have to obey the literary norms of the day. And that’s what this book The First Five Pages is doing in its own modest way. Noah Lukeman just wants to show you how to stand out from the also-rans in the slush pile, as something worthy of notice.

The First Five Pages   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2010

Noah Lukeman, The First Five Pages, Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 2010, pp.191, ISBN: 0199575282

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The Forest for the Trees

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advice to writers – from an experienced editor

All authors, editors and publishers should read this book. Even those who think they know all about writing and the publishing process will find fresh ideas and perceptive insights. Betsy Lerner has a wealth of experience, from her youthful beginnings at Simon & Schuster to becoming executive editor at Doubleday and now as a literary agent. She writes with style, empathy, wit, realism, and above all humanity. In The Forest for the Trees she identifies five ‘writer types’, all of them familiar.

The Forest for the TreesThe Ambivalent Writer is one who can’t commit to a one idea for a story from the many possibles and who does not realise that writing is 90 per cent sheer sticking power. The Natural Writer is the one for whom writing appears to come easily. Or is that the myth of not realising that hard writing makes easy reading? Lerner’s definition of the ‘natural’ is one who is always writing. She cites Thurber who never quite knew when he was or wasn’t at it, ‘Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, “Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.”‘ For ‘natural’, maybe one should read ‘persistent’.

The Wicked Child relies on ‘kiss-and-tell’: someone who exposes family relationships, friends, acquaintances (or even, like Philip Roth, a whole tribe) in a more or less disguised fashion. personal relationships. The Self-promoter will do anything for fame – there are many such writers today, but it is a shock to realise that Walt Whitman shamelessly trumpeted himself from the roof-tops and sucked up to celebrity writers of the day. Emily Dickinson on the other hand died with 2000 poems unpublished .

The Neurotic makes a great fuss about the process itself – writing has to be done with an HB pencil, or on lined paper of exactly the right width. Few of these quirks are as eccentric as Dame Edith Sitwell who needed to start the day’s work by lying in an open coffin, but every reader will recognise such stalling techniques.

The second half of the book deals with the publishing process – everything from finding an agent to the book jacket and sales conference. Authors should be aware of what editors are looking for and what they can realistically expect from a publishing house. It would seem that a wad of rejection letters followed eventually by a book without a launch party and no reviews is completely the norm. And if authors turn up to read their books in local bookshops only to find they haven’t got any copies to sell, that’s par for the course too.

Naturally every author is looking for validation, but ten per cent of all titles earn ninety per cent of all revenues. Publishers are clearly going to concentrate on those at the top of their lists. Yet the truth seems to be that even the publishers don’t know which books are going to be in that top ten per cent. If they did, they probably wouldn’t print any of the others at all.

Lerner concludes: ‘Most of the disappointment that writers experience in having a book published can be traced back to their initial expectations – what most writers don’t understand … is that landing a contract and being published do not guarantee the fulfillment of all their hopes and dreams.’

Why do we do it?

© Jane Dorner 2004

The Forest for the Trees   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Betsy Learner, The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, New York: Riverhead Books/Penguin Putnam, revised and updated edition 2010, pp.304, ISBN: 159448483X

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The Oxford Comma

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also known as the serial or the Harvard comma

What is the Oxford Comma?

the Oxford comma
The Oxford comma is a name given to the mark of punctuation used before the final and when listing a series of items. Here’s an example.

There were a number of items on the table: a handbag, a penknife, a clock, and a walking stick.

The Oxford comma is the comma which comes before the last item – , and a walking stick.

The Oxford comma gets its name from the fact that is has traditionally been recommended by the Oxford University Press in its instructions to typesetters and printers. The latest OUP style guide, New Hart’s Rules continues to urge its use. It’s also known as the ‘serial comma’, or the ‘Harvard comma’ in the USA.

When a number of items are listed in a sentence, the normal way to present them is separated by commas. However, there are two schools of thought about the need for the final comma.

The sentence above would still be understandable if it were written as follows:

There were a number of items on the table: a handbag, a penknife, a clock and a walking stick.

Some people argue that the final comma can be omitted in many cases because it breaks up the natural flow of the sentence. That’s true in this example – but only because all the items are quite distinct and carry equal weight. The comma in this case can be used or omitted. However, in other cases ambiguity can easily arise if the comma is omitted.

This is particularly true if the list includes things of a different kind.

cider, real ales, meat and vegetable pies and sandwiches

This example could mean that in addition to cider and real ales, the list includes meat, plus vegetable pies, plus sandwiches. But is more likely to mean meat and vegetable pies, plus sandwiches.

A famous instance of the same thing is that attributed to the American science fiction writer Teresa Hayden, who dedicated one of her books in the following way.

To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

What she meant of course was ‘I am dedicating this book to my parents, to Ayn Rand, and to God’. Even that would have been pretentious enough, but the way she has expressed it, without the Oxford comma, the implication is that her parents were Ayn Rand and God.

A comma after the final and is not required when the last two items are a single expression or a ‘pair’

The menu offered us several options: roast beef, pasta bake, lamb chops, or fish and chips.

The comma should also be used if there is a grammatical extension to the list, as in this example.

brass, copper, bronze, and other non-ferrous materials

The need for the final comma become more acute when the list is a series of clauses in a single sentence.

The main points to consider are whether the competitors are skilful enough to complete the course, whether they have trained sufficiently for such a long race, and whether they are used to running at high altitude in these temperatures.

The commas in this example help the reader to understand a long statement made up of complex parts.

When the clauses in a complex sentence are themselves puctuated by commas, the separate clauses should be punctuated using the semicolon.

The outbreak of war was caused by a number of factors: Hitler’s determination to occupy Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland; the longstanding desire of Chamberlain and Daladier, as opposed to Winston Churchill, to avoid war at all costs; and Stalin’s cynical, last-minute pact with Hitler.

Even though the comma before the final ‘and’ is sometimes not required, it’s worth noting that it is never wrong. This is a good argument for always using it – to remove any possible ambiguity.

© Roy Johnson 2011

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