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general advice on writing,  good style, grammar, and clarity

general advice on writing, good style, grammar, and clarity

Spelling Guide

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beginner’s simple guide to spelling and language

Spelling worries many people. Understandably so, because mistakes in spelling are often regarded as a black mark in terms of literacy and written competence. Oxford University Press have just brought out a series of short beginners’ guides on communication skills. The emphasis is on compact, no-nonsense advice directly related to issues of everyday life. In his Spelling Guide Robert Allen takes a reassuring line in explaining why spelling is difficult in English, and he offers a variety of solutions to the problem.

Spelling Guide Beginners in particular will find his approach very helpful, and even advanced users will probably learn a thing or two. He starts by showing you how to use dictionaries, then how to use spell-checkers. He explains how and why English spellings have often become so irregular. And fortunately, he also explains the cases where some rules do apply.

Some of his advice tips over into tutorials on the nature of language – quite rightly. For instance, one good tip for many people is that the apostrophe in terms such as who’s and it’s stands for a missing letter. Knowing this might help you to understand the spelling, and help you put the apostrophe in the right place.

He deals with all the most common problems – not only the most notorious misplaced apostrophe, but the s/z issue in words such as realise/realize, and word endings, especially the doubling of consonants in words such as regret/regretted. (Yet it’s target/targeted – how strange!)

There’s a whole chapter explaining why spelling is such a complex issue. Basically, it’s because English is comprised of so many different languages. The influence of Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon, French, and German are all still actively present.

The second half of the book is a series of checklists of ‘problem’ words – short (weird) long (accommodation) confusables accept/except) noun and verb forms (advice/advise) how to choose the right ending (stationary/stationery) verb endings (finalize/surprise) irregular plurals (banjos/zeros) and words with Latin and Greek endings (addendum/vortex).

The chapters of this book are short, but almost every page is rich in hints and tips. The strength of this approach is that it avoids the encyclopedic volume of advice which in some manuals can be quite frightening. This is a book which will reassure those who need it.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Robert Allen, Spelling, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp.128, ISBN: 0198603835

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Students Must Write

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writing skills guide for coursework and examinations

Robert Barrass begins this guide Students Must Write with the important observation that students are judged largely on the quality of what they write. It is therefore very much in their interests to sharpen their writing skills for all forms of academic work. He starts from basics, covering taking notes in lectures, and how writing about something helps you to understand and remember it. His advice is punctuated with well-chosen quotations from famous writers, indicating that they struggle too. They write, re-write, plan, edit, scrap drafts, and treat writing as a process. It’s not a one-off action. He analyses examples of slack writing and shows both the weaknesses and how they might be overcome.

Students Must WriteThere’s also a chapter on words – choosing items of vocabulary to make your writing more effective. To support this he adds some wonderfully useful lists of misused words, circumlocutions and malapropisms – but they are somewhat buried inside the chapters when I think they could have been highlighted to greater effect.

There is a particularly good chapter on how to deal with numbers, diagrams, graphs, charts, and tables. This includes such nice points as the order of presenting the slices of a pie chart – clockwise, starting from the largest at noon. [Bet you didn’t know that!]

His tips on exam technique are sound enough – as is his advice on longer pieces of work such as dissertations and reports. He even covers writing letters – applying for that job after you have graduated. And he ends with tips on using word-processors, a few words on punctuation, and a brief guide to spelling and how to overcome some of the common problems.

This is a book for people who want a general stroll through the process of language and writing. It moves from one topic to another in a casual manner. There is a downside and an upside to this approach. The downside is its weakness in terms of organisational rigour. But the upside is that it might make some of the issues of writing less intimidating for the very students to whom this book is addressed.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Robert Barrass, Students Must Write: A Guide to Better Writing in Coursework and Examinations, London: Routledge, third edition, 2005, pp.232, ISBN: 0415358264

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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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StyleWriter

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grammar, spelling, and editing software program

Lots of people don’t like spelling-checkers and grammar-checkers. It’s no fun having your weaknesses highlighted. Yet they can save you from many embarrassing mistakes – and you can learn good writing habits from them. STYLEWRITER tries to overcome this problem by offering a wide palette of distinctions and a selection of writing styles from which to choose. Its stated aim is to help users produce plain English. As the guidance notes say, “A low average sentence length and a low Passive Index makes your writing much more readable and interesting.”

StylewriterThe program is invoked from within your word-processor, and it works by splitting the screen in two. The top window reveals several lines of your text, with any problems highlighted. This has the advantage that individual items can be seen in their grammatical context.

The highlights are also colour-coded: dark red for suggested improvements, black for misused words, and bright red for spelling mistakes. The bottom window contains your original file, which can be edited. This editing function is commendably efficient: it takes the cursor to the exact spot in your text where corrections will be made. A full help system is available from pull-down menus, and this also includes tips on punctuation, grammar, and appropriate style.

At the end of the check, a full statistical report is available. This includes a word and sentence count, and a natty bar chart with encouraging comments on your results [Sentence-length ‘Excellent!’] There is also a summary which reveals the number of occurrences of features such as complex words, business clichés, foreign words, hidden verbs, and jargon. These can all be customised.

It is easy to observe that many great prose stylists would not pass the test of the forty word maximum sentence length which the program recommends. Henry James would only just be approaching the subject of his sentence after such a short preamble, and his verb would be still some way off. But for we lesser mortals the strictures are probably useful.

So – the program is well worth recommending. I ditched Grammatik in its favour, hardly without thinking. The publishers have recently dropped the price if you download it from their website.

It also allows you to choose the type of writing you wish to check and edit – so it copes with the various requirements for writing by lawyers, government officials, engineers, educators, or accountants. There’s even a setting for ‘creative’ writing that permits the bending of grammatical rules.

But on the whole it aims to produce witing which is shorter, clearer, and free from cloudiness and jargon. You even get a statistical summary of what you write (keep an eye on those long sentences) and if you don’t agree with a particular item of advice, you can remove it. On the other hand you can add rules and dictionary items.

The latest version has been completely re-vamped, and the best feature of all that’s been added is a free trial version which you can download here.

© Roy Johnson 2002

StyleWriter: the plain English editor – Version 4. Editor Software, 64 Woodmancote, Dursley, Glos, GL11 4AQ, England. Tel: 01453-548409

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Subediting for Journalists

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the art and skills of subediting for publication

The best thing about Subediting for Journalists is that it is quite clearly based on practical experience in professional journalism. There are some interesting accounts from newspaper and magazine journalists describing exactly how they work. It’s all to do with rigour and attention to detail. They deal with the basics of house style – adhering to a set of standards in spelling and representation. This means taking care with punctuation and grammar, spotting cliché, and getting names right.

Subediting for JournalistsMost of what they have to say concerns correcting common mistakes – dangling participles, misused phrases, and unnecessary repetition. Anyone who wants to improve their writing skills could learn valuable lessons here. They also cover all those grammatical niceties such as that/which and who/whom which you look up then forget about by the next time you need to use them. The advice they give could not be more up to date:

your publication …. could be printed, it could be uploaded onto a website, it could be cannibalised for delivery to WAP or G3 mobile phones and it could also appear on television.

There are plenty of examples of re-written news items which illustrate the advice being given. They deal neatly with issues of names, dates, places, accuracy, and getting to the point. There are sections on writing headlines and photograph captions. These need to be snappy, but the advice is the same in both cases – make it accurate.

They outline the main legal and ethical problems confronting subeditors – issues of copyright, libel, slander, defamation, and contempt of court.

They also explain the print production process. This includes the use of computer software such as Quark Publishing System (QPS) to control what can become a very complex collection of documents. It’s like a peek behind the scenes for the uninitiated.

There’s also a chapter on print technology which won’t tell you much about subediting, but which is a fascinating sketch of the revolution which took place in 1983 when hot metal was replaced by digital typesetting.

They finish with a chapter on subediting web pages. They conclude with a glossary of journalism terms, a sample house style guide, and standard proof correction symbols in UK and US style.

This is a good book. It’s readable, written by people who are clearly well-informed, and just about as up-to-date as it’s possible to be in the old-ish world of print publication.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Wynford Hicks and Tim Holmes, Subediting for Journalists, London: Routledge, 2002, pp.180, ISBN: 0415240859

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Teaching Academic Writing

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a toolkit for writing skills in further and higher education

No matter what subjects students engage with in further and higher education, they will be required to produce written work on which they will be assessed. This could be the formal academic essay, a lab report, a project, a case study, or even a reflective journal. Teaching Academic Writing is designed to assist subject lecturers and writing skills tutors whose job it is to help students develop their written work and grasp the conventions of academic argument and expression.

Teaching Academic Writing The need for this assistance has arisen as larger and larger numbers of students enter F & HE – often from non-traditional backgrounds, and sometimes with `English as a second language. The authors (a group of tutors from the Open University) start off by suggesting that teachers should make explicit the writing tasks they set for students. It can no longer be assumed that students will already know what an academic essay requires them to do – or that they will pick up the idea as they go along.

Next comes making them conscious of the appropriate academic register, as well as eradicating grammatical errors. There’s no quick fix for this: it requires a lot of intensive marking and supportive feedback. But I was surprised they didn’t spot the time-saving device of putting guidance notes on line.

However, their suggestions on pre-writing (notes), brainstorming, and planning should be useful as tools for teaching students that almost no form of successful writing comes fully-formed, straight from the head of the writer.

At a time when modular degrees are becoming more popular, it’s important that students are aware of the differing conventions which obtain in various subjects. These can vary from the ‘hard evidence’ required in sciences to the ‘well-informed opinion’ which is accepted as persuasive argument in the arts. Somewhere in between are the social sciences which attempt to combine the two. Once again, they argue very sensibly that these conventions should be made explicit to students if they are to have any chance of succeeding in their work.

They also show examples of such work and offer exercises which are designed to raise students’ awareness of what’s required. The close examination of a case study in business studies reveals the particular difficulty of writing for two audiences at the same time.

The next chapter deals explicitly with the issue of assessment. Once again the advice is to make the assessment criteria clear to both students and tutors alike. And their advice on providing feedback on assessed work is excellent. It would be good to see the marking pro-formas and guidance notes in more widespread general use.

However, what they don’t take into account is the important factor that making assignments thoroughly is a time-intensive activity, and many tutors can skimp on this part of their duties because they know their work will not be closely monitored. Moreover, since much direct teaching and assignment marking in F & HE is now done by hourly paid post-graduates, they are place in the invidious position of working for the rates of a domestic cleaner, exploiting themselves in order to stay in employment. [This is a subject close to my heart, which I discuss in my own book on Marking Essays.]

They finish with a first rate chapter on academic writing in an electronic environment. This covers all the digital tools available – from word-processors and email, to conferencing and discussion forums, and online writing laboratories (OWLs) and the strategies by which materials located on line can be evaluated for their usefulness.

Tutors at any level of F & HE would do themselves a favour by rehearsing the issues raised in this book. It might be written by what is almost a committee, but it’s got a collective’s combined experience written into it.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Caroline Coffin et al, Teaching Academic Writing, London: Routledge, 2003, pp.175, ISBN 0415261368

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The Art of Punctuation

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how to use common marks of punctuation

Noah Lukeman is a writers’ agent with a lot of top class clients, so maybe he knows whereof he speaks on this issue. He is concerned with the business of clarifying your writing by using punctuation in an efficient manner. The unique selling point in The Art of Punctuation is that there are no grammar lessons and no attempt to bore the reader with rules and conventions. Instead, he seeks to inform by showing examples of successful use by well-known authors.

The Art of PunctuationAnd his exposition is aimed at creative writers, who I suspect will enjoy this approach. Most of his argument is posed in the form of metaphors (commas: the speed bumps of punctuation) and when he analyses examples, he tries to show how professional writers achieve their special effects. He starts off with an examination of what he rightly identifies as the ultimate basic set, which he calls ‘the triumvirate’ – the comma, semicolon, and the full stop. It’s amazing how much there is to say about them.

You might disagree with some of his arguments. I don’t think it’s a good idea to discuss the dash and brackets at the same time, as if they perform the same function, But on the whole readers unsure about punctuation are likely to profit from what he has to say.

He illustrates his guidance with brief quotes from famous writers – all of which I think will make readers more sensitive to the subtleties of punctuation.

No iron can stab the heart with such force as a full stop put just at the right place. — Isaac Babel

I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th century writer were ‘I should have used fewer semicolons’. — Lynn Truss

By its very form (;) the semicolon betrays its dual nature; it is both period and comma. — Eric Partridge

He’s quite good on quotation marks, and I think anyone writing character-based work would do well to look closely at the variety of different ways dialogue can be presented in prose fiction.

The same is true of the paragraph. This in my experience is a much neglected aspect of giving structure to writing. I spend a lot of time teaching my students how to identify a topic, how to introduce it, discuss it, and conclude in such a way that brings the topic to a close yet leads on to the next.

This is a non-technical and non-judgemental approach to the subject of how to give pace, flow, and cadence to your writing. It’s also full of insider tips which he drops in from time to time. For instance, he reveals that publishers’ readers will know on the first page of your submitted work if its punctuation is amateurish or professional. And they will know by page five if it goes in the bin or not. So be warned. Get it right.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Noah Lukeman, The Art of Punctuation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.208, ISBN 0199210780

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The Basics of Essay Writing

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how to develop and improve your essay-writing skills

The main thing to say here about The Basics of Essay Writing is that it’s very short. Nigel Warburton has compressed the essential points of essay-writing skills into an amazingly small space. He’s done this by using a technique which could be recommended to people writing in any literary form. It’s called ‘cutting out the dross’. His ideas and recommendations come thick and fast, and he doesn’t dwell on anything for very long. The result is a highly concentrated series of tips, advice, and guidance on all aspects of academic writing.

The Basics of Essay Writing He begins by pointing out the importance of writing skills – how everyone can improve with just a few simple steps, and how writing is a form of thinking. It really is true that often you don’t really understand something properly until you have written it down. He deals with getting started, and how to encourage your own fluency; how to understand the instruction terms in an essay question; and how you must keep in mind the most important thing of all – answering the original question.

Research skills are condensed into the very sound advice that you need to be disciplined. You should not ‘get lost’ in reading everything, and your reading should be accompanied by active note-taking as a preparation for producing your essay plan.

The central part of the book deals with the all-important issue of structure: how to create order, marshal your arguments, and write good introductions and conclusions. In my experience this is the part students find hardest, and if you follow his suggestions it should be more manageable.

There’s a good section on plagiarism and referencing where he shows some practical examples of the various degrees of plagiarism which are possible, even when the original source is acknowledged.

Cultivating an appropriate style is dealt with via tips on tone, vocabulary, spelling, and punctuation. There’s a section on dealing with exams, and he ends with general advice for improving your writing. He shows a rogue’s gallery of common mistakes – of which he has obviously seen many.

Nigel Warburton is the principal author of a very successful Open University course on essay-writing skills. In fact (without knowing him in the slightest) I have been tutoring it for the last few years, and I have been repeatedly struck by the thoroughness of its approach. All the students who follow the course recommendations pass with flying colours.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Nigel Warburton, The Basics of Essay Writing, London: Routledge, 2007, pp.128, ISBN: 0415434041

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The Classic Guide to Better Writing

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guide to writing skills basics – plus grammar and spelling

This is a book with three titles. The Classic Guide to Better Writing was originally The Way to Write, and it has also been issued by Warner books as The New Guide to Better Writing. What does this mean? Well, my guess is that it indicates a compilation of sound advice which has been successfully marketed in various guises. As the blurb claims, “The book that has taught millions the art of writing well”. You also get the benefit of many revisions and new editions in its lifetime.

The Classic Guide to Better WritingFlesch and Lass are emphatic planners. They start off with what they claim as the three essential chapters – the need to plan, how to generate ideas, and how to put these ideas into some order. There’s a reassuring tone, and they cover many different kinds of writing. They even discuss the common mistakes and distractions which prevent people from writing well. I think this is what has made this book a best-seller: they keep the needs of their readers in mind.

The first part of the book discusses the construction of paragraphs; linking ideas and statements; audience and tone; clauses, phrases, and sentence construction; brevity, clarity, and avoiding ambiguity. Their advice is academically based, but chapters on making your writing more direct, interesting, and even amusing will appeal to general readers and those with a penchant for creative writing. However, they issue a warning that “This book won’t make you into another Shakespeare…But it will, we hope, teach you to write simply, clearly, correctly”

Part two tackles basic grammatical problems – double negatives; agreement of verb and subject; incomplete sentences; commonly confused words (affect/effect, imply/infer, lie/lay) spelling; quotations; awkward plurals (Mrs, court-martial, zero) and capitalization.

They do take the traditional [and perhaps outdated] view that you need to know the grammatical terminology for effects which most people use instinctively (‘relative pronouns’, ‘object of a preposition’) but fortunately every topic is illustrated with good examples, and anyone with the discipline to work through their exercises would give themselves a thorough grounding in the fundamentals.

Like many other classic guides, you get the advantage of a low price, because the publishers can afford to be generous, having made their money with earlier printings of a best-seller. This is a good-value manual on the principles of clear writing. Make sure you get the latest, 50th anniversary edition.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Rudolph Flesch and A.H.Lass, A Classic Guide to Better Writing, New York: Harper, 1966, pp.288, ISBN 0062730487

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The Economist Style Guide

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best-selling guide to English usage and style rules

The Economist prides itself on good quality writing. The Economist Style Guide is the print version of their in-house guide on grammar and English usage which they issue to all their journalists. It’s designed to promote precision and clarity in writing – and the advice it offers is expressed in a witty and succinct manner. It gives general advice on writing skills, points out common errors and cliches, offers guidance on consistent use of punctuation, abbreviations and capital letters, and contains an exhaustive range of reference material.

The Economist Style GuideIt also includes a special section on American and British English, a fifty-four page fact checker, and a glossary. I particularly like the section called ‘Common Solecisms’ which warns against popular misunderstandings and points to words often used incorrectly.

Anticipate does not mean expect. Jack and Jill expected to marry; if they anticipated marriage, only Jill might find herself expectant.

The emphasis of the illustrative examples is on current affairs, politics, economics, and business – but the lessons in clear expression and the examples of tangled syntax and garbled journalese will be instructive to all writers who wish to sharpen their style.

It takes quite a tilt at the language of political correctness – and I think some of the following advice might be challenged. But it is so refreshingly un-stuffy, one reads on with a smile in the mind.

Avoid, where possible, euphemisms and circumlocutions promoted by interest-groups. In most contexts the hearing-impaired are simply deaf. It is no disrespect to the disabled sometimes to describe them as crippled. Female teenagers are girls, not women. The underprivileged may be disadvantaged, but are more likely just poor.

The guidance is arranged in logical, separate sections – political terms, metaphors, apostrophes, spelling, Americanisms – so you can easily find what you need. The bulk of the advice deals with common problems of English such as the difference between ‘compare with‘ and ‘compare to‘, but I was glad to see that rather like Keith Waterhouse (Waterhouse on Newspaper Style they do not leave the excesses of their own profession unexamined.

Avoid expressions used only by journalists, such as giving people the thumbs up, the thumbs down or the green light. Stay clear of gravy trains and salami tactics.

© Roy Johnson 2010

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The Economist Style Guide, London: Economist Books, 10th edition 2010, pp.272, ISBN: 1846681758

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