Tag Archives: writing style

w00t! ESCAPED from yesterday’s miasma

Managed to break free from yesterday’s craziness and finally finish Chapter 2 for the Boob Book. Not gonna rehearse today’s little triumph because it’s described in detail over here.

More of interest to the writerly set: The word count for the introduction, two chapters, and two appendices is right at 10,600.

The chapters plus the intro average 2800 words apiece. The appendices (all two of them): 1090 words each.

So, if those numbers stay consistent throughout, the 11 chapters and 5 appendices should add up to a total word count of just under 40,000 words.

That’s not very long; one would like to be closer to 80,000, for a book-length work. However, there’s a glossary — heaven only knows how long that will run. I found a large cache of definitions at a government site; ergo in the public domain. I’ll probably use most or all of those, which will inflate the word count significantly. And as we speak, I have 21 pages of references, single-spaced, set up in Chicago style. That stands at 4874 words just now.

So the references alone push the word count to around 45,000 words. If the glossary comes in at around 3,000 words (???), that would make it 48,000. Add an index, maybe another thousand words (counting numbers as words…). Hm.

Well, they say shorter is better these days, moderns not being much on reading. We shall see.

Spent this afternoon studying and outlining downloads from Kindle Unlimited, by way of building the new racy-novel enterprise.

My goodness, there’s some bad writing out there! These things are awful. Full of dangling modifiers (some of them truly hilarious), typos, unidiomatic language (“grinded”; “withering” for “writhing”; and on and on), lapses in point of view, characters dissolving pointlessly in laughter, eye-glazing clichés…

Oh, well. Clearly literature is not what people are buying the things for. 😀

A few of them do display fairly workmanlike writing, and some are even done with style and humor. But even those self-consciously deploy tried-and-true tropes. There’s quite a sameness to these things, especially where the female characters are concerned:

The female character almost invariably is said to be lonely: either she describes herself as lonely, explicitly, or some other character observes or speculates that she’s lonely.

As the story unwinds, the woman is “rescued” in some way from an unhappy relationship with a former husband/boyfriend. Male lover(s) sex is better, kinder, hotter, more positive all the way around.

Female character yearns for change or sometimes simply for an outrageous spree.

She often is described as feeling self-conscious or insecure about herself.

Attraction is immediate, as you’d expect in such short pieces – the characters lust after each other at first glance.

Men are described as “gods”

Men are often described as cooking or doing some other domestic activity; this seems to be part of his appeal or at least a repeating trope.

Hm. We’ll redact some of these other observations, lest the young, the impressionable, or the tender be reading. Suffice it to say that all the way across the board, a kind of monotony reigns.

It explains why some very, very silly things rise to the top in this genre. Like the series about the woman who gets it on with Bigfoot.

Heee! Yes. That one is said to be authored by a SAHM who home-schools the kiddies.

And that factoid also explains something. I suppose.

Write Tight! Part I

Write Tight!

–E. B. White

Kinda doubt that E. B. White ever put it quite that way, but the message is the gist of William Strunk and E. B. White’s Elements of Style, the bible of journalistic and business writers. Write tight! is a marginal note I paste into student papers, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and o…

Well, to be fair, few of my students have ever heard of Strunk and White. And even they did, it wouldn’t do them much good. Creatures of an earlier era, when children learned basic English grammar in grade school (yeah: back in the day, grade school was actually called “grammar school”!) , Bill Strunk and E. B. White wrote their indispensable guide under the assumption that readers understood what was meant by terms like “subject” and “predicate,” and that they could tell the difference between an independent and a dependent clause. That, alas, is no longer true.

If you’ve found your way here because you want to be a Writer with a Capital W, or because you are already such a creature, you probably own a copy of Strunk and White. If you don’t, buy it: you can get a paperback copy for something between five and seven dollars. It’s short and it’s just not that hard to figure out. You need it.

The admonition to write tight means that a good writer tries to express ideas in as few words as possible without sounding like she or he is texting. Write economically. Always write as economically as possible.

Readers in general are happy to find prose of any kind written clearly, in concise, interesting, easy-to-follow language. This applies across the board, to all kinds of writing. It applies to technical writing, for example, where you may write a manual that explains how a computer program or a technical device works. It applies to business writing, from daily correspondence to the annual report. It applies to journalistic nonfiction. It applies to fiction (think Hemingway!).

To make every word count is to “write tight.” The principles of tight writing are described in brief in William Strunk and E.B. White’s short and famous book, The Elements of Style. You should read it and come to know it well. If you plan on a career that requires a lot of writing—or if you’d just like to write for the fun of it—you should memorize this book. In particular, check out “Rule 17,” which says:

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all details and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Over time, two strategies for developing a “tight,” economical writing style have coalesced in my schemes to communicate the whole idea to grammar-blind, style-innocent classmates. One consists of a few very simple mechanical tricks, things anyone can easily memorize and apply. The other: techniques of what I call “composition and style.” The second does require you to understand a little bit of how language works, and to engage your brain to make your language work the way you want it to work.

Tomorrow I’ll offer a few mechanical devices to help build economy into your writing style. And later this week, we can look at techniques of composition and style that, once internalized, you can apply to make your writing more effective and engaging.

Watch this space!