Japn 230 Writing Tips

Good clear writing is a rarity. But it shouldn't be. It is partly about writing short, clear sentences because, as writing guru Verlyn Klinkenborg notes:

Knowing what you’re trying to say is always important. 

But knowing what you’ve actually said is crucial. 

It’s easier to tell what you’re saying in a short sentence. 

This seems obvious: you can look back over and edit a short sentence much more easily than you can a long complex one. He cautions us,

You’ve been taught to believe that short sentences are childish,

Merely a first step toward writing longer sentences.

You’d like to think your education has carried you well past short sentences. 

But you’ve been delivered into a wilderness of false assumptions and bad habits,

A desert of jargon and weak constructions,

A land of linguistic barbarism, a place where it’s nearly impossible to write with clarity or directness,

Without clichés or meaningless phrases.

He goes on to explain:

A cliché is dead matter.

It causes gangrene in the prose around it, and sooner or later it eats your brain.

You can’t fix a cliché by using it ironically.

You can’t make it less gangrenous by appearing to “quote” it or invert it or joke about it.

A cliché isn’t just a familiar, overused saying.

It’s the debris of someone else’s thinking.

 

So how do we avoid repeating "the debris of someone else’s thinking"?

Klinkenborg believes that a central fact of our education is this:

The problem is that we have been taught to believe that what we discover by our own thinking,

By examining our own thoughts and perceptions,

Is unimportant and unauthorized.

 

As a result, all too often, we fear thinking,

And we don’t believe our thoughts are interesting,

Because we haven’t learned to be interested in them.

 

[But] the reality is:

If you notice something, it’s because it’s important.

But what you notice depends on what you allow yourself to notice,

And that depends on what you feel authorized or permitted to notice

In a world where we’re trained to disregard our perceptions.

Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important?

It will have to be you.

Then, this authority you give yourself, has a great deal to do with how you write, and what you write,

With your ability to pay attention to the shape and meaning of your thoughts,

And the value of your own perceptions.

from Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences about Writing (2013)

 

 

We might wish to news were better; that there is some easier fix. But, the reality is only we can be in charge of what we think and say, and at least for a while, the best way to do this is to write short clear sentences and then read them to see what they actually say.

 

But, alas,

 

In school we learned to write as if the reader Were in constant danger of getting lost,

A problem we were taught to solve not by writing clearly

But by shackling our sentences and paragraphs together.

We were taught to think about transitions. Remember?

Late in the paragraph you must prepare for the transition to the next paragraph—

To take that great leap over the void, across that yawning indentation.

You were taught the art of the flying trapeze,

But not how to write. 

 

So writing well sometimes means we have to let go, to unlearn, what we have been taught.

 

 

 

 

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