Avoid These Bad Writing Habits
Random House’s lead editor has a book on what you should and shouldn’t do when writing, and people are already arguing about it. All writing advice is relative, because language is not physics, it is something people invented. This does not mean that writing tips are useless, so if you love to write and are trying to get better, you should read this excerpt from Benjamin Dreyer’s book Dreyer’s English: The Perfect Guide to Clarity and Style .
In this particular piece, Dreyer mainly focuses on the “bad habits” that writers fall into, at the sentence and word choices level. Some of Dreyer’s advice only applies to narrative writing, but much applies to all forms of writing, down to particularly important emails. For instance:
Beware of random rhymes like “Rob went to work” or “make sure everything’s okay today.” By “caution,” I mean don’t do it.
AND:
You writers are overly addicted to “Then,” which can usually be shortened to “Then,” or get rid of it altogether.
As with Strunk & White , you can choose from Dreyer’s advice. You won’t agree with all the rules, but you will likely find something helpful that will make your letter clearer or more persuasive.
If you do write fiction, there is a lot of solid and tiny advice. My personal favorite is the solution for the awkward suggestions required by the flashback:
For fiction written in the past tense, here is a technique for eliminating memories that I stumbled upon years ago, and the writers I shared with them were generally very excited: start your recollection with, say, two or three standard – issue had’s (“Jerome visited his brother in Boston earlier that year”), then pin one or two more had’s on a low-key “d” (“After a particularly unpleasant dinner, he decided to go home right away”), and then completely discard the past -Improve, when no one is inclined to pay attention, and immerse yourself in the simple past (“He unlocked the front door, as he later recalled, shortly after midnight”). Works like a charm.
As a writer, I never needed a trick like this, but as a reader I was thrilled. That’s what writing tips is so much fun – you don’t have to be a writer to appreciate them.
Are these bad habits creeping into your letter? | Lighted hub