On Writing Well | Alessandro Desantis

Highlights

Nobody told all the new computer writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they’re writing fluently doesn’t mean they’re writing well.
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.
Clutter is the laborious phrase that has pushed out the short word that means the same thing.
Clutter is the ponderous euphemism that turns a slum into a depressed socioeconomic area, garbage collectors into waste-disposal personnel and the town dump into the volume reduction unit.
Clutter is political correctness gone amok.
Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
Don’t dialogue with someone you can talk to. Don’t interface with anybody.
Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author’s voice.
Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away.
Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore a fundamental rule is: be yourself.
“Who am I to say what I think?” they ask. “Or what I feel?” “Who are you not to say what you think?” I tell them. “There’s only one you. Nobody else thinks or feels in exactly the same way.”
Never say anything in writing that you wouldn’t comfortably say in conversation. If you’re not a person who says “indeed” or “moreover,” or who calls someone an individual (“he’s a fine individual”), please don’t write it.
You’ll never make your mark as a writer unless you develop a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning that is almost obsessive.
Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what was written by earlier masters. Writing is learned by imitation.
They enjoyed not only the arrangement but the effort to entertain them. They weren’t enjoying it, however, with their eyes. They were hearing the words in their inner ear.
If all your sentences move at the same plodding gait, which even you recognize as deadly but don’t know how to cure, read them aloud.
See if you can gain variety by reversing the order of a sentence, or by substituting a word that has freshness or oddity, or by altering the length of your sentences so they don’t all sound as if they came out of the same machine. An occasional short sentence can carry a tremendous punch. It stays in the reader’s ear.
Good usage, to me, consists of using good words if they already exist—as they almost always do—to express myself clearly and simply to someone else.
You learn to write by writing. It’s a truism, but what makes it a truism is that it’s true.
Unity is the anchor of good writing. So, first, get your unities straight. Unity not only keeps the reader from straggling off in all directions; it satisfies your readers’ subconscious need for order and reassures them that all is well at the helm. Therefore choose from among the many variables and stick to your choice.
Most nonfiction writers have a definitiveness complex. They feel that they are under some obligation—to the subject, to their honor, to the gods of writing—to make their article the last word. It’s a commendable impulse, but there is no last word.
every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn’t have before.
The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn’t induce him to continue to the third sentence, it’s equally dead.
Therefore your lead must capture the reader immediately and force him to keep reading. It must cajole him with freshness, or novelty, or paradox, or humor, or surprise, or with an unusual idea, or an interesting fact, or a question. Anything will do, as long as it nudges his curiosity and tugs at his sleeve.
But take special care with the last sentence of each paragraph—it’s the crucial springboard to the next paragraph. Try to give that sentence an extra twist of humor or surprise, like the periodic “snapper” in the routine of a stand-up comic. Make the reader smile and you’ve got him for at least one more paragraph.
Knowing when to end an article is far more important than most writers realize. You should give as much thought to choosing your last sentence as you did to your first.
The perfect ending should take your readers slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right. They didn’t expect the article to end so soon, or so abruptly, or to say what it said. But they know it when they see it.
For the nonfiction writer, the simplest way of putting this into a rule is: when you’re ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.
Use active verbs unless there is no comfortable way to get around using a passive verb. The difference between an activeverb style and a passive-verb style—in clarity and vigor—is the difference between life and death for a writer.
I use “perpetrated” because it’s the kind of word that passive-voice writers are fond of. They prefer long words of Latin origin to short Anglo-Saxon words—which compounds their trouble and makes their sentences still more glutinous. Short is better than long.
Verbs are the most important of all your tools. They push the sentence forward and give it momentum. Active verbs push hard; passive verbs tug fitfully.
Probably no other language has such a vast supply of verbs so bright with color. Don’t choose one that is dull or merely serviceable. Make active verbs activate your sentences, and avoid the kind that need an appended preposition to complete their work.
Most adverbs are unnecessary. You will clutter your sentence and annoy the reader if you choose a verb that has a specific meaning and then add an adverb that carries the same meaning.
Most adjectives are also unnecessary. Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don’t stop to think that the concept is already in the noun.
Not every oak has to be gnarled. The adjective that exists solely as decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader.
Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be confused. Be tired. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.
If you find yourself hopelessly mired in a long sentence, it’s probably because you’re trying to make the sentence do more than it can reasonably do—perhaps express two dissimilar thoughts.
Humor is best achieved by understatement, and there’s nothing subtle about an exclamation point.
Learn to alert the reader as soon as possible to any change in mood from the previous sentence. At least a dozen words will do this job for you: “but,” “yet,” “however,” “nevertheless,” “still,” “instead,” “thus,” “therefore,” “meanwhile,” “now,” “later,” “today,” “subsequently” and several more.
Always make sure your readers are oriented. Always ask yourself where you left them in the previous sentence.
Always use “that” unless it makes your meaning ambiguous.
Don’t get caught holding a bag full of abstract nouns. You’ll sink to the bottom of the lake and never be seen again.
Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual—it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain. Short paragraphs put air around what you write and make it look inviting, whereas a long chunk of type can discourage a reader from even starting to read.
Writing is like a good watch—it should run smoothly and have no extra parts.
The assumption is that fact and color are two separate ingredients. They’re not; color is organic to the fact. Your job is to present the colorful fact.
Try not to use words like “surprisingly,” “predictably” and “of course,” which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.
Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does—in his own words.
Never go into an interview without doing whatever homework you can. If you are interviewing a town official, know his or her voting record. If it’s an actress, know what plays or movies she has been in. You will be resented if you inquire about facts you could have learned in advance.
Most men and women lead lives, if not of quiet desperation, at least of desperate quietness, and they jump at a chance to talk about their work to an outsider who seems eager to listen.
Don’t become the prisoner of your quotes—so lulled by how wonderful they sound that you don’t stop to analyze them. Never let anything go out into the world that you don’t understand.
If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion; it’s probably one of the countless clichés that have woven their way so tightly into the fabric of travel writing that you have to make a special effort not to use them.
Eliminate every such fact that is a known attribute: don’t tell us that the sea had waves and the sand was white.
Never be afraid to write about a place that you think has had every last word written about it. It’s not your place until you write about it.
True wit, however, is rare, and a thousand barbed arrows fall at the feet of the archer for every one that flies.
The most boring sentence in the daily newspaper is the last sentence of the editorial, which says “It is too early to tell whether the new policy will work” or “The effectiveness of the decision remains to be seen.” If it’s too early to tell, don’t bother us with it, and as for what remains to be seen, everything remains to be seen. Take your stand with conviction.
Humor is the secret weapon of the nonfiction writer. It’s secret because so few writers realize that humor is often their best tool—and sometimes their only tool—for making an important point.
Humor, to them, is urgent work. It’s an attempt to say important things in a special way that regular writers aren’t getting said in a regular way—or if they are, it’s so regular that nobody is reading it.
“I’m here and I’m involved”: make that your creed if you want to write serious humor.
Write with respect for the English language at its best—and for readers at their best.
Writers have to jump-start themselves at the moment of performance, no less than actors and dancers and painters and musicians.
I’m often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task—the day’s work—and not with some enjoyment.
Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested. That’s almost the whole point of becoming a writer.
Moral: any time you can tell a story in the form of a quest or a pilgrimage you’ll be ahead of the game. Readers bearing their own associations will do some of your work for you.
Readers can process only one idea at a time, and they do it in linear sequence. Much of the trouble that writers get into comes from trying to make one sentence do too much work. Never be afraid to break a long sentence into two short ones, or even three.
No writing decision is too small to be worth a large expenditure of time. Both you and the reader know it when your finicky labor is rewarded by a sentence coming out right.
As a nonfiction writer you must get on the plane. If a subject interests you, go after it, even if it’s in the next county or the next state or the next country. It’s not going to come looking for you.
Besides wanting to write as well as possible, I wanted to write as entertainingly as possible.
You must find some way to elevate your act of writing into an entertainment. Usually this means giving the reader an enjoyable surprise. Any number of devices will do the job: humor, anecdote, paradox, an unexpected quotation, a powerful fact, an outlandish detail, a circuitous approach, an elegant arrangement of words. These seeming amusements in fact become your “style.”
If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft.