Imagine yourself recruiting a long-distance runner to deliver an important message. What kind of person will you choose: a lean, strong athlete with well-toned muscles and powerful lungs, or a podgy, unfit couch potato who will wheeze and pant up the first few hills before collapsing in exhaustion? The answer is obvious. Yet far too many writers send their best ideas out into the world on brittle-boned sentences weighted down with rhetorical flab.
This book will help you energise your writing, boost your verbal fitness and strip unnecessary padding from your prose. But whereas a successful exercise regime typically requires weeks or months of sustained effort before you see tangible results, here you will learn how to strengthen and tone your sentences with the stroke of a pen or the click of a mouse. The rules are deceptively simple: use active verbs whenever possible; favour concrete language over vague abstractions; avoid long strings of prepositional phrases; employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute something new to the meaning of a sentence; and finally, reduce your dependence on four pernicious ‘waste words’: it, this, that and there.
As with any fitness routine, adhering to these five principles requires energy and vigilance. The results, however, will speak for themselves. Your sentences will become sturdier and more energetic, and your ideas will fit more comfortably on your newly shapely prose.
Whether you are a student, an academic, a journalist, a fiction writer or even a poet, this book will help you develop healthy writing habits and see your own words with new eyes. Each chapter takes you on a guided tour of some of the world’s finest sentences – and some truly dreadful ones as well. Along the way, you will learn how to pep up your prose without losing your sense of style.
Crucially, The Writer’s Diet does not target beginning writers only. All too often, the most intellectually sophisticated authors are the ones who produce the most ungainly prose. Those who go on to pursue advanced academic degrees quickly learn the power of jargon, which functions within many professional spheres like a secret handshake among initiates. Over time, even the most experienced authors may lose their sense of perspective and come to regard impenetrable prose as ‘normal’. This book furnishes a reality check, a way for you to measure your own writing against the best and worst by your colleagues.
The Writer’s Diet provides no ‘big picture’ advice on argument or audience, no instruction on composition or paragraph structure, no primer on ‘correct’ grammar and punctuation. Instead, the book zeroes in on five common problems that frequently plague unfit sentences and offers practical exercises to help you develop healthier writing habits.
The five chapters of this book correspond to the five sections of the WritersDiet Test, a tongue-in-cheek diagnostic instrument that tells you whether your writing is ‘flabby or fit’. You can take the test online at www.writersdiet.com or follow the manual instructions at the back of the book.
Some writers use the WritersDiet Test to pinpoint problems in specific passages; others submit longer samples and try to identify overall patterns in their work. Either way, the test offers a heuristic, not a rigid formula or set of rules. Ask yourself: Did I write this way on purpose? Do I like the results?
The WritersDiet Test will help you identify signature patterns in your work: a weakness for be-verbs, perhaps, or a penchant for prepositional phrases. Maybe you will even spot some verbal tics not highlighted by the test itself. Many writers find that their scores change significantly depending on what kind of sample they test: a personal essay, for example, typically contains more concrete nouns and active verbs than an academic journal abstract, which is likely to be, well, more abstract.
‘Can good writing really be reduced to a numerical formula?’ you ask. No, of course not; the work of the world’s finest authors will always resist quantitative analysis. The WritersDiet Test makes no attempt to measure for vividness of expression, clarity of thought, fluidity of style or any of the other elements that matter most in good writing. Confident stylists understand the value of flaunting the rules, stretching the boundaries and even indulging from time to time in strategic excess.
You can benefit from this book without taking the WritersDiet Test, and you can take the test without reading the book. However, the book and the test have been designed to work together as complementary tools. The test provides an immediate, personalised diagnosis, helping you identify some of the grammatical features that most frequently weigh down intelligent prose. The book explains those features in depth, lingering on stylistic subtleties and exceptions that the test cannot address. The test is a blunt instrument; the book coaches you in the complex human art of writing powerful prose.
If your writing feels stodgy and anaemic but you have never quite been able to say why, the WritersDiet Test will show you in a visual, visceral way. The book, in turn, will help you interpret your test scores, figure out how to improve them and even decide when to ignore them. Many fabulous pieces of writing will come out looking ‘flabby’ or worse on the WritersDiet Test, because stylish writers have the confidence and skill to play around with language in ways that the test is neither designed nor intended to evaluate. Examples at the end of each chapter will show you how to make sense of complex and even contradictory results.
Over time, as the core principles outlined in this book become habits of mind, you will probably discover that you no longer need the WritersDiet Test at all. Instead of writing bulky sentences and afterwards paring them down to size, you will find yourself producing taut, energetic prose every time you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.