Dos and Don’ts of Writing

Have you ever heard of nounism? “This is a new American disease that strings two or three nouns together where one noun-or, better yet, one verb-will do. Nobody goe broke now; we have money problem areas. It no longer rains, we have precipitation activity of a thunderstorm probability situation. Please, let it rain.” These wise words come from William Zinsser in his book “On Writing Well,” which as a journalist I felt the pressure to read. Not only does he lambast the bad English habits we’ve picked up, he offers tips for avoiding them.

A few of the more salient ones:

• Make the subject of your sentence clear, and make people your subject whenever you can. As opposed to “The common reaction is incredulous laughter,” say “Most people just laugh with disbelief.” As Zinsser puts it, “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.”
• When travel writing, spare us the cliches! “Eliminate every such fact that is a known attribute: don’t tell us that the sea had waves and the sand was white…Towns situated in foothills are nestled – I hardly ever read about an unnestled town in the hills” (so true!) and “This is a world where old meets new – old never meets old.” Don’t use words like charming and romantic – “Who will define ‘charm’ except the owner of a charm school? Or ‘romantic’?…One man’s romantic sunrise is another man’s hangover.” Ouch!
• On science writing: writers fear science like scientists fear writing. Really, you just have to explain a process in short, linear sentences, like you’re explaining to a friend how something works. Zinsser describes a writing assignment he gave his Yale journalism undergrads – describing how a process works so you make sure you know how it works and you learn to lead the reader through the same sequence of logic that made sense to you. “One student, a bright Yale sophomore still spraying the page with fuzzy generalities at midterm, came to class in a high mood and asked if he could read his paper on how a fire extinguisher works. I was sure we were in for chaos. But his piece moved with simplicity and logic…By the end of his junior year he had written a how-to book that sold better than any book I had written.” Juniors selling books? Must be a Yale thing. Another tenet of science writing is assume the reader knows nothing.
• Don’t forget even science stories are about people, not the science itself. A story about a nuclear weapons program in Iraq isn’t just about how uranium is enriched. And also, think like a scientist but write like a writer. After all, “About 98% of people who hold a doctorate in physics can’t write their way out of a petri dish,” says Zinsser. Not because they can’t; because they won’t.

Thanks for the sage tips Willy!