How to Make a Good Text out of a Bad One

How to identify the problems with your text and make everything right

Writing a bad text isn’t a drama. It happened to anyone, and most likely more than just once in a lifetime. Even seasoned professionals make mistakes.

In this post, I’ll tell you what can be wrong with your text and how to make it right. But if you expect it to be a short story, I’m really sorry.

The Three-Level Concept

It doesn’t really matter what your text actually is. There are three levels of fallacy that can haunt any text, from a tweet to a multi-volume novel. Here they are:

• Textual level: something is wrong with your sentences, your wording, your grammar, and so forth.
• Structural level: the text doesn’t click because its structure is wrong for some reason.
• Conceptual level: you came up with the wrong idea, you fail to substantiate your opinions, you haven’t thought the entire story through, or your idea simply doesn’t work as you thought it would.

Of course, if the text in question sucks at all three levels simultaneously, it begs the question of whether the author is adequate for the job. The remedy here doesn’t consist in editing but in attending courses and study sessions for writers and boning up on it like there’s no tomorrow.

Personally, I’ve never seen a text that was a failure at all three levels at once, at least not in my line of work. (Of course, I have seen instances of a three-level bingo in general; I visit Facebook too, after all.) As a producer and an occasional editor, I mostly deal with texts that are bad on the textual and / or structural level. However, it’s important that I know how to work with all those fallacies. After all, I’m no saint and I write things, too. And, as a human being, I’m bound to make mistakes along the way.

Art for Art’s Sake

There is one notion I feel I have to talk about before I proceed with any practical advice.

As I said above, it doesn’t matter what kind of text you work on. It can be a poem, a guest feature, a social media post, or a fairy tale. Even if, god forbid, it’s a suicide note, the same rule applies without exception:

You must express your ideas and your intent in the clearest way possible.

Without fully understanding that it is your supreme objective as a writer you will have to face the need to rectify the whole damned thing. Even if you consider yourself a scribbler. Even if you feel ashamed of showing it to anyone. Even if it’s a vacation request or a comment on Instagram. If you don’t want your text to suck, you must find a way to broadcast your message in such a way as to make it as comprehensible as possible.

The process of writing is about grasping ideas or emotions and converting them into words. That’s the only format that gets them transferred into somebody else’s mind. Replace words with images or sounds and you get the description of drawing and music respectively.

It works even if you write an obscure novel with profound symbolism and postmodernist timeline. Your use of such complex techniques has to be substantiated by the fact that there is no better way to convey whatever you mean to convey. For that reason, every technique you use must be in the right place and used at the right time. Otherwise it won’t be postmodernism with profound symbolism, it will be just bad writing and name-dropping.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that you should distill your message and make it simple. Had it been so, Crime and Punishment would have had just one sentence, reading “killing people is bad, no matter how you justify it.” You just have to write it in such a way that the reader would understand it.

That being said, here’s what you do when somebody (including yourself) is very unhappy with what you wrote.

Rectifying the Textual Level

That’s the simplest level. It’s about how you write sentences and what words you use. Something is wrong with them.

In my experience, one of the most widespread problems on the textual level is using incomprehensible sentences with too many big words. Here’s what I mean:

“At the start of the current period of the Earth’s rotation around the Sun, I ceased being asleep after devouring excessive amounts of ethanol during the dark period of day and felt a tantalizing deficiency of oxygen dihydride.”

Of course, I’m exaggerating, but that’s the basic idea. Writing like that doesn’t make you look smart. It makes you look like an unbearable showoff or even a musical critic. If you feel that shorter and simpler sentences can convey your idea without sacrificing any subtle meanings, just go for it and see how it looks. Here’s what the sentence from my example looks like after I clean the semantic debris:

“On January 1st, I woke up after a night of heavy drinking and felt very thirsty.”

The rest depends on the nature of your text.

• If you write a news piece, you report facts, not opinions. Therefore, avoid all words that look even a little biased.
• If you write a blog post, you state your opinion and reference facts. Therefore, avoid using biased words that contradict each other.
• If you write a complex sci-fi novel where the timeline is a Moebius band and your characters undergo transitions multiple times only to find out that they are one and the same person in different states of being, you must be a Philip K. Dick, so help you god.

Rectifying the Structural Level

The problems on the structural level arise when you failed to make up a plan for your text in advance. As a result, even if your sentences and wording are fine, the text is still hardly comprehensible. Here’s what I mean:

“In 1967, The Beatles released their acclaimed album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which many deem the first concept album in rock though Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys had been released a year before. Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer of Jesus Christ SuperStar once claimed that one of the biggest regrets of his life was that Yesterday had been penned by Paul McCartney, not him.”

It’s fairly easy to see what’s wrong with this paragraph. The first sentence is not very well balanced and references two facts in reverse chronological order. It would be better to make two sentences out of them and stress that Pet Sounds was indeed the first concept album.

But still, it’s nothing compared to the second sentence. It literally has nothing to do with the first one, even though it is still about The Beatles. It doesn’t take a rock’n’roll geek to know that Yesterday was on Help!, not Sgt. Pepper. And even if it was, it has nothing to do with the topic of concept albums. Andrew Lloyd Webber, on the other hand, mostly wrote rock operas and musicals, not concept albums. As a result, the entire paragraph is a pitiful mess of facts that have little to no connection to each other.

When your text looks so unstructured and illogical, that’s the result of insufficient planning. Put your text away and make up a detailed plan. By “detailed” I mean that you write a brief outline for each item on your list. It’s hard to offer a universal template for such a plan, so I’ll give you an exemplary plan for an article on conceptual rock albums.

1. Title and option subtitle.
2. Introduction. Basic idea: concept albums changed the face of the musical industry and helped popular music move away from being a mere soundtrack for dancing to becoming a rival to academic music.
3. Section one: albums before Pet Sounds etc. They were just collections of songs unrelated to each other and used just as something for people to dance to. Give some examples. Note that nobody was taking that music seriously.
4. Enter concept albums. The main difference is that they either tell a story, or have a common underpinning idea. Pop music ceases being a soundtrack for dancing and becomes something one listens to, sometimes without moving. Explain it: the advent of the hippie culture and mind-altering drugs and the creation of music that would be a better fit for the altered state of mind. Give some examples.
5. Further evolution of concept albums. The advent of progressive rock and further exploration of complex ideas within a single album. The decline of progressive rock and the rise of punk. And then post-punk. Examples everywhere.
6. Conclusion. The effect concept albums had on the musical industry. They changed the way popular music is produced and, most importantly, perceived by the audience. The audience now takes popular music much more seriously than before 1966.

Please note the chronological order of sections. Of course, you don’t have to use it all the time but it’s the most logical course of action when you describe an evolutionary process to someone who hasn’t heard much about it before. The division of the text into sections follows the evolutionary phases of the process in question. Obviously, it requires you to know it all or duly research it. Nobody said it would be easy, sorry.

And here’s the trick to writing paragraphs logical enough even for a Vulcan. You can explore only one idea within a single paragraph. The paragraph ends as soon as the exploration is over. And that’s it. Make up a detailed plan and don’t rush things.

Rectifying the Conceptual Level

This problem is the simplest to describe and the hardest to solve. It stretches from basic misunderstanding to complete ignorance. So, over my years of working as a producer and an editor, I have come up with a set of rules and requirements for everyone who writes under me. Similarly, I apply them to myself when I write something. And I recommend that you use at least some of them if you wish to avoid falling into the abyss of conceptual failure.

• If you don’t know something, google it. Read everything that seems relevant. If you can ask an expert, don’t hesitate to do it. It’s relatively easy to rewrite a poorly written text. It’s very hard to rewrite ignorance.
• Make up a list of things you don’t understand or wish you have known better. Prepare a set of questions about each item on the list. This will help you structure your newly acquired knowledge.
• It’s very useful to doubt everything. Even if it seems that you know something for a fact, check it nonetheless. Things change. Even scientific facts change as people discover more.
• If you struggle to prove your point, it is likely that your point is no good. Double check everything. There might be a fundamental error.
• If you stumble upon a game-changer fact in the process of writing, don’t hesitate to review everything you’d written so far. Quality beats speed in most cases.

It’s relatively easy to rewrite something that is poor in form, and it’s very hard to rewrite something that is poor in substance.

So, to sum it up, here’s a rule that I hope will help you avoid all three levels of errors in a text:

Don’t start writing until you know very well what you are going to write.

That’s all for today. Yeah, I know it was a long one but I do hope it was worth it even a little bit.