Want to write more clearly? 6 tips from a book that “changed the career” of a FTSE100 company content writer.
A review of Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace
One of my friends is a content writer for a FTSE100 company and he recommended a book to me.
He heard I’ve started writing online and said this book was the best he’s read on writing. He said it’d “change my life,” as it did his.
So when he’d given me the book I read it straight away.
I read it in one sitting. I’m not sure I’d say it’s ‘changed my life’, but there are definitely some gems in there.
Here are some things I’ve learned which I hope will be useful to you too.
1. Having something to say
This was the biggest surprise for me.
The authors put this right at the start. Quoting Matthew Arnold, the Victorian literary and art critic:
“Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.”
This rings true. Often I find it hardest to write when I don’t actually have much to say. It reminds me of my school days when we were given essay topics to write on, but none of us actually felt interested in those contrived questions.
It also suggests I should perhaps read more.
I once got in touch with a poet by email with a few of my pieces, and they graciously said:
“Before one writes, one must read”.
Perhaps an indirect way of saying there’s much yet for me to learn.
It was Sviatoslav Richter, a former world class pianist, who declined to compose pieces, because “the world already has enough bad pieces that it doesn’t need any more from me”.
Surely this this also means we should look for things that we’re genuinely interested in. There’s no point feigning interest in something.
You may eventually become interested in something, but you can’t force it.
I think of reading and learning as somewhat like a playground. There are many things you can go play and many paths you can explore. But once you start somewhere, you’ll be led down a path of your own, full of wonder and joy. But it’s also ok to play with something and then drop it if it isn’t that fun.
I was motivated to read more.
2. Try to draw up story characters, even in formal writing
People like stories.
The book contrasted the following sentences:
a) “The EPA feared the president would recommend to Congress that it reduce its budget.
b) “The EPA had fears that the president would send a recommendation to Congress that it make a reduction in its budget”
Sentence b) seems to be the preferred choice, and certainly over c):
c) “The fear of the EPA was that a recommendation from the president to Congress would be for a reduction in its budget.”
It sounds rather clunky.
In a) and b), the subject of the sentence was clear. It’s an entity that people can grasp.
But a) is superior, because it turns the EPA into a ‘character’. Not adding excessive emotive force, a) assigns an action to the EPA. (Of course, one can take it too far.)
Think of your subjects as ‘characters’.
3. Use active voice
This is related to the above.
Contrast these three sentences:
d) We discussed the problem.
e) The problem was the topic of our discussion.
f) The problem was discussed.
e) is clearly clunky, and we’d use it only to make a very specific point. Here: “the problem is the reason for the discussion”.
f) is in the passive voice. It is short, but it doesn’t actually say who discussed the problem.
I find that the passive voice can sometimes be an excuse to be lazy. Or to be ‘intellectually irresponsible’. It makes me think, why would the writer not go away and find out who actually did it?
But above all, the book mentioned how people are wired to think in subject-verb-object patterns.
We’ve been story tellers for a long time — think The Iliad, stories about Ancient Greece which weren’t written down until centuries later. People simply passed those stories down.
Use the active voice, and think “stories”.
4. Use passive voice, sometimes
But the passive voice does have its place.
An example given by the book (if you’ve spot what just happened, well done):
“By early 1945, the Axis nations had been essentially defeated; all that remained was a bloody climax. The German borders had been breached…”
The passive gives the readers a sequence of subjects in a narrative.
Or think of an encyclopedia article. It makes sense to hone in on the subject of the article.
I used to write for a company’s department where they almost banned all instances of the passive, which leads on to my next point.
5. Rules can be good, until they’re not
There are lots of grammatical rules, but they aren’t created equal.
Some rules, if you keep them, make your writing more respected.
The book gave the example of starting a sentence with ‘And’. There seems to be a folkloric rule about this.
It’s true: when someone starts too many sentences with ‘And’, I do get the impression that they don’t have other ways of starting their sentences. Certainly when I learn a new language, I keep defaulting to ‘And…And…’
But what I really rated the book for, was the point about the distraction that comes from slavishly following rules.
When you get more obsessed about the rules when getting the point across, something’s off.
It’s a bit like trying to write a sonnet that has the Spencerian or Shakespearean rhyming scheme, but in doing so you change your original intention.
Emily Dickenson once said poetry, for her, should be intuitive and raw, as if:
“I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.”
Someone once described the concept of ‘hecklers’ to me in speech and language. It’s when you start over-analysing what you’re saying or writing that you hear ‘voices’ trying to ‘judge’ what you’re doing.
It’s good to be aware of what you’re doing to not be completely off. After all, a lack of self-awareness can be quite disastrous (just think of applicants to certain TV contests…)
But once that becomes the *overwhelming* thing, you can barely focus on what you’re doing.
Rules are there to guide good writing, not to constrain it.
6. If you know things, you do what you want.
The book mentioned additionally, that if you know how the rules came about in the first place, you can debate the haters.
Or the ‘hecklers’, I suppose. Or real hecklers.
But here is where I think the book was weaker.
To me, it sort of broke a promise.
It promised to show the reader the history of the rules it mentioned. But it didn’t do that for most of them.
For example, the rule about not splitting infinitives, as in:
“to quietly leave”.
I believe this rule came from languages where the infinitive is expressed by one word, as in Latin and Greek. For example, ‘to be’ in Latin is ‘essere’ and in Greek, ‘einai’.
But the book didn’t give its take on it.
How can I be sure that the rule which forbade people starting their sentences with ‘And’ is folklore?
For what it’s worth, ‘And’ is a conjunction, and it makes a lot of sense for conjunctions to be at a ‘junction’ between two clauses. Taking this rather literally.
Nonetheless, the general point still stands.
You can do what you want, if you make educated decisions in your writing.
Maybe you can even come up with new rules for writing. Or start a genre.
But that comes from learning.
Which point will you take away?
The most important thing in learning a skill is, of course, to put it into practice.
For me, my biggest take away is point 1 — reading more.
We’re a very visual culture. Movies, TV shows, and adverts vie for my attention constantly. It’s hard to sit down and read, not least because it seems so much less exciting.
But when I read, my mind follows the author to a world which no one else can follow or observe. Unlike a programme on screen.
That, to me, is exciting.
Which of the above rules will you take away?
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