Here is Cheryl's presentation

Read Chapter 6 as you think about your project

Tuesday night you will let the class know what you are thinking about doing for your 800-word final project in this class. Don't charge into selecting your project without taking some time to review Chapter 6 in "On Writing Well."

Let me start my highlighting of that chapter by turning to the back of it where we find this not-to-be-ignored advice:

"Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write.

"Therefore think small. Decide what corner of your subject you're going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop. . .

"As for what point you want to make, every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn't have before."

Remember the information I passed along in the first class from Jim Simon, the Metro editor at The Seattle Times:

"Find a story, not an issue. Use small, personal stories to illustrate a big problem or issue."

Don't try to explain the world's present financial situation in 800 words. You might tell your readers what has happened to one investor who had money tied up in overseas markets and what effect that has had on his life.

Don't take on the pros and/or cons of big agribusiness vs. local food sources in 800 words. Find a local grower who is farming next to a corporate farm and tell what's alike and what's different between the operations.

Look at the questions Zinsser says to ask yourself before you start:

"In what capacity am I going to address the reader? (Reporter? Provider of information? Average man or woman?) What pronoun and tense am I going to use? What style (Impersonal reportorial? Personal but formal? Personal and casual?) What attitude am I going to take toward the material? (Involved? Detached? Judgmental? Ironic? Amused?) How much do I want to cover? What one point do I want to make?"

Remember what I said: Less is more. Build a piece of writing that doesn't wander, that has a beginning, a middle and an end, and above all has a discernible point.

Let this be a warning: John's highlighter rides again

I once worked with a copy editor who changed a word after consulting Roget's Thesaurus, and a city council went from "warning" citizens to "admonishing" them.

If that copy editor had looked up those words in a dictionary, we might not have received the phone complaints the next day from council members.

"to warn: to tell of a danger, coming evil, misfortune, etc.; to put on guard against a person or thing."

"to admonish: 1. to warn; caution against specific faults. 2. to reprove with mildness."

It's that second meaning of admonish that caused the trouble as it had the council scolding citizens instead of directing them away from some danger. There's a shade of meaning there that you can't get from using a thesaurus alone.

Zinsser's warning to never use a thesaurus without a follow-up visit to the dictionary is worth heeding. And I like his statement at the beginning of Chapter 6:

"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."

You won't develop that respect through quick visits to a thesaurus. Get a good dictionary and look up words. Or use the excellent and easy-to-use dictionaries online.

You also need to read, read, read and listen to great writers. As Zinsser says, "Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what was written by earlier masters. Writing is learned by imitation."

I just started "The Forever War" by Dexter Filkins, New York Times correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Alexandre Dumas is lined up on the reading shelf right behind him. A mix of new and old, non-fiction and fiction.

I write this not to appear as some erudite egotist but to get a discussion going. What are you reading, or what were you reading before I loaded you down with assignments for the class? Give us your recommendations.

OK, let's get back to "On Writing Well"

"Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it's beautiful?" Zinsser asks at the end of Chapter 3.



Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (left) had an answer to that back in 1916: Murder your darlings.



That was his answer in his essay "On the Art of Writing."



In writing, style is not extraneous ornamentation, and the rule to be obeyed when it appears in your writing is this: "Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing . . . delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."



Orwell and Tuchman have their versions of this, and I especially like Tuchman's (thanks again, Andy): "The historian is continually being beguiled down fascinating byways and sidetracks. But the art of writing – the test of the artist – is to resist beguilement and cleave to the subject.”



My wife, the magazine editor, put it this way (in a handout you'll be getting this quarter):



Kill your babies: Reporters work hard gathering information, and often this spawns paragraphs in stories that reporters find too fascinating to leave out. But practice birth control: If the stuff seems extraneous, wanders from the main topic, makes you want to move on to something else, kill it.



Later in his book, Zinsser gives a good rule of thumb on this: Make sure that everything in your writing is doing work. If it's not, get rid of it.

Allow me this digression, please

When Andy brought up Barbara Tuchman (at right) in his comment on the George Orwell essay, it reminded me of my favorite observation by Tuchman.

I have used it in presentations to the public, who often complain that journalists focus only on the bad news. That's a danger in all that is recorded, Tuchman says, whether it be in the indispensable documents used by historians or in present-day newspapers. "The fact of being on the record," Tuchman says, "makes (disaster) appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic . . ."

Want proof of that? Take a look at our own times, Tuchman says:

"After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening -- on a lucky day -- without having encountered more than one or two of there phenomena."

Not sure that ever convinced the public, but at least it showed that the problem wasn't unique to my paper.

Be sure to read Andy's comments -- and add any of your own.

Orwell is always a highlight for me

George Orwell is one of my favorite authors and I think his essay "Politics and the English Language" is a highlight of his work. I'm not sure how I overlooked giving it as a reading assignment for this class.

Finding the mention of it in "On Writing Well" confirmed my favorable opinion of Zinsser.

If you don't read the Orwell essay, let me call to your attention to these words of advice from it:

"(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

"(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

"(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

"(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

"(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

"(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."

I'm out of town until Monday night when I will have my highlighter out again.

Installment #2 of "Follow John's highlighter"

I said in class on Tuesday that I believed that "less is more." That's rooted in my journalism background, but what it means is that I think the strongest writing is clear, pared down to the essentials, that every word, phrase and sentence in a piece of non-fiction writing is "doing work," as Zinsser puts it.

That doesn't mean that I can't appreciate writing with more words, more complex sentences, vocabulary and phrasing. But I mostly like that in fiction. I read non-fiction because I want to learn about something, and I don't want the writing to get in the way of the subject I am trying to learn.

In fiction, I'm more likely to take enjoyment in the complexity of language, the nuances and the hoops the author has me jump through.

So is there no room for any of this in non-fiction? There's room, there's creativity, there are hoops to take the reader through -- but it all has to be done with the purpose of helping the reader understand the subject at hand. In my opinion.

And that's why I highlighted this in the first part of "On Writing Well:"

". . . the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components."

"Open Walden to any page and you will find a man saying in a plain and orderly way what is on his mind."

"Clear thinking becomes clear writing."

"If the reader is lost, it's usually because the writer hasn't been careful enough . . . Perhaps Sentence B is not a logical sequel to Sentence A; the writer, in whose head the connection is clear, hasn't bothered to provide the missing link."

THAT LAST one -- about logical sequencing -- is a huge stumbling block for many writers. It's easy to supply the word, link, explanation in your own head and think you've done the same down there on the computer screen. Read your writing for continuity.

Back to Zinsser and some words on finding your focus:

"Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Surprisingly often they don't know. Then they must look at what they have written and ask: have I said it? Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for the first time? If it's not, some fuzz has worked its way into the machinery. The clear writer is someone clearheaded enough to see this stuff for what it is: fuzz."

There is a link to a very good PowerPoint presentation on clarity in writing in the post to this blog on Nov. 24, 2008. I highly recommend it to your attention.

Agree with what I found worth highlighting in Zinsser's book? You don't have to. Leave a comment or let us know what you highlighted.