One of my favorite books on writing is William Zinsser's
On Writing Well. In Chapter 10, "Bits and Pieces," he gives a lot of good advice on various aspects of writing. Here are some of my favorite bits and pieces:
On verbs:
Use active verbs unless there is no comfortable way to get
around using a passive verb. The difference between an active verb
style and a passive-verb style—in clarity and vigor—is the
difference between life and death for a writer.
"Joe saw him" is strong. "He was seen by Joe" is weak. The
first is short and precise; it leaves no doubt about who did what.
The second is necessarily longer and it has an insipid quality:
something was done by somebody to someone else. It's also
ambiguous. How often was he seen by Joe? Once? Every day?
Once a week? A style that consists of passive constructions will
sap the reader's energy. Nobody ever quite knows what is being
perpetrated by whom and on whom.
On little qualifiers:
Prune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how
you think and what you saw: "a bit," "a little," "sort of," "kind of,"
"rather," "quite," "very," "too," "pretty much," "in a sense" and
dozens more. They dilute your style and your persuasiveness.
Don't say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little
depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be confused. Be tired. Be
depressed. Be annoyed. Don't hedge your prose with little
timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.
On the exclamation point:
Don't use it unless you must to
achieve a certain effect. It has a gushy aura, the breathless excitement
of a debutante commenting on an event that was exciting
only to her: "Daddy says I must have had too much champagne!"
"But honestly, I could have danced all night!" We have all suffered
more than our share of these sentences in which an exclamation
point knocks us over the head with how cute or wonderful something
was. Instead, construct your sentence so that the order of
the words will put the emphasis where you want it.
On transitions:
Learn to alert the reader as soon as possible to any change in
mood from the previous sentence. At least a dozen words will do
this job for you: "but," "yet," "however," "nevertheless," "still,"
"instead," "thus," "therefore," "meanwhile," "now," "later,"
"today," "subsequently" and several more. I can't overstate how
much easier it is for readers to process a sentence if you start
with "but" when you're shifting direction. Or, conversely, how
much harder it is if they must wait until the end to realize that
you have shifted.
Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with
"but." If that's what you learned, unlearn it—there's no stronger
word at the start. It announces total contrast with what has gone
before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change.
On concept nouns:
Nouns that express a concept are commonly used in bad
writing instead of verbs that tell what somebody did. Here are
three typical dead sentences:
The common reaction is incredulous laughter.
Bemused cynicism isn't the only response to the old system.
The current campus hostility is a symptom of the change.
What is so eerie about these sentences is that they have no
people in them. They also have no working verbs—only "is" or
"isn't." The reader can't visualize anybody performing some
activity; all the meaning lies in impersonal nouns that embody
a vague concept: "reaction," "cynicism," "response," "hostility."
Turn these cold sentences around. Get people doing
things:
Most people just laugh with disbelief.
Some people respond to the old system by turning cynical;
others say. . .
It's easy to notice the change—you can see how angry all
the students are.
My revised sentences aren't jumping with vigor, partly
because the material I'm trying to knead into shape is shapeless
dough. But at least they have real people and real verbs. 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.
On "The Quickest Fix":
Surprisingly often a difficult problem in a sentence can be
solved by simply getting rid of it. Unfortunately, this solution is
usually the last one that occurs to writers in a jam. First they
will put the troublesome phrase through all kinds of exertions—
moving it to some other part of the sentence, trying to
rephrase it, adding new words to clarify the thought or to oil
whatever is stuck. These efforts only make the situation worse,
and the writer is left to conclude that there is no solution to the
problem—not a comforting thought. When you find yourself at
such an impasse, look at the troublesome element and ask, "Do
I need it at all?" Probably you don't. It was trying to do an
unnecessary job all along—that's why it was giving you so much
grief. Remove it and watch the afflicted sentence spring to life
and breathe normally. It's the quickest cure and very often the
best.
This is probably his best advice in the entire chapter. I posted some of Zinsser's thoughts from this section here.
