Omit Needless Words

BY HOWARD RUNYON

As school was adjourning for the winterholiday break, Steve “Reno” Reed asked me to write something for this magazine about the teaching of writing — the skills, the craft let’s say, of writing. I agreed; I can’t deny Reno a favor, and he’s a good flatterer. But I was in a jam.

For a teacher of Advanced Placement English, I have what may seem strangely little confidence that I can help anyone become a better writer. I believe fervently, and always tell my English students, that the surest way to become a good writer is to read a lot, go through a series of infatuations with great writers, and spend years knocking yourself out to write like whoever is your chief writer-crush in a given moment. If you do that, you’ll absorb bits of the styles and attitudes of those whose works have enchanted you, and the bits, over time, will accrue into a unique stew: your voice, your style. The stew will never be finished but will go on evolving, like all skills that we acquire and then use regularly.

So I think that the biggest favor one can do for students who want to be good writers is to put extraordinary writing in front of them, ensure a supply of oxygen — at least one classroom window stays cracked open even in winter — and hope for ignition, the sparking of a fire that will start as admiration and grow into passionate hard work. But, just as not everyone responds to the charm of sport, or cookery, or civil engineering, not everyone responds to the charm of the printed word. The teacher of high-school English needs a strategy that sidesteps enchantment.

That brings us to rules. The most famous, and still perhaps most revered, rules for the writing of clear, lively American English are in The Elements of Style, a tiny book first written by William Strunk, Jr., a professor of English at Cornell. Strunk had his first manual published privately, for his students’ use. One of those students, E. B. White — after going on to become a New Yorker stalwart and, most famously, author of the children’s novels Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web — later revised and carefully expanded Strunk’s text. Now often called “Strunk and White,” the book is mostly a catalogue of numbered rules for the writing of smooth, precise, coherent English. I believe (and may owe the belief to Reno) that its supreme rule — because many of the others are applications of this rule to specific grammatical circumstances — is Rule 17: Omit needless words

Many of the common weaknesses in students’ writing — in writing, period — are examples, one way or another, of needless words having made their way onto the page. A first draft from even a strong student may have around 50 words per page that do nothing to advance the paper’s narrative or argument. Often, that’s because of the thoughtless transfer of conversational tics into print. In everyday talk, we lard our sentences with expressions that seem harmless in conversation: as a matter of fact, I’m not going to lie, truth be told, in my opinion, in my honest opinion, each and every (versus just each or every), the truth is, the thing is, the long and the short of it is, the fact of the matter is, what you need to understand is--the list could go on to fill a garage. Most such phrases mean only I am about to tell you the next thing I’m going to say. Live listeners are apt to forgive those pointless tags; the human brain, in processing speech, hops nimbly over them. But in print — except in naturalistic dialogue — they’re debris in the road, postponements of what matters. I tell my students that every needless word is a little sleeping pill slipped to the reader. Job number one: Keep the reader awake

Some other rules that I urge on students: n Prefer short words to long ones, except when you want a long word for rhythm, or when some long word is the only word you know that nails your meaning. n Prefer verbs of action to constructions using to be with adjectives or other mushy options (e.g., prefer The meeting had spun out of control to The meeting was completely out of control). n The word before the period is in a privileged spot. When you can, finish sentences with “star” words, not bit players (e.g., prefer The shed reeked of gasoline to There was a strong odor of gasoline in the shed). n When you can, use positive constructions even for negative news (e.g., prefer We found nothing to We didn’t find anything). n Make items in lists grammatically consistent: We need a workspace, an office manager, two million, and better luck than we’ve had this week is okay, its items all built on nouns. We need to shower, feed ourselves and the cats, unload the car, and carry out trash until we can see the bed is okay, its items all built on verbs. I hope for world peace, no recession, a cozy place to spend my retirement, and having good friends nearby, wherever I end up is awkward; it sets a pattern of noun-based items and then smacks us with a verb-based one. n Study punctuation, and value it. Spoken language is alive; print merely stands for life. The reader’s imagination breathes life into it. Reader is to text as musician to score--a creative interpreter. If we want a passage to be loud or soft or fast or slow, skillful punctuation, along with apt choices of wording and structure, will help the reader hear it that way.

Some critics deride The Elements of Style as prescriptive and dogmatic, an elitist promotion of . . . what we should call, maybe, bourgeois prejudices. They have a point; the book is prescriptive, language is alive, and many captivating writers regularly jump certain boundaries that Strunk and White want us to respect. But if students (and most others who write, in any setting — academic, political, journalistic, corporate, nonprofit) followed most of the book’s rules most of the time, then most of the writings we encounter, and most of the speeches we endure, would be briefer, livelier, and more persuasive.