To write well, you must write. Practice often.
When we think of improving our reading skills, we read. Friends often share how well their children
read. This makes sense because their
children read all the time. But do they
write? Not nearly as often. Write every day: an essay, directions, report, summary, poem,
letter, outline, notes. Spend more time
on technical writing than creative.
Fewer than one percent of people will ever make a living writing
fiction. But every one of us will write
reports, summaries, evaluations, letters, and essays in school and for our
jobs. Writing is thinking on paper. It
forces you to analyze and organize your thoughts. Don’t worry what it looks like and how it
sounds, just get it down. The more you
do it, the better you’ll get.
Study English and its rules. I’m not a grammarian, but it’s important to know something about
the rules if you wish to play the game. Or
as Ernest Hemingway wrote in his letters, “The game of golf would lose a good
deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting
green. You ought to be able to show that
you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before
you have a license to bring in your own improvements.”
It’s not fashionable to teach English, AKA grammar, today. My children did not know the eight parts of
speech or the four types of sentences when we began our English home study last
year. They used them, of course, but
they did not understand them. To play
sports, you have to know the rules. Our
language is the same and infinitely more important. In the Information Age, people will know us
through our writing. I just read an
excellent 50 pages on Grammar in the Penguin Writer’s Manual, The Essential
Guide to Writing Well. That’s just
50 pages of rules. It is the Queen’s
English and a tad different and there’s a lot there, I won’t deny it. It’s tantamount to saying the rules of chess
are contained in two pages, yet
it takes a lifetime to learn. So it goes
with English. Why would we expect our
math skills to improve if we don’t practice?
Or our piano performance? But we
want our English to simply improve.
Read, read, read, yes. “But
write, you must,” says Yoda.
Learn to write a paragraph well. This is the building block of all
writing. Every paragraph should have two
things, unity and coherence. A well-
ordered paragraph usually includes a topic sentence. For budding writers, this is often the first
sentence. Every sentence must develop
and support this idea. Good writing
includes varied sentence length, type, and order. For example, most sentences are declarative
or statements. Ask a question. Change from normal to inverted or mixed word
order and by all means, change the length. Consecutive, long statements
bore readers. An excellent text will
model good and poor paragraphs. I don’t
think schools use this much anymore, sadly.
Orwell’s Six Rules for Better Writing Learn and practice.
(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.
George Orwell shared these in his original 1946 essay, “On
Politics and Education.” I encourage any
serious writer to take the time to read it.
Its commentary on the English language is as ominous as his keystone
novel, Ninety Eighty-Four. This is a quote from the opening of the essay.
A man may
take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the
more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is
happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our
thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for
us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.
Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread
by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary
trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to
think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that
the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern
of professional writers. George
Orwell
Here’s a link to the essay in its entirety.
NOTE: The eight parts of
speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, conjunction, preposition,
and interjection. The four types of
sentences are declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory.
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