Wordcraft: The Complete Guide to Clear, Powerful Writing

Wordcraft

Writing for Social Scientists

Howard S. Becker

The Craft of Research

Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, Joseph Bizup, and William T. FitzGerald

The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking

Brooke Borel

Writing Fiction

Janet Burroway, with Elizabeth Stuckey-French and Ned Stuckey-French

Writing Abroad

Peter Chilson and Joanne B. Mulcahy

Immersion

Ted Conover

The Business of Being a Writer

Jane Friedman

The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation

Bryan A. Garner

Legal Writing in Plain English

Bryan A. Garner

What Editors Do

Peter Ginna, editor

Writing Science in Plain English

Anne E. Greene

Storycraft

Jack Hart

Economical Writing

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

The Subversive Copy Editor

Carol Fisher Saller

The Writer’s Diet

Helen Sword

A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations

Kate L. Turabian

Wordcraft

The Complete Guide to Clear, Powerful Writing

Jack Hart

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2006, 2021 by Jack Hart

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74907-5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74910-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226749105.001.0001

This book was first published in 2006 by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, under the title A Writer’s Coach.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hart, Jack, 1946– author.

Title: Wordcraft : the complete guide to clear, powerful writing / Jack Hart.

Other titles: Writer’s coach | Chicago guides to writing, editing, and publishing.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Series: Chicago guides to writing, editing, and publishing | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020032181 | ISBN 9780226749075 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226749105 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Journalism—Authorship. | Creative nonfiction—Authorship. | Authorship.

Classification: LCC PN4775 .H324 2021 | DDC 808.02—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032181

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1  METHOD

2  PROCESS

3  STRUCTURE

4  FORCE

5  BREVITY

6  CLARITY

7  RHYTHM

8  HUMANITY

9  COLOR

10  VOICE

11  MECHANICS

12  MASTERY

Acknowledgments

Selected Resources for Writers

Index

Preface

This book was first published by Random House in 2006 under the title A Writer’s Coach.

I’d originally planned to title the book Wordcraft and conceived of it as book 1 in a two-book set. Book 2 would pass along what I’d learned in a long career of editing and coaching narrative nonfiction and would be called Storycraft.

But when Random House bought the rights to book 1, someone in the bowels of that giant company discovered a conflict with the title of another book on its list. My editor informed me that we’d have to change the title and came up with A Writer’s Coach. Not a bad title, to be sure, but not what I’d intended. A few years later, I published book 2 as Storycraft with the University of Chicago Press.

Now that I have had the opportunity to bring the two books together at UCP as the package I’d originally envisioned, we’ve recovered the lost title. More important, I have revised the book to take note of the changes that have shaken the writing world since its original publication. While the original edition assumed an audience consisting primarily of newspaper and other print journalists, I learned over the lifespan of the original edition just how relevant the advice is to writers of all kinds. Some sections may still be especially useful to print journalists, but I now address most of my advice to anyone who wishes to understand and follow the principles of good writing. That means, of course, just about everybody. Professionals such as lawyers and advertising and public relations types have always had to reach out with the written word.

But these days we all have keyboards in our figurative hip pockets, and the amount of influence and connection we have in this world depends, to some degree, on how well we use them.

And so, as an outpouring of recent scientific research has demonstrated, does an ability to move audiences with effective stories. Those same lawyers and marketing types who depend on clear, effective writing to power their careers have discovered the value that good storytelling has in persuading juries or selling a brand. More than ever, the lessons I incorporated in both books 1 and 2 have proved useful far beyond print newsrooms.

So, while updating Wordcraft I simultaneously revised Storycraft so that the books function as the set I’d pictured at the very beginning. Taken together, the two volumes capture just about everything I learned about writing and storytelling over a long and very satisfying career. If I’d had them when I started out all those decades ago, they’d have speeded my education, eliminating years of trial and error and benefiting not only me but also all the fine writers and eager students I worked with over the years.

Now that you do have them, you have a leg—or two—up on me at your age. Which means you should be able to climb higher than I ever did. If you enjoy the fruits of fine writing half as much as I have, all of the effort—mine and yours—will have been more than worth it.

Introduction

You can’t wait for inspiration; you have to go after it with a club.

—Jack London

Novices sometimes imagine writing as dark magic, something known only to some mystical inner circle. They pick up a professional’s finished work, marvel at its seamless perfection, and think, I could never do that.

Nonsense. Take it from someone who’s been scouting around inside the mystic circle for decades. I worked shoulder to shoulder with some of the best writers on the planet, and never once did we dance around a cauldron. Some hocus-pocus might have helped, but we didn’t know any. So we just got down to work.

Great writing happens not through some dark art, but when method meets craft. The secret—if there is one—is to take one manageable step at a time. Superman may leap tall buildings in a single bound, but the best writers I know sit down at their keyboards and write one line. And then another. And another.

That’s how it’s done, in writing or anything else. Picasso crafted accomplished landscapes and portraits before he broke through into the terra incognita of cubism. Thomas Edison, the most prolific inventor of all time, broke innovation down into a step-by-step process for methodical efficiency. Genius, he famously said, is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

Writing poses challenges similar to any other creative process. A writer attending a narrative nonfiction conference once asked Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic Press, whether talent or hard work counted more among book authors. Talent matters, he said. But the writers who can manage their time and energy well show the best results in the long run. Then he pleaded with the writers in the room to do a better job of getting their manuscripts in on time.

Plenty of dull, disorganized writers meet their deadlines, of course, just as some of the most inspired live chaotic lives of confusion and angst. But the most successful writers I know have mastered a productive, efficient process that consistently turns out great work. They write without psychological meltdown, and they make deadline.

Yes, talent counts for something—superhuman performances in any field probably require hard wiring that sets the performers apart. Writing is no different. But for most of us, that’s beside the point because we have no choice but to write. A certain skill with the written word is essential to almost anybody’s success in the modern world: the cop filing a report, the foundation director pitching a grant, the moonstruck kid emailing flirtatious notes to that smokin’ sophomore in third-period algebra. Whether we get what we want out of life depends, more or less, on how well we use writing to accomplish it.

Most of us don’t do nearly as well as we might, largely because of that nonsensical notion that good writing is magic. Some schools add to the problem. They teach that other essential skill of the modern age—reading—as though it’s a universal that every student must master. Most students do. But in far too many schools the invidious mystique of writing taints the curriculum. In literature classes, you read great works and marvel at the genius of the writers who produced them. In composition, you struggle to knock a few clumsy sentences together. Nobody expects you to see any connection between the diva’s aria and your Neanderthal grunts.

In 2001 Tom Hallman, one of the writers I worked with regularly, won the Pulitzer Prize for newspaper feature writing. In journalism, Tom is widely recognized for his mastery of the newspaper narrative, true stories told using the techniques of literature. He’d been a Pulitzer finalist twice before, and over the years he won everything from the Ernie Pyle Award to top national awards from the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Society of Professional Journalists.

So when Tom gave me permission to post multiple mark-ups of the rough drafts from his Pulitzer Prize–winning story on a website available to journalists across the country, interest was high, and the response was predictable. Tom’s fellow journalists were astounded to see how far the story developed over the last three drafts he produced. They, too, had been victims of the writing mystique, assuming that someone of Tom’s accomplishment would spin webs of gold the first time his fingers hit the keyboard. What they saw, instead, was a damned good writer hard at work, applying his method and honing his craft.

Tom’s first draft was just that, an initial run at the story that mixed great promise with plenty of disappointments. The second draft tied up loose ends, tweaked the structure, and sharpened the character development. The third polished the language, refined the imagery, and pushed through to the final level of excellence. Seeing that progression, one editor told me, was the most instructive writing lesson he’d ever had.

I trust this book offers lessons of similar value.

My professional path informs those lessons. I started my career as a college professor with the requisite advanced degree and spent a dozen years teaching at big universities. That gave me a grounding in theory and plenty of practice communicating with novice writers. But I never really understood the importance of process and craft until I started meeting daily deadlines in the newsroom. I’ve tried to stress the real-world writing realities I learned there throughout Wordcraft.

You’ll notice the newsroom influence as you read. Much of it will be from the Oregonian where I spent twenty-six years. If you’re not a newspaper journalist—and fewer writers are every year—don’t let that put you off. All writers face similar problems, regardless of their medium. The down-to-earth, practical advice I’ve gathered here should apply to almost any kind of writing, be it a novel, a memo, or a love letter.

The practical focus extends to the examples I’ve used. When I’ve written something to illustrate a point, my example is set off with quotation marks or in a block quote in roman type. But the vast majority of the examples I’ve included were actually published somewhere, and each of those is set in italic type. Because I took them from the reading I did every day, over many years, they represent a tolerably good sampling of the hazards and opportunities any writer is likely to encounter in the real world.

Bad examples are unattributed—the point is to learn from mistakes, not to shame anybody with them.

My experience in the newsroom was central to my growth as a writing coach. I was lucky to arrive at the Oregonian just before we began a long drive to improve its journalism. We succeeded gloriously. National recognition poured down on the paper. Pulitzer Prizes, Overseas Press Club awards, national business-writing and religion-writing awards. The Oregonian won major awards in everything from garden to food to television writing. The writing, reporting, and editing, not the subject matter, was the common denominator.

As the newspaper’s writing coach, I was challenged to keep up with the staff’s eagerness to improve. I scoured the literature on writing. I invited dozens of nationally known writing talents to our newsroom, where they shared their secrets and added to my store of teaching and editing strategies. For many years I produced a nationally distributed instructional newsletter on writing as well as a writing column for Editor & Publisher magazine. Both of those responsibilities forced me to think incessantly and analytically about the qualities of good writing.

I also spent a lot of time out and around the country and even abroad, talking to writers at other newspapers, at professional organizations, at colleges, and at private institutes. I spoke to organizations of food writers, wine writers, fiction writers, travel writers, advertising copywriters, medical writers, and investigative reporters—all sorts of writers facing every kind of writing challenge. They honed my sense of what works in writing, regardless of the topic. And they made me question assumptions I might have harbored if I’d been confined to the classrooms where I started my career.

When I conducted a writing workshop, whether it was in Augusta, Auckland, or Albuquerque, I almost always began by asking the participants to name the qualities that they associated with good writing. When a piece of writing grabbed them by the lapels, I asked, when it pulled them into the writer’s world to the exclusion of everything else, what was it about the words themselves that attracted them?

Their terminology may have differed, but their answers invariably tapped the same half dozen or so attributes. Good writing, they said:

•  radiates energy, crackling with a vigor that pulls readers along. It has internal strength, an inherent force that moves readers.

•  gets to the point, regardless of what the point may be. Good writers don’t waste their readers’ time.

•  transports them, putting them into a scene where they can see the autumn light and smell the fallen leaves crunching underfoot. It’s rich, in other words, in what journalists call color.

•  has a personality, a tone both appropriate to the subject and inviting for the reader. The words sound right. They fit with one another and the mood of the reading occasion.

•  can dance. Good writing has a rhythm that pleases in its own right, creating cadences that give pleasure regardless of content.

•  is clear. You never have to read a well-written sentence twice—unless it’s for the sheer pleasure of the experience.

•  is mechanically correct. Good writers know their tools, and they never trip readers up with lapses of grammar, usage, or style.

There’s broad agreement on the goals. The trick is to achieve them in your own writing, regardless of your purpose. That means jumping from the abstractions—the broad goals such as clarity and color—to the actual hands-on-the-keyboard practices that work.

This book is intended to help you make that leap. Once you take it, the series of specific decisions that makes up any act of writing won’t seem nearly so daunting. You’ll have a method designed to make writing manageable and a craft guaranteed to make it clearer, more forceful, and more effective.

The inspiration is up to you.

1

Method

My father never had truck driver’s block.

—Roger Simon

THE AGONY AND THE METHODOLOGY

The pain of writing is legend. And its intensity hardly varies between the student facing a research-paper deadline, the office worker thrashing out a report, and the seasoned professional writing for publication.

When I run a writing seminar, I often hand out a questionnaire that, among other things, quizzes the participants about the emotion they bring to their writing. Someone invariably quotes Dorothy Parker, the New York literary wit who said she hated writing, but loved having written. It’s agony and ecstasy, one writer said. When I get the idea, and when I’m finished . . . it’s joyful. Everything in between is agony.

Why should that be? Physically, writing’s relatively easy work. Take it from a guy who’s loaded log ships, pumped gas, and tarred roofs in the midsummer sun. Writers work on their butts and out of the weather. So what’s with all this whining?

And why the avoidance, which one writer labeled tap dancing? I’ll dance around the story, he said, putting it off because I think it’s harder than it invariably is.

What’s the first thing you do when facing a new writing assignment? I ask. Get a cup of coffee, a journalist replied. More difficult story, more coffee, more trips to the bathroom, more procrastination.

But is it really procrastination, another writer asked, when I’m walking around, getting another cup of coffee, and thinking about the story? More likely, it’s a paralysis from possibilities: possible stories, possible leads, possible story flow.

Exactly! Paralysis from possibilities. The tendency to see the task ahead as overwhelming explains most keyboard anxiety. For a variety of reasons, we view writing from the back end. Day in and day out, we witness the finished work of accomplished writers. In our mind’s eye we stroll down street after street of beautiful homes, ignorant of the piece-by-piece construction that created them, one two-by-four at a time. Look at that gorgeous building, we think. The craftsmanship. The detail work. The sheer size of the thing! I could never build something like that.

Time for another cup of coffee.

But there’s another way to look at it. One year I watched four row houses rise on the lot next door. The work was noisy, messy, and distracting, but instructive, too. From the logging crew that brought in chain saws and cleared the lot to the roofers who nailed on the shingles, not one bit of work went into those houses that you or I couldn’t do ourselves, given enough time and some research into the technical details. The secret is in the process, not the finished buildings.

The pain of writing stems from comparing your blank screen with the finished pages you see all around you. But beautiful writing is built one step at a time, just like a house. Take the steps slowly, break them down into pieces small enough to handle easily, and the agony will disappear.

Writing, it is often said, is thinking. And the most productive form of thinking, the method that built the modern world, is science. The discipline, the logic, and the procedural rules of science took us from oxcarts to interstellar probes. So it’s not surprising that scientists place so much emphasis on process. Science, they will insist, is process. Articles in scientific journals invariably include detailed descriptions of how the authors conducted their research—the methodology. That mandatory section of the report sometimes takes more space than the section describing results.

Methodology is just as important for writers. Genius, said F. Scott Fitzgerald, is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. In writing, that can involve a considerable journey. And, as every mother’s cliché will have it, the longest journey begins with a single step.

THE BACK-END VIEW OF WRITING

For decades, I focused my writing-improvement efforts on the last stages of the writing process, the eleventh-hour nit-picking that burnishes words to a high gloss. That’s what I spent my time doing in the newsroom. And those were the skills I taught in my magazine columns and workshops.

I wasn’t alone. Most writing coaches, copy editors, workshop organizers, newspaper line editors, readers, and critics have focused on the polish stage of writing.

Harvard education professors V. A. Howard and J. H. Barton, authors of a wonderful summary of writing research called Thinking on Paper, note that a principal obstacle to writing improvement is our tendency to dwell on either the final results or the mental origins of writing to the exclusion of the activity of writing, as if an empty gap separated writing from thinking.

As Bob Baker, the author of Newsthinking put it, "You have to stop concentrating on merely the results of good writing—the examples they show you in most textbooks. You have to begin thinking about the causes—the thought strategies that created those polished examples."

Baker, a former writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times, was one of the writing-process pioneers who helped me discover new dimensions to writing and editing. Don Murray, the Pulitzer Prize–winning University of New Hampshire professor, was another. Murray’s seminal book, Writing for Your Readers, helped shift the focus of American writing instruction from results to causes.

I’ve seen the power of what Baker and Murray taught. Analyzing and improving process, making it less painful and more efficient, is the surest route to writing improvement. It’s helped me with my own writing, and I’m confident it can help yours, too.

I. The Writing Process

Seize the subject, and the words will follow.

—Cato the Elder

WRITING ONE STEP AT A TIME

Most of us have had a classmate who could sit down the night before the due date for a big paper and bang it out in a couple of hours. He’d be heading out for a beer while we sat staring at our keyboards with—as journalist and screenwriter Gene Fowler described the predicament—little drops of blood forming on our foreheads.

Or maybe your experience was with a colleague who could knock out a big departmental report before lunch. Or a friend who dashed off long, beautifully organized letters in one continuous flow of words. Or a closet novelist who produced a book by turning out a few pages a day despite holding a full-time job and having two toddlers underfoot.

Maybe they’re all writing gibberish. Or, like the reporters who shrug and say their stories just write themselves, maybe they’re mindlessly spewing out clichés according to a formula that requires no thought whatsoever.

Still, sometimes the two-hour research paper gets an A, the speedy report writer earns a promotion, and the relaxed reporter wins a Pulitzer.

That shouldn’t be terribly surprising. Most accomplished writers follow an efficient road map that leads them through projects without a lot of angst. In the real world of experienced professionals, a published piece almost never originates at the keyboard.

Consider everything that typically leads to a final draft:

1. The idea that results in a piece of writing may take days, weeks, or months forming in the writer’s mind. It probably will be shaped by discussion with others—editors, friends, sources. Eventually, the best ideas take the form of hypotheses that can be tested in the real world.

2. The information gathering can take anywhere from a few minutes to months. In the case of some Pulitzer Prize–winning feature stories, reporting lasted a year or more. Copywriters at ad agencies may spend months on research, interviewing, and brainstorming. Gathering string for a novel or a nonfiction book can take decades.

3. After the reporting, the writer has to ask, So what? What, in other words, is the focus of all the data pulled together during information gathering?

4. The raw material—notes, documents, database information—must be sorted and organized. That gives the report, essay, or story a shape, and it makes the raw material accessible during the writing.

5. The writer must work through the first draft.

6. The writer—and everybody else involved in producing the finished product—must dive into the final tweaking and polishing.

Of course, writing projects rarely conform perfectly to this idealized scheme. Ideas get refined as information gathering proceeds and the ultimate focus of the writing emerges. Drafting may suggest more meaningful approaches to organization. In the real world, writers jump around the process instead of moving smoothly from beginning to end.

Figure 1. The writing process

Regardless of the writing project, however, one thing remains the same. Content problems are almost always process problems. And some writers struggle for their entire lives without tumbling to the First Law of Writing Improvement: A problem visible at any one stage of the writing process usually results from something that happened at the immediately preceding stage.

Why do some writers bog down in aimless morasses of information? Almost always it’s because their original idea wasn’t adequately developed. Why can’t some writers find a focus? Probably because their undirected information gathering swamped them with irrelevant information. Why do some writers have a hard time finding a sensible organizational scheme? Maybe they have no focus. Poor organization, of course, will make it devilishly difficult to craft a decent draft. And if you have a lousy draft, you’re bound to have problems polishing it.

II. Ideas

My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.

—Ernest Hemingway

MINING THE WORLD FOR IDEAS

The author wearily steps to the lectern, ten cities into a twelve-city book tour. She finishes her shtick, asks for questions, and scans the audience warily, leery of the hands thrusting toward the ceiling. She points at a smiling face in the back, grips the edge of the lectern, and tries to keep herself from glowering as the inevitable question floats toward her again.

Where, says the adoring reader, do you get your ideas?

You get a life, growls the author to herself before graciously answering the damnable question for the umpteenth time. And, despite the platitudes she dishes out for public consumption, Get a life is the right answer.

Experienced writers are swamped with ideas. The problem isn’t getting ideas; it’s getting around to the ones they already have. They have lives, in other words. And the lives they lead follow myriad paths to an unending supply of ideas.

For one thing, they’re great readers. They read competitors, friends, enemies, and the best writers, living and dead. They read novels, memoirs, and billboards. Then they think about what they’ve read, exploring the possible application of new ideas to their own writing.

They don’t get stuck in reading ruts, either. Lots of us wake up to the morning news feed and find time for a favorite magazine or two, whether online or in print. But inveterate readers sample the whole world of publishing. In my town, that’s easy. Portland is home to one of the world’s biggest bookstores, Powell’s City of Books, and for years I made a habit of stopping into Rich’s Cigar Store, which in addition to stogies carried somewhere between three thousand and four thousand magazine titles. On any given day I might have leafed through Fine Woodworking, Wooden Boat, or Zyzzyva (a literary journal).

I’m only following my own advice. I’m the guy who told folks in magazine-writing classes to