- Unsupervised Learning
- Posts
- Summary: Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace
Summary: Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace
[ NOTE: These book summaries are designed as captures for what I’ve read, and aren’t necessarily great standalone resources for those who have not read the book. Their purpose is to ensure that I capture what I learn from any given text, so as to avoid realizing years later that I have no idea what it was about or how I benefited from it. ]
Easily the most readable instructional book I’ve read, perhaps…ever
Even superior to my favorite Strunk and White book on writing
Prose is written or spoken language in its normal form, i.e. without a meter. In short, there is prose and there is poetry.
It’s highly alluring to write in an obscure way, and this should be fought against
Academics, and most others as well, do it to look smarter
Some people have opaque writing just because they’re not able to write clearly
Not in the book, but the higher the quality of the content the smaller the font generally is (to a point)
Smaller fonts are supposed to remove natural bias by lowering one’s shields when struggling to read something. If it’s too easy to read the content hits our biases directly
Most experienced writers get something down as fast as they can, and then come back to clean it up
Don’t think as you draft. Just write
The first principle of clear sentences is that the main character should be the subject
Second principle of good sentences is that the subject’s actions should be expressed using verbs
Nominalization is the nouning of verbs, resist->resistance, react->reaction
Nominalization is bad because it removes the key quality of clear writing
One of the hallmarks of bad academic writing is heavy use of nominalization
Diagnose:
Diagnose: underline the first 7-8 words in a sentence
Look for the subject, and make sure it’s clear
Count the words before the verb
Analyze:
Find the main characters
Find the verbsRewrite:
Change nominalizations to verbs
Make the main characters the subjects
Rewrite the sentence with because, if, when, although, why, how, whether, or that
There are a few exceptions where nominalizations are useful
In general, most of these rules have exceptions
FIND MAIN CHARACTERS AND LINK THEM TO ACTIONS USING VERBS. This is the single most important piece of guidance for clear writing
Even when you have an abstract concept, turn it into a subject and a main character, and give it some verbs to do
Active verbs are often better, but not always
Flow is key to good writing, and cohesion is key to flow
Sentences are cohesive when the information from one appears in the first few words of the next
This is the best reason to use the passive, so you can link in this way
Begin sentences with information more familiar to your reader, then go to more abstract or new
End sentences with information the reader cannot predict
There’s a balance in each passage for being clear and being cohesive. Give priority to cohesion.
Think of cohesion as pairs of sentences fitting like puzzle pieces
Avoid distractions at the beginning of a sentence. You basically start clean and solid, and then hit them with the new or interesting or harder to understand thing
The end of your sentence is how you manage two kinds of problem: complexity of the sentence as a whole, and teaching a complex topic
The first few words of a sentence give the point of view
The last few words give the emphasis
Tactically revise for stress by 1) trimming the end, 2) shifting peripheral ideas to the left, and 3) shift new information to the right
Emphasize themes in passages by repeating them throughout the passage
There’s a German proverb that says the beginning and end shake hands with each other
Concision is powerful
Delete meaningless words
Delete doubled words
Delete words that readers can infer (Ha!)
Replace phrases with words “carefully read what you have written” -> edit
“The one thing to do before anything else” -> first
Change negatives to affirmatives
Shape is key
You can write clear and concise sentences, but can you write shapely ones?
This is Hitchens territory. He’s the master.
Revise long openings
Get to the subject quickly
Get to the main actions/verbs quickly
Consider starting with your point
Consider cutting things out
Consider turning subordinate clauses into separate sentences
Consider changing clauses to modifying phrases
When you coordinate, try to go from shorter to longer and from simple to complex
Elegance is next
The most striking feature of elegant prose is balanced sentence structure
You most easily do this with things like and, or, nor, but, and yet
Chiasmus is a neat trick where you balance elements in two parts of a sentence, but you switch the order in the second one (it’s greek for crossing)
Tips for elegant sentences are based on ending with strength
End with a strong word or pair of them
End with a prepositional phrase introduced by ‘of’
End with an echoing salience (echoing a previous word)
End with a chiasmus (crossing order of a list)
Delay the point of the sentence with a set of suspended clauses (suspense, use caution)
I think I like this book on style so much because it’s reductionist. Every trick has a name, which gives order to the universe.
It makes me want to read Hitchens, or Harris, or Adams, and name every twist and turn of sentence that produces a smile from me
Be aware of sentences that are shorter than fifteen words and longer than thirty
[ Find my other book summaries here. ]