Book Review: 100 Ways to Improve

作者：Gary Provost
出版社：A Mentor Book
副标题：Proven Professional Techniques for Writing with Style and Power
发行时间：1985年10月1日
来源：下载的 epub 版本
Goodreads：4.0（434 Ratings）
豆瓣：8.8（15人评价）

摘录：

As a free-lance writer I live and die by the mailbox. During the past twenty years I have sent and received more than forty thousand pieces of mail that had some part of my heart attached to them. And during that time there haven’t been more than one or two mishaps concerning the handling of my mail. Though I have laughed at post-office jokes and have made a few myself, the fact is that the United States Postal Service has the highest success record of any business I have ever dealt with. For that reason this book is dedicated to the men and women of the post office at South Lancaster, Massachusetts 01561, and to postal workers everywhere.

Nine Ways to Improve Your Writing When You’re Not Writing:

1. Get Some Reference Books
2. Expand Your Vocabulary
3. Improve Your Spelling
4. Read
5. Take a Class
6. Eavesdrop
7. Research
8. Write in Your Head
9. Choose a Time and Place

Roget’s Thesaurus is arranged in two sections. The first section contains hundreds of clusters of related words and phrases. The second section is an index listing all the words in the first section alphabetically and telling you where they appear in that section.
Let’s say, for example, that in a letter you want to assure the owner of the company you work for that you will most certainly try to recover the four billion dollars you lost on the papier-mâché deal, but recover isn’t quite the word you want to use, and you’re not sure what is. So you whip out your pocket edition of Roget’s Thesaurus, turn to the index, and look up recover. There you’ll find the numbers 660, 775, and 790. You turn to cluster 660 and you find recover along with its cousins rally, revive, pull through, reappear, and others. If you don’t like anything you find there, you turn to the other numbers, and the thesaurus will lead you to redeem, get back, salvage, and so on.

Here are a few reference books you might find useful.
Finding Facts Fast by Alden Todd (Ten Speed Press) is a good reference book for any writer who has to do research.
The Statistical Abstract of the United States will tell you how many tomatoes were grown in New Jersey last year and a good many other things you might not find anywhere else. You can order it from the U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402.
The Book of Lists by David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace, and Amy Wallace (Bantam) is fun to read and rich with useful information.
The Help Book by J. L. Barkas (Scribner’s) will tell you who provides what services and where you can get more information.
The King’s English by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler (Oxford University Press) is an excellent grammar text.
Words into Type (Prentice-Hall) will guide you through every aspect of manuscript preparation, from matters of usage and grammar to matters of editing and proofreading.

Everybody has heard tips for improving vocabulary. Learn a new word in the morning and use it three times before sunset and it’s yours, etc. There are many books that will help you stretch your vocabulary. The best known one is Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary by Wilfred Funk and Norman Lewis (Funk and Wagnalls). Read that book or one like it.
But the most important vocabulary for the writer is not the one that will take in uxorious tomorrow and soubrette the next day. It’s the one he or she already has. For the writer of average intelligence and education, learning new words is much less important than learning to use easily the words he or she already knows.
Think for a minute. How many synonyms can you come up with for the noun plan?
There are program, itinerary, scheme, design, agenda, outline, and blueprint. If you concentrated for a minute, you might have come up with ten words that you already knew. But how many of them would have come easily to mind while you were writing a letter to the boss about your potentially lucrative new ... uh ... plan?
The only way to make your vocabulary more accessible is to use it. If you want all those short but interesting words waiting at the front of your brain when you need them, you must move them to the front of your brain before you need them.
Stop to think about other word possibilities when you write, and eventually they will come so quickly that you won’t have to stop.
Pause before you speak. Then insert some of those good but neglected words.
And when you drive home from work at night, pick out an object along the road and see how many synonyms you can think of before you pass it. There’s a house over there. But it’s also a dwelling, an abode, a building, a bungalow, perhaps, or maybe a cottage. It’s a home for somebody, it’s headquarters for a family, and it’s a shelter and a structure, too.

Nine Ways to Overcome Writer’s Block:

1. Copy Something
2. Keep a Journal
3. Talk About What You’re Writing
4. Touch Your Toes
5. Do Writing Exercises
6. Organize Your Material
7. Make a List
8. Picture a Reader
9. Ask Yourself Why You Are Writing

Your lead should give readers something to care about before it gives them dry background information. “Something to care about” usually means one of two things. Either you give the readers information which affects them directly, or you give them a human being with whom they can identify.

Nine Ways to Save Time and Energy:

1. Use Pyramid Construction
2. Use Topic Sentences
3. Write Short Paragraphs
4. Use Transitional Phrases
5. Don’t Explain When You Don’t Have To
6. Use Bridge Words
7. Avoid Wordiness
8. Steal
9. Stop Writing When you Get to the End

Writing in the pyramid style means getting to the point at the top, putting the “who, what, when, where, and why” in the first paragraph, and developing the supporting information under it.
Newspapers use pyramid style because they are in the business of getting facts to readers as quickly as possible and because of the way news stories must be edited. When a newspaper editor has a seven-inch story that he or she has to put into a six-inch hole in the newspaper, that editor doesn’t run through the story with a pencil looking for useless adverbs or sentences that can be rewritten. He or she simply cuts an inch off the bottom. That is why each inch of a pyramid-style story should be less important than the inch that came before it.
You should use pyramid style for any short report and for any story that might be cut. And when you do, don’t put anything in paragraph 12 that the reader must know in order to understand paragraph 7.

We use bridge words all the time to make conversations smooth. If your friend says, “Let’s pick apples Saturday. My brother Larry lives in California,” you will feel slightly jarred. You are distracted and will want to ask, “Why are you suddenly talking about your brother?” On the other hand, if your friend says, “Let’s pick apples Saturday. My brother Larry and I used to pick apples all the time. He lives in California,” the word “apples” provides you with a bridge across your friend’s thoughts, and you go along easily.

Be a literary pack rat. Brighten up your story with a metaphor you read in the Sunday paper. Make a point with an anecdote you heard at the barber shop. Let a character tell a joke you heard in a bar. But steal small, not big, and don’t steal from just one source. Someone once said that if you steal from one writer, it’s called plagiarism, but if you steal from several, it’s called research. So steal from everybody, but steal only a sentence or a phrase at a time. If you use much more than that, you must get permission and then give credit. Here are two example of acceptable, honorable ways to steal.
Whenever people ask me what I did for a living before I became a writer, I reply, “I did all those crummy jobs that would someday look so glamorous on the back of a book jacket.” It’s a cute line, one of many I use often in order to keep myself constantly surrounded by an aura of cleverness. But I didn’t invent the line. I read it twenty years ago in a TV Guide article by Merle Miller, and I’ve used it ever since, rarely giving Miller credit for the line.
The previous paragraph shows two examples of acceptable literary theft. The first is Miller’s line, which the paragraph is about. The other is the paragraph itself. It’s the opening paragraph for an article I wrote in Writer’s Digest (April 1983) called “Do Editor’s Steal?” I stole it from myself.

Ten Ways to Develop Style:

1. Think About Style
2. Listen to What You Write
3. Mimic Spoken Language
4. Vary Sentence Length
5. Vary Sentence Construction
6. Write Complete Sentences
7. Show, Don’t Tell
8. Keep Related Words Together
9. Use Parallel Construction
10. Don’t Force a Personal Style

Writing should be conversational. That does not mean that your writing should be an exact duplicate of speech; it should not. Your writing should convey to the reader a sense of conversation. It should furnish the immediacy and the warmth of a personal conversation.
Most real conversations, if committed to paper, would dull the senses. Conversations stumble, they stray, they repeat; they are bloated with meaningless words, and they are often cut short by intrusions. But what they have going for them is human contact, the sound of a human voice. And if you can put that quality into your writing, you will get the reader’s attention.

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that bums with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.

Style is not something you can put onto your writing like a new set of clothes. Style is your writing. It is inexorably knotted to the content of your words and the nature of you. So do not pour the clay of your thoughts into the hard mold of some personal writing style that you are determined to have. Do not create in your head some witty, erudite, unmistakably exciting persona and try to capture him or her on paper. Also, do not try to write like Erma Bombeck, Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, or anybody else. If you fail you will look foolish, and if you succeed you will succeed only in announcing to the world that you are not very creative. Strive instead to write well and without self-consciousness. Then your style will emerge. It might be as specifically yours as your thumbprint, or it might be as common as sunshine. But at least it will be you.

Twelve Ways to Give Your Words Power:

1. Use Short Words
2. Use Dense Words
3. Use Familiar Words
4. Use Active Verbs
5. Use Strong Verbs
6. Use Specific Nouns
7. Use the Active Voice ... Most of the Time
8. Say Things in a Positive Way ... Most of the Time
9. Be Specific
10. Use Statistics
11. Provide Facts
12. Put Emphatic Words at the End

A couple of tips. A word is familiar if it came easily to you but is not part of some specialized knowledge you have, such as a computer term. A word is unfamliar if you never heard of it until you found it in the thesaurus or if you haven’t read it at least three times in the past year.

Active verbs do something. Inactive verbs are something. You will gain power over readers if you change ​verbs of being such as is, was, and will be to verbs of motion and action.
Bad:
A grandfather clock was in one corner, and three books were on top of it.
Better:
A grandfather clock towered in one corner, and three books lay on top of it.

Verbs, words of action, are the primary source of energy in your sentences. They are the executives; they should be in charge. All other parts of speech are valuable assistants, but if your verbs are weak, all the modifiers in the world won’t save your story from dullness.
Generally speaking, verbs are weak when they are not specific, not active, or are unnecessarily dependent on adverbs for their meaning.
If you choose strong verbs and choose them wisely, they will work harder for you than any other part of speech. Strong verbs will reduce the number of words in your sentences by eliminating many adverbs. And, more important, strong verbs will pack your paragraphs with the energy, the excitement, and the sense of motion that readers crave.
Sharpen a verb’s meaning by being precise. Turn look into stare, gaze, peer, peek, or gawk, Turn throw into toss, flip, or hurl.
Inspect adverbs carefully and always be suspicious. What are those little buggers up to? Are they trying to cover up for a lazy verb? Most adverbs are just adjectives with ‘ly’ tacked on the end, and the majority of them should be shoveled into a truck and hauled off to the junkyard. Did your character really walk nervously, or did he pace? Did his wife eat quickly, or did she wolf down her supper?

Usually what matters is what did happen, what does exist, and who is involved. So develop the habit of stating information in a positive manner.
If you want your reader to experience the silence of a church at night, write “The church was silent.” If you write “There was no noise in the church,” the first thing your reader will hear is the noise that isn’t there.

Emphatic words are those words you want the reader to pay special attention to. They contain the information you are most anxious to communicate. You can acquire that extra attention for those words by placing them at the end of the sentence.
If you want to emphasize the fact that redwood trees are tall, you might write, “Some redwoods are more than 350 feet tall.” But if you want to emphasize the fact that one of the attractions in California is the redwood trees, you would write, “Also found in California are the 350-foot redwood trees.”
If you want to emphasize the amount of money that somebody owes you, you write, “By June first please send me a check for 107.12 by June first.” And if you want to emphasize who the check is to go to, write, “On June first the check for $107.12 should be sent to me.”
This is a lesson best learned by ear. Listen to how the impact of a sentence moves to whatever information happens to be at the end.

Eleven Ways to Make People Like What You Write:

1. Make Yourself Likeable
2. Write About People
3. Show Your Opinion
4. Obey Your Own Rules
5. Use Anecdotes
6. Use Examples
7. Name Your Sources
8. Provide Useful Information
9. Use Quotations
10. Use Quotes
11. Create a Strong Title

In order to write successfully, you don’t have to become a great writer. But you do have to make yourself likable. If you are asking people to buy your product, take your advice, mail a check, or worry about the problem you present, you first want them to care about you. When you write well, you share a private moment with the readers. Present yourself to readers as someone they would welcome into their homes. Write clearly and conversationally, and strive always to present in your writing some honest picture of who you are.
Readers will like you if you edit from your work French phrases, obscure literary allusions, and archaic words that are known to only six persons in the world.
Readers will like you if you seem to understand who they are and what their world is like. If you write an article called “Getting Back on the Budget” for Woman’s Day, and you begin by advising the readers to go out and borrow $100,000, you will reveal your ignorance of the readers’ financial status. The readers won’t like you. (And of course the editors at Woman’s Day won’t like you and won’t publish your article.)
Readers will like you if you use humor in almost everything you write. Of course, there are times when humor is inappropriate (on a death certificate, for example), but don’t hesitate to bring humor into your business correspondence and articles.
Readers will like you if you show that you are human. In a how-to piece, for example, you might write, “This third step is a little hard to master. I ruined six good slides before I got it right. So be smarter than I was; practice on blanks.”

People are why TVs get turned on. People are why books get opened. People are why magazines are purchased. And people are why the well-told tale has been listened to for centuries.
People is the one subject that everybody cares about.
What do other people think? How do they act? What makes them angry, happy, enthusiastic? How will they vote in the next election? How can I get them to fall in love with me, buy my product, support my plan? These are the questions readers ask.
So try to put humanity into everything you write. There are times when you cannot comfortably dress your prose in flesh and blood, but those times are rare. Even a how-to article is about a person named “you.”
Don’t write about the new bookkeeping system. Write about how the new bookkeeping system will affect people.
If you are writing about the welfare crisis, begin with an anecdote about one family that lives in a car because they cannot pay rent out of their small welfare check.
If you are writing a brochure to attract new members to your church, don’t write about the steeple and the organ. Write about the people who come to church suppers, the people who volunteer for committees, the people your readers will meet if they show up for church on Sunday.

You should also include the source of opinions expressed in your story.
If you are expressing your own opinion in a story, don’t try to hang it on the vague “There’s a growing feeling” or “Widespread opinion is.” But neither do you have to precede every sentence with “I think” or “It’s my opinion that.” If you write, “Sturge Thibedeau is the worst director in Hollywood,” that is obviously your opinion, since it is not a measurable fact.
But if you’re going to disown the opinion and write something like “Sturge Thibedeau is generally considered to be the worst director in Hollywood,” back it up with something like “In a 1981 poll of one hundred top directors, ninety-seven rated Sturge Thibedeau as the worst director in Hollywood or anywhere else.” If you can’t back the opinion with something, then you have to wonder about where you got the idea in the first place.
I’m not trying to improve your ethics, only your writing. A phrase like widely regarded means nothing to the reader unless he or she knows what you mean by widely regarded. Does widely regarded mean the writer and his brother? Does it mean three bad actors who got canned from Thibedeau’s films? Does it mean Sturge Thibedeau’s ex-wives? Or does it mean one hundred knowledgeable people in the film industry?

“Familiar quotations,” wrote Carroll Wilson, in the preface to a book of quotations, “are more than familiar; they are something part of us. These echoes of the past have two marked characteristics—a simple idea, and an accurate rhythmic beat.”
Though “quotation” and “quotes” are the same thing, we generally think of quotations as words that are notable enough to have been preserved through time.
Use quotations when you need to enhance an idea with something poetic or reinforce a generalization or an opinion.
Quotations will create the idea that you are not alone in your opinion, that somebody, perhaps even Abraham Lincoln, agrees with you. They will give you credibility by association.
Don’t use a lot of quotations, however, or they will look more like crutches to hold you than planks to support you.
How do you come up with good quotations? The most famous source is Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, but there are a variety of paperback and hardcover books of quotations. Some are arranged by topic, some by author, some by both. Browse in the bookstore. Also, when you hear a quotation you like, write it down. Here’s how you might use a quotation:

“Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.” The words were written by Langston Hughes, but they have special meaning today for Sturge Thibedeau. Thibedeau, who has long been considered one of Hollywood’s worst directors, achieved his lifelong dream yesterday with the release of Treadmill to Oblivion.

A good title will make a reader curious.
A good title is a guide. By telling something about the content of your story, it separates the appropriate readers for your story from those who would have no interest in it.
A good title is short. Don’t write, “Investigative Techniques and Conclusions Concerning the Proposal to Extend Client Services.” Write, “Results of the Client Survey.”
A good title hints at the limits of information in the story; that is, it suggests the slant. Don’t write, “How Sports Enriched My Religious Life.” Write, “A Christian Looks at Baseball.”
A good title should reveal information, not hide it. Don’t write, “Tips on an Important Purchase.” Write, “Six Ways to Save Money Buying a House.”

Ten Ways to Avoid Grammatical Errors:

1. Respect the Rules of Grammar
2. Do Not Change Tenses
3. Know How to Use the Possessive Case
4. Make Verbs Agree With Their Subjects
5. Avoid Dangling Modifiers
6. Avoid Shifts in Pronoun Forms
7. Avoid Splitting Infinitives
8. Avoid These Common Mistakes
9. Be Sensitive to Changes in the Language
10. Prefer Good Writing to Good Grammar

To succeed as a writer, you must respect the rules of grammar. If editors or teachers have consistently found grammatical errors in your writing, the flaw in your work is not minor. It is fatal. Good writing and good grammar are not twins, but they are usually found in the same place.
The rules of grammar exist to help you write well, not to sabotage your work, and you cannot write well without them. The rules of grammar organize the language just as the rules of arithmetic organize the world of numbers. Imagine how difficult math would be if three and three equaled six only once in a while or if a tenth was equal to ten percent only when somebody felt like it. Grammatical rules about tense, gender, number, person, and case provide us with a literary currency that we can spend wherever English is spoken or read. Grammar is a system of rules for speaking and writing a given language, and that system was not created just so that English teachers would have something to harass you about. It exists so that we can communicate well, and when you blatantly violate portions of the system, you are chipping away at the stability of the whole.
While you should accept the fact that changes do occur in the language, you should also resist each change every step of the way. Change should not come easily. New words and constructions seeking entry into the language should be met by a mighty army of grammarians saying, “It’s wrong,” and the rest of us saying, “It just doesn’t sound right,” so that the trendy, the senseless, and the merely pretty fall dead on the battlefield, and only the truly valuable survive. Change, if I might switch my metaphor, should come gradually and rarely, or the language will fall like a table that has all its legs removed at once instead of replaced one at a time.

Most nouns are made possessive by adding ’s: The dog’s paws, a child’s toy, the ocean’s beauty. However, if a noun ends in s already and is plural, simply add an apostrophe: The dogs’ paws, A singular noun ending in s may be made possessive either way: The actress’s role/The actress’ role.
When joint possession is being shown, the ’s usually is added only to the last member of the series: June and Jane’s mother is coming to lunch. However, if what is possessed is not identical, each noun in the series should have ’s: June’s and Jane’s teachers are coming to lunch.
With compound nouns, the ’s is added to the final word:

• My mother-in-law’s house is spotless.
• The Queen of England’s dogs kept barking.

The personal pronoun it does not use an apostrophe in its possessive form:
Wrong: The dog scratched it's collar. The perfume lost it's scent.
Right: The dog scratched its collar. The perfume lost its scent.

Plural subjects require plural verbs; singular subjects require singular verbs. When writing a long or complicated sentence, check to make certain your verb agrees in number with its subject.

In addition to major grammatical mistakes, there are a good many minor mistakes to be made, and nobody’s hands are completely clean. We all have a few grammatical rules that we can never quite nail down despite our “ears” for language. Many people cannot remember the difference between who and whom. (Who is nominative case, and whom is objective case, as in “Who is going to the prom with you, and with whom did she go last year?”) Many writers use like as a conjunction (She walks like she’s got a train to catch), even though most grammarians insist it be used only as a preposition (It looks like a luxury car, and it rides like a dream). And almost everybody gets confused about lay and lie. (And with good reason. Lay means to put something down, and lie means to recline, but the past tense of lie is, would you believe, lay.)

Minor mistakes like these might confuse, disturb, or disgust your reader, depending on which mistakes you make, how often you make them, and who the reader is. It’s arbitrary. When I wear an editor’s hat, I don’t mind a writer using who instead of whom, or occasionally using like as a conjunction. On the other hand, I would be inclined to reject the writer who consistently used like as a conjunction (even though Shakespeare did it), or who wrote, “I lied down for a nap.”
When it comes to minor grammatical mistakes, readers don’t all draw lines at the same place. But all readers have a limited number of grammatical mistakes that they will forgive, so you should at least aim for grammatical perfection except when you can improve the writing by breaking a rule of grammar.
Many grammatical errors occur because the writer tries too hard not to make a mistake. Instead of trusting his or her ear for language, the writer reacts to some traumatic correction in childhood. Most of us, for example, once said, “Jimmy and me are going to the movies,” and had some impolite adult snap at us, “It’s ‘Jimmy and I are going to the movies.’ ” Many people were corrected so often that they now change all their me’s to I’s and write things like “The contract was given to Jimmy and I.” (It should be “Jimmy and me.” I is nominative, me is objective.) Or, having been bawled out for saying, “I played bad,” when he should have said, “I played badly,” the kid turns into an adult who writes things like “I feel badly about your loss,” when he means that he feels bad about your loss. The problem is that the writer recalls the specific words involved instead of the pertinent rule, which was not explained.

Even if you know all the rules of grammar, you’re covered only for today, not tomorrow. The rules change. Grammar is a living thing; it grows to meet new needs.

An obvious example of this is something called the degenderization of language. The feminist movement has successfully lifted our consciousness about the fact that English pronouns of unspecified gender are always male, a fact that contributes to the idea that males are the regular folk and females are something else. It is good grammar but poor feminism to write, “A doctor should always clean his stethoscope before checking someone’s heart.”
Several solutions to the problem have been suggested. Among them are he/she, his/her, and s/he. None has really caught on. What is catching on, however, is “A doctor should always clean their stethoscope,” an error in number that is perpetrated by people who would rather offend grammarians than feminists. It’s good feminism but bad grammar, and I don’t like it. In fact, to be perfectly honest about it, I hate it. But I’m starting to get used to it, and it seems to be earning its way into the language. If it proves to be made of hearty stuff, I will welcome it.
The point is that it’s bad grammar today, but it might be good grammar ten years from now. Today’s rules have no better shot at immortality than thee and thou had.

Six Ways to Avoid Punctuation Errors:

1. Use Orthodox Punctuation
2. Know When to Use a Comma
3. Know When to Use a Semicolon
4. Know When to Use a Colon
5. Use Exclamation Points Only When Exclaiming and Question Marks Only when Asking Questions
6. Know How to Use Quotation Marks

Writing is not a visual art, so don’t use punctuation as decoration. Be creative in your writing, not in your punctuation.
After writing an exclamation, use only one exclamation point. No! is every bit as effective as No!!!
Avoid using unnecessary quotation marks. Some writers insist on placing quotation marks around slang words: My “old man” is going to give me some “big bucks.” If you wish to use slang or idioms, do so, but do so without quotation marks.
Avoid using unnecessary dashes and ellipses. Some writers use dashes (——) and ellipses ( ... ) to cover faulty sentence constructions and vague thoughts. Don’t.

Twelve Ways to Avoid Making Your Reader Hate You:

1. Avoid Jargon
2. Avoid Clichés
3. Avoid Parentheses
4. Avoid Footnotes
5. Don’t Use Transitions to Conceal Information
6. Don’t Acknowledge When You Should Explain
7. Don’t Hide Behind Your Words
8. Don’t Intrude
9. Don’t Play Word Games.
10. Don’t Play the Tom Wolfe Game
11. Don’t Play the Mystery Game
12. Don’t Cheat

Seven Ways to Edit Yourself:

1. Read Your Work Out Loud
2. Cut Unnecessary Words
3. Think About What You Have Written
4. Ask Yourself These Questions
5. Follow These Rules of Form for Titles
6. Prepare a Perfect Manuscript
7. Use Common Sense