Use good words, not bad ones

Use good words, not bad ones

Mar 25th 2015, 22:07 by R.L.G. | BERLIN

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"WRITE with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs" is a traditional bit of style advice. The aim is to get young writers picking a few words that tell, rather than bulking out their prose in the hopes of convincing by sheer mass.

But does good writing really prefer nouns and verbs over adjectives and adverbs? Mark Liberman of the Language Log blog and the University of Pennsylvania tried a brief experiment, choosing several pieces of "good" writing (both fiction and non-fiction) and "bad" writing (such as two winners of the "Bad Writing Contest" competition and an archetypally purple novel of 1830, "Paul Clifford", which begins with "It was a dark and stormy night"). The surprising result was that the "good" selection had relatively more verbs and adverbs, and the "bad" writing, relatively more nouns and adjectives.

How can usage-book writers have failed to notice that good writers use plenty of adverbs? One guess is that they are overlooking many: much, quite, rather and very are common adverbs, but they do not jump out as adverbs in the way that words ending with –ly do. A better piece of advice than "Don't use adverbs" would be to consider replacing verbs that are combined with the likes of quickly, quietly, excitedly by verbs that include those meanings (race, tiptoe, rush) instead.

Why would good writers use more verbs? One reason is that if unnecessary words are reduced, the verb-percentage goes up as a mathematical necessity. Ordinary sentences require a verb, whereas they do not require any other part of speech. Imperatives need no subject (Run!), and sentence fragments can make sense without explicit subjects: Woke up. Got out of bed. Dragged a comb across my head. By contrast, it is hard to write without verbs. So "use verbs" is not really good advice either, since writers have to use verbs, and trying to add extra ones would not turn out well.

What about nouns? There is a likely culprit for the high percentage of nouns in Mr Liberman's counts in "bad" prose: "nominalisations", also known as "zombie nouns". Abstract words are necessary for any language: you cannot have just rocks and trees and water, but need a few phenomena and increases and observations. But too many have a narcotic effect. Judith Butler, in the essay that won the 1997 Bad Writing Contest, uses account, relations, ways, hegemony, relations, repetition, convergence, rearticulation, question, temporality, thinking, structure, shift, theory, totalities, objects, insights, possibility, structure, conception, hegemony, sites, strategies, rearticulation and power—all in a single sentence. It is not much clearer with the other words added.

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Part of the reason why such writing bamboozles is that no one has ever seen or stubbed a toe on a rearticulation or a temporality. Abstract words make the brain do hard work. This is not always a bad thing—some good writing is difficult. But, by and large, a good style will at least dole out "metaconcept" words—words about ideas—either in manageable sentences, or broken up with more concrete nouns.

That leaves us with the adjective. The key, again, is to choose wisely. "Paul Clifford" begins like this:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. Through one of the obscurest quarters of London, and among haunts little loved by the gentlemen of the police, a man, evidently of the lowest orders, was wending his solitary way.

This is not the purplest prose of all time, but note how many adjectives are useless. Does "dark" add to the night? "Violent" to a sweeping gust of wind? If "a man" is wending his way, must we be told that it is a "solitary" one? Trying as a rule to eliminate adjectives will lead to some odd writing. But as with all words, they are best if they tell you something you didn't already know.

There is a lot to criticise in journalistic writing. But in one way, it is good training: print journalism forces writers to put complex stories into a box defined by an editor and competing stories. Every journalist moans about favourite phrases, sentences and whole stories cut from articles. But keeping to a tight word count forces the writer to think about which words absolutely have to be there, and makes it less likely that the editor will kill the writer's darlings. So while simple formulae such as "write with nouns and verbs" may not be brilliant style advice, one short piece of advice is worth taking: edit.

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