Nib #44 — What to Read to Become a Better Writer

Okay, you’ve targeted your audience, mapped out an outline, vomited up a terrible first draft, and now you’ve edited and revised it once. Now what? The first answer is, “Edit and revise it again, at least once more.” (Writers should not voluntarily hand in anything rougher than a third draft — see Nib #86 .) On the other hand hand, you can’t rewrite forever. At some point, writing projects have to be put to bed. So the question remains: in the absence of a pressing deadline, how can writers know when they reach that point? How do you know you’re done done? The best answer is, when you feel yourself nitpicking . The first round of edits is for out-and-out mistakes. The second is for big refinements — breaking up long sentences, streamlining repetitive points, deleting digressions. After draft three, your edits will get more granular: eliminating unnecessary words, condensing overlong clauses and phrases, correcting personal tics, and tightening up word choices. Somewhere after draft four, your edits will become less obvious and less clarifying. Some of them will help with flow or tone. You may even stumble onto a gem of a new thought. But at a certain point, the changes will start to feel almost arbitrary — whether to put a subordinate clause before or after the independent clause, whether to turn a certain comma into an em dash, whether to change a “President Trump” into “Trump” or “the Administration.” When changes to the text stop clarifying its meaning, you’re no longer editing. You’re nitpicking. And when you feel yourself nitpicking, it’s time to stop. It may come on your fifth draft. It may come on your 20th. It’s not about the number. It’s about the feel. It’s about the moment when you’re reading your work and you can’t really tell the difference between this draft and the last one — when tweaks start to feel like they are coming from you rather than from the text itself. When you can’t tell if your changes are making the writing better or worse: that’s when you know you’re done. Until next week… keep writing!

“Show, don’t tell” may be the #1 piece advice in creative writing. It urges authors and poets and even journalists to put their readers in a scene, in a moment, in an image, rather than simply describing it. It’s good advice — and just as applicable to persuasive writing. Consider the following telling sentences, of the sort written every day in Washington op-eds, speeches, constituent letters, etc. Immigration is a crucial issue to America. These budget cuts will hurt the most vulnerable. The economy needs pro-growth tax cuts. The problem with these telling sentences is that they assert conclusions instead of presenting evidence. They raise questions rather than answer them. Why is immigration crucial? How will the budget cuts hurt people? What will pro-growth policies do for the economy? If we rework those sentences to focus on evidence instead of unearned conclusions, they become more interesting, vivid, and persuasive: Joe Biden’s open borders policy reduced blue collar wages by 4%, added $61 billion to the budget deficit, and enabled drug cartels to smuggle enough fentanyl into the country to kill every American citizen. Under these budget cuts, a single Ohio mom with three kids would lose her health insurance, child care, and her second job. If we lower income and capital gains tax rates today, Colorado alone will see 3,200 new business startups and 20,000 new jobs in the next 12 months. Persuasion is not about telling people how they should think about an issue. It’s about showing them the issue — the problems, proposals, and tradeoffs — in such a way that they reach the conclusion you want them to reach. Whatever your evidence — statistics, stories, analogies, images — don’t describe them. Don’t explain how people should feel about the evidence. Instead, present the evidence, as clearly and concretely as possible. Do that, and the persuasion will take care of itself. Until next week… keep writing!

This week, a little trick for all the speechwriters out there working with dense, wonky policy minutiae (and bosses who love it). Turning complex ideas and obscure data into compelling stories and arguments is very often what speechwriting is . That’s why even the most abstruse technocratic debates, when introduced to a general audience, can quickly devolve into blistering morality plays. Sometimes, though, certain details are too essential to an argument to be dumbed down or moralized. They must be presented in all their dry, impenetrable specificity. The problem here is not just that obscure facts can be boring, but that using them risks alienating one’s audience — making the speaker seem pretentious, talking down to the less informed. One way speechwriters skin this cat is with the phrase, “As you know…”, like this: “As you may know, violent crime in the county fell by 22 percent over the last six months.” Or: “As many of you know firsthand, Ireland is America’s top pharmaceuticals trading partner.” Prefacing information that the audience probably doesn’t know with the suggestion that they might can soften its reception. It invites the audience into the argument, making inclusive points that might otherwise be alienating. Ronald Reagan used it: "And as you may know, I approved raising the ceiling so they can buy an additional 10 million metric tons in the next year.” So did John F. Kennedy : "As you may know, there is currently a dispute over whether the Administration should spend the additional defense funds voted by the last Congress.” And Franklin Roosevelt : “[A]s you know, we have put 300,000 young men into practical and useful work in our forests and to prevent flood and soil erosion.” Of course, “As you know” does not give a speechwriter license to lard up rhetoric with unnecessary wonkery. It’s just a little sugar you can sprinkle on necessary details every once in a while to help them go down easier. Until next week… keep writing!

Jargon gets a bad wrap. To listen to most writing advice these days, you’d think that specialized, technical language is inherently wrong and should never be used. But that’s silly. Jargon helps people communicate — that’s why we create it. Every group with specialized knowledge has its own vocabulary: chemists, stock brokers, Dungeons and Dragons nerds, sports gamblers, etc. Used properly, jargon saves time, money, and lives. Think of doctors in an emergency room — “Give one of epi I-V push, stat!” — or soldiers on a battlefield — “Contact front, request immediate suppression, danger close!” The only admonition against jargon is that it oughtn’t be used to communicate with people who don’t understand it. It comes across as cliquish and snotty, like you’re lording your in-group membership over uninitiated outsiders. Misusing jargon in this way is an especially toxic problem in Washington because unlike in other industries, here the insiders work for the outsiders. The solution is for D.C. people to always remember to write like it. It’s perfectly fine for emails between congressional staffers to be full of Hill jargon because it saves time and energy. A congresswoman’s speech to a local Chamber of Commerce should probably avoid Hill jargon, but could employ some business jargon — “ROI,” “pass-throughs," “depreciation.” A Senator’s opening remarks at a town hall meeting, on the other hand, should probably drop jargon altogether. Just focus on communicating clearly with each particular audience you're writing to, and the jargon will take care of itself. Until next week… keep writing!

In honor of Stephen King’s 78th birthday Sunday, this week’s Nib offers a partial — but unequivocal! — recommendation from among King’s 50+ best-sellers. It’s the middle section of his 2000 memoir, On Writing — the section also called “On Writing.” It’s about 90 pages of excellent advice to improve one’s writing. Much of it mirrors Strunk & White — as most good writing advice tends to do. The difference is the generosity with which King explains the rules and principles he writes by. What The Elements of Style might cover in a sentence or two, King guides readers through for a paragraph or even a page, with examples, alternatives, and the cheerful enthusiasm of the natural teacher. “On Writing” takes up everything from dialogue attribution (no adverbs!) to distraction elimination to literary devices to editing. Whatever you think of King’s fiction — or, these days, his politics — his writing about writing is worth every writer’s time. Until next week… keep writing!

Contrary to what you see on social media, there are good reasons to disagree with you. People of goodwill can be liberal or conservative, religious or not, or believe LeBron James and not Michael Jordan is the GOAT. We all know this. So we should write like it. The temptation to attribute other points of view either to evil or stupidity comes not from conviction or knowledge, but from Pride. Pride with a capital P — the bad one. The fact that this temptation defines much of our public discourse today does not normalize or absolve it — as events of the last week cast in sharp relief. And so, God-fearing, patriotic young conservative writers have a special duty to rise above this temptation. Half the country is left-of-center, after all. Assuming that half is either evil or stupid is un-Christian and unpatriotic in the extreme. It’s also unpersuasive. You can’t win people over by calling the other side names. (When was the last time Keith Olbermann persuaded anyone of anything?) It doesn’t matter if your writing can’t persuade hardened ideologues on the other side. What matters is whether it persuades non-ideologues who read or hear it. Charlie Kirk understood this. His target audience wasn’t the leftist cranks who berated him at his open mic events. It was the politically unaffiliated kids in the crowd who he knew might be hearing serious, thoughtful conservative arguments for the first time. They were the people he won over — thanks in part to the respect he gave to the people he couldn’t win over. Unlike too many activists today, Kirk didn’t troll or “own” the left to get high-fives from allies already on his team. He didn’t straw-man opponents’ weakest points for cheap laughs. He graciously grappled and tried to beat the other side’s best arguments. As a means of resolving political differences, Kirk’s model — humble, generous, charitable persuasion — is very hard. But it’s worth it, especially for conservatives. We know the alternatives are so much worse. Until next week… keep writing!

Read The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. That’s it. That’s basically the whole Nib. Notice we say read Strunk & White. You need not read it more than once, or keep a dog-eared copy on your desk, or esteem it above all other writing books. It’s a little text book, not the Bible.  But the fact is, Strunk & White’s 100 pages of clear, concise prose contain more practical writing instruction than most young professionals today received in 17 years of formal education. The Elements of Style may not be the best writing book ever written. But it is easily the most accessible (it can be read in a single sitting) and the most gallant. This is the true spirit of the laws Professor Strunk laid down for students taking his English 8 course at Cornell University a century ago. The book’s rules are merely tools that enable writers to take care of their readers. “Always their motivation is fellow feeling,” journalist Andrew Ferguson — one of the best writers you’ll ever read — wrote in a 2009 appreciation, "‘Elements’ at 50". As Ferguson writes, the book’s commitment to clarity and correctness: “isn’t ‘bossiness.’ It’s not even grammar, really: It’s etiquette, and etiquette, properly understood, is a branch of morality.” That’s the best way to understand and read The Elements of Style. It’s a good book, in every sense of the word, and can make all young writers better. Until next week… keep writing!

For many writers, the hardest and most time-consuming sentence to write every day is the first one. Where do I begin? and Where do I go from here? are so open-ended they can paralyze writers before they even start typing. This is why outlines are so helpful even for shorter compositions. They keep writers on track, point-by-point and paragraph-by-paragraph. For longer projects that can’t be written in a single sitting, try this tip from Ernest Hemingway: “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck.” Papa had novels in mind, but his advice is just as valuable to writers of longer speeches, essays, and non-fiction books. It’s natural to try to close one’s writing day by finishing a section, a chapter, or an important paragraph. But if doing so leaves you unsure where to start tomorrow, you might be better off leaving today’s work not quite finished. Hemingway’s trick sets writers up to jump back into their work as soon as they sit back down. It may seem counterintuitive to deliberately end a writing session on an incomplete thought. But if completing that thought gives you instant, daily access to momentum, it will end up saving you much more time and frustration in the long run. So, if you want to write like Hemingway, it turns out you don’t have to do it standing up, naked, surrounded by six-toed cats. Just step away from the keyboard every day knowing what you’re going to write next. Until next week… keep writing!

If you want to cultivate a reputation as a good writer, never show anyone else your first drafts. Most inexperienced writers — whether students or young professionals — don’t appreciate just how bad first drafts are (See Nib #8: First (Worst) Drafts ). Not their first drafts; all first drafts. Rough drafts always teem with innocent but embarrassing mistakes like misused words and tense disagreements. Even worse, they are full of bad writing — overlong sentences, purple flourishes, awkward phrases, and confusing transitions. No matter how smart or talented you are, if you hand someone a first draft of something you write, they are going to think you’re illiterate. Don’t even share first drafts to solicit feedback on them. A typical first draft is so bad that only the writer himself can improve it — because no one else can even discern the text’s intended meaning. Ideally, you should not share — let alone submit — anything rougher than a third draft. The first edit should clear your draft of mistakes. The second should smooth out the clunkiest bits. Third drafts will still need polishing, but they should at least be coherent. (For frame of reference, you are reading the seventh draft of this Nib.) Of course, keeping your first draft to yourself will not magically make your writing better. But it will protect your reputation from the harshest judgments. And, in a world where your peers do share their rough cuts, it will make you look like Jane Austen by comparison. Until next week… keep writing!