Bad Habits

One thing I have learned after years of writing, learning and reading about writing, and teaching writing: the rules aren’t the rules. Often the rules we have learned make our writing difficult to read. They create a set of bad writing habits. 

Before I start on guidelines to good writing, we have to understand the rules that create bad habits. Most of these rules are those we absorbed in years of reading bad writing, in school, and from people who don’t know what they are doing telling us that what we are doing is incorrect. These habits are hard to break.

First, most of us learn to write by copying what we read. If we don't read at all, if what we read is bad writing, then we tend to write badly. Think about some of what you have read in your own field. How much of it do you have to read more than once just to understand it—and many times, even several readings leave you confused? My students often complained that their textbooks, books that should teach them the basics in their fields, left them confused instead of instructed. 

This goes back to efficiency in writing. If the goal is to communicate an idea from the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader, then many writers fail at what they do.

Worse, how many readers think that the fault lies with them? I’m sure most of us have blamed ourselves for not understanding a textbook, what an outstanding researcher has published, even simple instructions. 

I tried to put a television stand together not too long ago. As an exercise in futility, I first read the instructions. They were clear enough, although the pictures were more instructive, but they left out several steps and did not point out certain restrictions or cautions necessary for putting that stand together. I had to take the thing apart three times and redo it before I finally got it right. That was a waste of time. Something that should have taken at most an hour took up an entire afternoon and caused my blood pressure to soar.

Fortunately, I felt no need to blame myself. Those instructions were badly written. If the reader doesn’t understand, the fault is the writer’s. Let me repeat that: the writer is responsible for helping the reader understand. Taking the time to consider the reader is a necessary part of writing. And any time you hear a writer blame a reader for not getting it, you know the writer has no clue how to write.

So if you read a lot of bad prose, you are likely to emulate that bad prose in your own writing. The antidote is good writing. If we learn by imitation, we should choose a good writer to imitate. Identify someone whose articles you actually enjoy reading, the ones you understand the first time through; read that writer’s work, even if the articles aren’t directly related to your field. You should also read something besides professional articles. Pick up some decent fiction and read that. Many biographers and historians are also excellent writers. The book doesn’t have to be a classic. It just has to be something you enjoy reading.

School is no place to learn good writing habits either. I have great respect for English teachers in public schools, but most of them have too many students to do a good job of teaching writing. (Don’t get me started on class size and teacher compensation. You get what you pay for.) Unfortunately, I also know a great many teachers who don’t have a clue how to teach good writing because they don’t even know what good writing is. (I still recall the temptation to edit the notes I got from my children’s teachers. Can you imagine their reaction if I had edited the notes and sent them back?)

No doubt you remember writing assignments from high school and from college. Were you given a set number of pages to write? Teachers often assign a report that is five pages long. What happens if you have said everything you have to say in four? You get points taken off. What happens if you use simple words and short sentences? You are told that such writing doesn’t sound educated. So what did you do? You piffled for an extra page, stretching the sentences out, repeating yourself, searching the thesaurus for long words to substitute for short ones. And yet what you turned in was not necessarily good writing. It was just longer writing.

Then you get your paper back redecorated in red ink. You would see comments like: You cannot begin a sentence with because; Don’t use first person—don’t use I and you; Don’t start a sentence with and or but; Don’t use the verb to be (am, is, are, was, were); Don’t split infinitives; Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. How many paragraphs are in an essay? Five: one introduction, three body paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph. 

No doubt you can add to the list yourself. These rules, and I’m stretching a point to even call them rules, don’t make you a good writer. If anything, they make you worse.

Are there rules? Yes. We have grammar rules and spelling rules, but even those can be bent. A preoccupation with rules can end up making your writing dull, long, claustrophobic, unfriendly, and uncommunicative.