Invigorate your writing with some unconventional modifiers

Jonah Goldberg caught my attention the other day with this:

The story of all three major races . . . is that this conventional wisdom was incandescently wrong and ill-advised.

Incandescent can mean “glowing or white with heat,” “intensely bright,” “brilliant; masterly; extraordinarily lucid,”or “aglow with ardor, purpose, etc.” The adverb form, incandescently, isn’t usually coupled with a word like wrong, the way Goldberg used it, but it works, and works well. It emphasizes the point that the “conventional wisdom” isn’t just slightly wrong, but it is wrongness that you need welding goggles to safely view. It’s wrongness raised to a higher degree, with whipped cream and a cherry on top. It’s the kind of wrongness that only highly educated experts are capable of. But it says it in only two words.

Try using some modifiers—adjectives or adverbs—in unconventional ways. (Don’t overdo it, though, or the cleverness of your writing will capture your audience’s attention, rather than the point you’re trying to make.)

Creative DNA: Are you a writer or an editor?

According to choreographer Twyla Tharp, we all have “creative DNA.”

I believe that we all have strands of creative code hard-wired into our imaginations. These strands are as solidly imprinted in us as the genetic code that determines our height and eye color, except they govern our creative impulses. They determine the forms we work in, the stories we tell, and how we tell them. I’m not Watson and Crick; I can’t prove this. But perhaps you also suspect it when you try to understand why you’re a photographer, not a writer, or why you always insert a happy ending into your story, or why all your canvases gather the most interesting material at the edges, not the center. [The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life]

Tharp goes on to say that photographer Ansel Adams seemed to view the world from a distance. “He found solace in lugging his heavy camera on long treks into the wilderness or to a mountaintop so he could have the widest view of land and sky.”

On the other hand, she cites Raymond Chandler as a novelist who viewed the world from close up. “He works in extreme close-up, a succession of tight shots that practically put us inside the characters’ skulls. …his eye for descriptive detail was razor-sharp.”

Adam’s wide-open, distant view and Chandler’s up-close scrutiny of the details were part of each artist’s creative DNA.

I thought about this idea when I read an article by Daphne Gray-Grant, in which she talks about two types of writers:

1. Those who have to force themselves to write their first draft, but come to life when it’s time to rewrite and edit their work.
2. Those who can get lost in the writing, but can’t stand rewriting and editing their work.

My hypothesis is that, rather than a clear distinction between these two types, it’s likely that most writers would find themselves somewhere on a  continuum between these two extremes.

But either way, I thought that this characteristic is probably part of one’s creative DNA; it’s a hard-wired preference for one or the other aspect of writing. For me, rewriting, revising, and editing is always easier than getting the first draft down. When I’m just trying to get something down on the page, I constantly have to fight the impulse to revise what I’ve just written. I want to edit as I go, despite the fact that it slows me down.

You don’t fight with your DNA. It would be foolish to berate yourself over the fact that you can’t force your hair to come out of your scalp a different color, or straighter, or curlier.

You can’t overcome your creative DNA, either. Whichever type of writer you happen to be, there’s no point in beating yourself up because you find either writing or editing to be a thing of dread. Take advantage of and revel in what you’re good at, what you enjoy; learn to work through the things that are harder for you, using trickery if necessary. Gray-Grant’s article offers some strategies to help both types of writers discipline themselves to get the work done.

And as Tharp recommends, take some time to examine your creative DNA.

If you understand the strands of your creative DNA, you begin to see how they mutate into common threads in your work. You begin to see the “story” that you’re trying to tell; why you do the things you do (both positive and self-destructive); where you are strong and where you are weak (which prevents a lot of false starts), and how you see the world and function in it.

What about you? Are you more comfortable with writing, or editing? And what are some other ways we can describe our creative DNA? Let me know in the comments section.

Savory similes

Most people know what a simile is—a direct comparison between two unlike things—and we use them all the time.

In fact, we use them so freely that many of them have become clichés. For example, “stiff as a board,” “white as a sheet,” or “slept like a log” are well-known, worn-out phrases. They’re like spices that have been in the cupboard so long they no longer have any flavor.

But now and then, a writer ignores the old and stale similes, puts together some ideas that haven’t been coupled before, and creates an image that makes you pause and just savor the simile they’ve created. Like this:

Writing is hard and often painful, and sometimes feels like pulling coils of rotted old rope out of our brains.

That’s from copywriter Katy Evans-Bush, and for anyone who has struggled to express their ideas on the page, it encapsulates our feelings in a vivid, albeit impossible, image.

Feel like you’re ready for a simile makeover?

First, identify the similes in your writing—they’re often introduced with like, as, and than (as in more than, bigger than, faster than, and so forth).

Ask if they’ve become too familiar. If wrote it without thinking about it, it’s probably too familiar.

Now here’s a key step: Identify the primary idea that the simile represents. If you’ve written that someone was “as white as a sheet,” why was the person pale? Fear, shock, or illness? Decide whether you want to focus on the surface characteristics or the underlying impression that you are trying to convey for a moment, and then think of other ways to illustrate that thing. “She was as colorless as the face of the moon.” “He looked like a college student whose mother just showed up at the kegger.”

Consider your audience, whether they will be familiar with the image you’re evoking. “He was drawn to it like anarchists to a World Trade Organization meeting” will work with one audience, while other audiences will relate better to “She was drawn to it like tweens to a Jonas Brothers concert.”

Your turn: What are your favorite similes?

Purposeful purpose statements

You were probably introduced to the purpose statement during high school and college composition courses; that sentence at the start of the paper that tells what the paper is about. And chances are that you’ve continued to use them for some of the documents you write at work.

But do purpose statements serve any purpose?

Yes. Sometimes.

First off, the reason for including a purpose statement is to tell your readers what they can expect to learn if they continue reading the document. That’s a useful bit of information for longer documents, like reports and whitepapers. Readers like to know up front whether the document is something they need or want to know, whether they should keep reading or not.

But for a single-page letter or an email message? Better to just say what you need to say. Instead of “The purpose of this letter is to inform you of new technical training opportunities,” cut to the chase with something like “New technical training classes are available to all employees.”

Second, if you decide your document does need a purpose statement, be sure that it does the job. A good purpose statement is:

• Specific—Include particulars to reduce ambiguity. If you have a longer document explaining new training classes (instead of just a letter), something like “This document outlines XYZ Company’s new training classes” would be too general, too vague. Is it management training, new employee training, HR procedures training, or something else? Adding “technical” lets people know what type of training has been added. If it’s more than one type, include the main categories.
• Concise—Cut out excess baggage. Purpose statements that begin “The purpose of this document is to…” begin with a bunch of wasted words. Just say what the document is for, using this model: “This [type of document: report, whitepaper, article, or whatever] [action verb: describes, discusses, outlines, and so forth] [your topic].” For example: “This whitepaper describes the four main causes of employee absenteeism, and provides six strategies to help reduce it.”
• Targeted—Identify your audience. You’ll often accomplish this by being specific, embedding your target audience in the statement: “This whitepaper  demonstrates how IT departments can reduce server hardware expenses by using virtual servers.” Other times, you may want to add a sentence that explicitly states who the document is aimed at: “This report is written for property owners in the proposed flood abatement zone.”

Whatever you do, avoid emulating this model, written by technical writer Bill Swallow with his tongue firmly in cheek:

This email provides information that is hopefully insightful enough to help you understand that statements like these in white papers are not necessary but rather are inventions of the over educated who have learned how to pepper their writings with meaningless expository text in order to boost word count while sounding intelligent.

The Art of the Quotation

It seems a bit odd, doesn’t it? We can give our own words sparkle, heft, and melody by using someone else’s. The long history of the art of quotation—shortly after Adam said the first words, somebody quoted him—amply proves its power.

“Expression would be insufferably bleak,” says Arthur Plotnik in The Elements of Expression, “without the charms and treasures of utterances past.”

“Borrowed words connect us to one another, across periods, across cultures. They affirm the universality of human thought and emotion. And for ‘one brief shining moment’ (Camelot) at a time, they make us look good.”

But just as we must choose our own words with care, we should be as careful choosing the words of others.

For example, a familiar quotation can add an authoritative voice to an argument you may be advancing. On the other hand, it may be so familiar that that it has drifted into cliché. Mr. Shakespeare has  given us epigrams like “Brevity is the soul of wit,” and “…to thine own self be true…,” but perhaps they’re getting a bit run-down. They are no less true, but they’ve lost some of their impact because we’ve heard them so often. Our brains are wired to notice the unfamiliar, the out of the ordinary. Give your audience something fresh and they’ll repay you with their attention.

Spend a bit of time enjoying the words of others. There are plenty of quotation books and websites available; do a bit of random browsing to get a feel for the breadth of the ideas they capture. And start collecting them yourself. When you read or hear something that expresses an idea with wit and clarity, write it down, store it away. I collect quotations from books, conversations, and even product packaging. (For example, “All work and no play should be illegal” came from a beverage container. That twist at the end helps freshen an otherwise well-worn proverb.)

Start including a few in your work. Choose them carefully, use them sparingly. Give proper attribution, and quote accurately.

“A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool. “ –Joseph Roux

Don’t be afraid to borrow the words of others to make your point.