Writing, Clear and Simple

There are many “first secrets” of writing; as many as there are writers who talk of secrets of writing. Take note of this one; it will serve you like a good pocketknife:

The first secret of good writing:  We must look intently, and hear intently, and taste intently … we must look at everything very hard. Is it the task at hand to describe a snowfall? Very well. We begin by observing that the snow is white. Is it as white as bond paper? White as whipped cream? Is the snow daisy white, or eggwhite white, or whitewash white? Let us look very hard. We will see that snow comes in different textures. The light snow that looks like powdered sugar is not the heavy snow that clings like wet cotton. When we write matter-of-factly that Last night it snowed and this morning the fields were white, we have not looked intently. Out of this intensity of observation we derive two important gains. We learn to write precisely; and we fill our storehouse with the images that one day we will fashion into similies and metaphors.

—James J. Kilpatrick

Sharpen to a razor’s edge your powers of observation. Look for the perfect words and phrases to paint pictures of what you see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Strive to make your sentences photo-realistic. 

Stephen Wilbers teaches business writing, and he says that he tells participants at his seminars that if they spend more than 50 percent of their working day writing, they are professional writers.

They may not think of themselves as professional writers, but if they are devoting 50 to 75 percent of their working hours to writing, then writing is their principal product. Hired writers is what they are.

It’s an important realization. It changes the way they think of themselves and how they assess their value to the organization that is paying them.

What about you? Are you, by this criteria, a professional writer? Does that change how you look at your job? 

Here’s the article, by the way. (Requires registration. Sorry.)

"Who? "

Claire Zulkey. She’s written for The Wall Street Journal Online, ElleGirl, and The Chicago Tribune, among a long list of other publications. She also writes the MBToolbox blog over at Media Bistro. She lives in Chicago, she’s funny, she loves writing, and she’s crazy enough to consent to being interviewed by me, but I don’t hold that against her.

"Oh, THAT Claire Zulkey. I thought you meant the one with the kangaroo."

She’s that one too.

"Oh."

Can we start now?

Describe the path of your writing career. Whatever possessed you to start writing, and how did you end up doing what you’re doing?

I had a really good writing teacher in 8th grade, Mr. Onofrey. It probably sounds hokey but I went to a very small Catholic grade school and we were a really tight-knit class. Most of us still talk and we agree that he was one of the best teachers any of us had ever had. Anyway, he always had us working on writing projects—sonnets, novels, group projects, class newspapers. So I kept working on that kind of stuff through high school, where I got a little bit of journalism experience. I didn’t go to a very writing-focused university so at Georgetown I largely wrote to entertain myself. For some reason they gave me a column in the school paper and that probably helped me hone my voice.

What are you wearing? If you’d rather not answer that, what’s the most fun you’ve ever had on a writing project?

I just got back from the gym so right now I’m wearing my very space-age looking Pumas, stupid cropped black sweatpants (my regular-length ones are dirty), a gray tank top and black sports bra. Most fun on a writing project? I’ve had a lot. Maybe a favorite was when I got sent on a trip to the British Virgin Islands for an article for a bridal magazine.

What’s the worst writing job you’ve ever had?

In some sense for me there is no bad writing job because I’m always amazed I get paid to write period. But now that I’m done being all high horsey, it was definitely being a copywriter. I was a copywriter for an extremely shitty ad firm here in Chicago and had to write weekly newsletters for an extremely shitty riverboat casino in Gary, Indiana. That was pretty bad.

What is the most-used writing resource on your bookshelf?

I hate to say it but I rarely use any resources off my bookshelf. I probably pull out my Chicago Manual of Style out once in a blue moon only to realize I have no idea how to find in there what I’m looking for.

Admit it. You like it because it has "Chicago" in the title. (That and the snappy orange book jacket.)

 You’re right, that’s true. But it’s also sort of the standard that EVERYBODY uses, unlike the AP Manual.

And the jacket IS hard to resist. I own three orange coats of my own. For real. 

Tell us about being a writer in Chicago. Is there a special "vibe," or is that word passe now?

I love being a writer in Chicago. I’m actually leading a panel next week on what it’s like to be a freelancer here, but on a broader sense, I feel like it’s been really supportive. There has been a reading series at the Museum of Contemporary Art that’s wrapping up on the 16th that involves contributions from a bunch of major reading series in the city—I love that collaboration instead of competition. We have fun together, I think, we writers here in Chicago. We take our work seriously but don’t take ourselves too seriously. I’m wildly generalizing of course. Also, did you like that I plugged not one but two events of mine in this paragraph?

Very smooth. Have a cookie. Aside from MBToolbox, your favorite writing website is … ?

Freelance Success. It’s a subscriber-only resource for freelance writers—you pay $100 a year to have a group of experienced writers help you out with your freelancing queries.

[We pause momentarily while your humble correspondent tries to cover up his disappointment that she didn’t mention this site.]

Oh, shut up.

Sorry. Clean or messy desk?

At home, it’s very small so it’s messy 90% of the time. Put anything more than a pop can on it and it’s messy. At my office, it’s messy during the day, clean by the time I leave.

Any advice or words of writerly wisdom you’d like to pass on to the non-writers or aspiring writers in the audience?

It’s the same old crap you always hear: Keep working. If you persevere, it’s likely you’ll find success—and I imagine if you have the drive to keep working, it’s because you’ve experienced a modicum of success—it only takes one small success to lead you to much larger ones. Or, if you happen to be a person who hasn’t found any particular writing career success but just love writing so much that you can still keep going just for the joy of it, then God bless you.

God bless you too, and thanks. For more Claire, check out her site: www.zulkey.com.

In the last post, I said that commas are used to indicate the separate items in a list. That function is just an extension of the comma’s basic purpose, which is to show where a sentence’s joints are: where introductory, interrupting, or concluding phrases and clauses begin and end, which are the units in a list or the parts of an address, a person’s title, where the non-essential clauses are, and so on.

Some people find it useful to think of commas as showing where you should pause when reading a sentence, but that’s an oversimplification. If you stop with that rule of thumb, I think you run the risk of leaving out commas that should be added, and adding commas that you shouldn’t.

With that in mind, here’s another use for commas: Insert a comma when you have two complete sentences joined with a conjunction, such as and, but, yet, because, and so on. For example:

Almost everybody knows what a comma is, but few can explain how to use it.

 That sentence really contains two complete sentences: "Almost everybody knows what a comma is," and "Few can explain how to use it." This causes trouble for some people when they omit the conjunction; what you have then is lovingly called a comma splice, and it looks like this:

Almost everybody knows what a comma is, few can explain how to use it.

Please don’t do this. If you want to leave out the conjunction, then use a semicolon instead of a comma. Yes, it is true that you can find examples of comma splices (also known as splice commas) in the writings of such literary luminaries as Samuel Beckett, E.M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, and John Updike, just to name a few. But you’re not them, are you? e e cummings wreaked havoc on rules of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, but if you’re not him, I don’t recommend that you follow his lead either. Lynn Truss (I mentioned her and her book Eats, Shoots, and Leaves in my previous post) explains it this way:

Now, so many highly respected writers adopt the splice comma that a rather unfair rule emerges on this one: only do it if you’re famous.  

Unfair, maybe, but it works for me. 

Let’s hear it for the comma. A deceptively simple mark, commas are a source of confusion and contention. Lynn Truss, in her bestseller, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, notes that punctuation in general, and commas in particular, serve two different purposes:

1.  To illuminate the grammar of a sentence
2. To point up — rather in the manner of musical notation — such literary qualities as rhythm, direction, pitch, tone and flow

This is why grown men have knock-down fights over the comma in editorial offices: because these two roles of punctuation sometimes collide head-on — indeed, where the comma is concerned, they do it all the time.

Because of these two very different purposes, the "rules" governing the use of commas tend to get muddled up. Time to introduce a bit of clarity, eh?

The most straightforward purpose of commas is to divide up items in a list.

The children’s choir was made up of first, second, third, and fourth graders.

 Without the comma, we’d have to insert the word and or or between the items in the list to keep its meaning from being  jumbled. But if we said it that way, we’d sound a bit silly: "The children’s choir was made up of first and second and third and fourth graders."

Remember that a list isn’t always a list of things; it can be a list of adjectives. From today’s local newspaper comes an article about using chili on steaks:

Let’s sit down to something that is hearty, bursting with flavor, but low in fat.

The comma gives us a cue that the adjective hearty stands on its own; it doesn’t work in conjunction with bursting with flavor. You could easily write this as "hearty and bursting with flavor." In other cases,  a string of adjectives works together, and a comma would change the meaning. From the same article, the phrase beef tenderloin steaks would look silly with commas between the adjectives, because the steaks are not beef and tenderloin. Beef tenderloin works as a unit.