Writing, Clear and Simple

The answer comes to us from ancient Egypt:

Be a scribe! Your body will be sleek, you hand will be soft… You are one who sits grandly in your house; your servants answer speedily; beer is poured copiously; all who see you rejoice in good cheer. Happy is the heart of him who writes; he is young each day.

—Ptahotep, 4500 B.C.

Clever man that I am, I said the other day that you should take care not to rely too heavily on tools like spelling checkers, because they can lead you astray; that you had to develop the skills to know how to spell correctly yourself.

Then someone asked me what one should do if they wished to learn to spell better, and I went "Ummm…" I hadn’t given that part of it much thought yet. (In many ways, I’m rather like Indiana Jones—not in the ruggedly handsome, heroic way, but in the "I’m making it up as I go" way.

So I did a bit of googling and found some resources for learning to spell better. One of the best ideas was to spend some time figuring out what sort of spelling mistakes you make most often. For example, do you reverse letters as you type? It may just be that your brain is getting ahead of your fingers, and you just need to be a bit more careful as you type. Maybe you’re using one of the so-called "rules" of spelling when you shouldn’t, like thinking about "I before E except after C" and writing nieghbor instead of neighbor. Or you might be mixing up a few homophones, that is, words that sound alike but aren’t spelled the same, like there, their, and they’re.

Get yourself a dictionary and keep it handy. When you’re unsure about a word, don’t just guess, look it up. Yeah, it’s probably easier to ask your spouse the crossword puzzle fanatic, or your roommate the English major (although I wouldn’t rely on that; one year my wife roomed with an English major who couldn’t spell to save her life), but you won’t get any better at spelling.

Learning a few basic spelling rules is fine, but remember this (from one of the sites liked below): "English spelling ‘rules’ are bunk. No matter what rule you come up with there are always exceptions."

All that said, here are a few of the things I found that could be useful:

• Ten Spelling Tips
• Ten Rules for Better Spelling
• Strategies for Better Spelling
• Writers.com Spelling Tips
• How Can I Improve My Spelling? 
• Some Information About Spelling

That’ll keep you busy for a spell.

I’ve never had trouble figuring out when to use me or I in a sentence. I’m not bragging about it, like that makes me a special person; I have my own stumbling blocks, such as remembering my children’s birthdates. At any rate, it’s obvious that there are many people who have trouble with me vs. I, as well as we/us, he/him, she/her, and they/them. Jay Nordlinger commented on this problem:

Over the weekend, I was reading some books to little ones, and found myself sort of having to correct the English as I went. For example, one book wanted me to say, “The same thing happened to Bobby and myself.”

Ugh, the myself, from people too insecure or ignorant to say me! (Myself is always the refuge — false refuge — of those who don’t know how to use I and me.) Just killed me. (Killed myself?)

I thought that was rich: people fearful of making a blunder in choosing between me and I, so they opt for a different approach entirely and make a different blunder. Myself here is just plain wrong. (Grammar Geek explanation: Myself, along with ourselves, yourself, yourselves, herself, himself, and themselves, are reflexive pronouns, which means that it’s an object of the sentence pointing back at the subject. For example “Bobby and I did it to ourselves.”)

There’s a simple little trick I learned oh so many years ago in elementary school that you can use to know which pronoun to use. Let’s take Jay’s example:

“The same thing happened to Bobby and _____.” Which one is it, me or I?

The trick is to get rid of that the other person. (Don’t worry, he’ll be perfectly safe.) With Bobby out of the picture, the sentence becomes “The same thing happened to …” and I hope you know that the correct pronoun for the object of this sentence is “me.” If that’s the right word to use when you’re alone, then it’s the right word to use when Bobby is with you. “The same thing happened to Bobby and me.”

Let’s turn the sentence around so we’re the subjects, not the objects:

“Bobby and _____ had the same thing happen.” Me or I?

Again, I hope it’s obvious that you wouldn’t say “Me had the same thing happen,” unless you’re going for the faux-caveman sound. If you would say “I had the same thing happen,” then “Bobby and I had the same thing happen,” is also correct.

It works the same for the other pronouns as well. Let’s try it with Mona and an unnamed friend.

”_____ and Mona went to the library.” She or her? Well, if Mona were staying home, then we all know that she would go by herself. Mona needs to return some books, though, so “She and Mona went to the library.”

There are a couple of quirks to how you apply this (leave it to Grammar Geeks to make it complicated), but this little trick will do nicely for about 90% of the cases you’re likely to run into. We’ll talk about those exceptions later, mostly because I started out hoping to make this a relatively short entry.

[Note: This post has been modified to fix an error caused by sloppy revision work. Told you I would make mistakes.]

For the sake of this post, I’m assuming you’re here because you want to get better at writing. At the same time, there may be a small—or not so small?—voice inside you murmuring "This is hopeless. I have no talent for writing."

Well, maybe so. But don’t fall into the trap of believing that talent is everything.

Talent is great, but it can also destroy you if you think that all you need is talent and the world will beat a path to your door. The willingness to learn and write is much more important than talent. Writing is a craft, like knitting or painting or pottery.

(That’s Angela Booth, a successful professional writer, by the way.)

There are boatloads of people with a talent for writing out there who lack the discipline to work on the craft of writing; they’ll never be writers, regardless of the talent they have, because they fail to develop skill.

Everyone has something to say, and can learn how to say it more clearly.

Clear writers, like clear fountains, do not seem so deep as they are; the turbid look the most profound.

—Walter Savage Landor