Write it Right

The Secrets of Effective Writing

John Peck, Martin Coyle

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780230373846
• eBook ISBN: 9781350315600
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

Shows students how to make their writing effective and grammatically correct. Organised into mini units and easy to read, it deals with everyday tasks and problems. This second edition adds further guidance on common questions raised by students, for example 'When does one use italics and/or underlining?'

1The Logic of Effective Writing

1The naked truth about writing

A card in a newsagent’s window draws attention to an intriguing offer: ‘Alsashun puppies for sale. Going cheep.’ Most people reading the card will smile in a slightly superior way. We might not be entirely sure how to spell ‘Alsatian’, but we know that it isn’t like the spelling on the card. At the same time, there is something rather endearing about the advertisement, as it is so clear that the person who wrote it ventured forth bravely, trusting that the spelling of the word would echo its sound. But that is not the only spelling mistake. If we did not know better, we might be tempted to take a look at these dogs as they appear to be quite remarkable animals: rather than barking, they do bird impersonations, going ‘cheep’.

It is easy to laugh at such revealing evidence of someone else’s educational shortcomings. In a patronising way, we make all kinds of assumptions about the person who wrote this advertisement. There are just six words on the card, but they seem to reveal the naked truth about the owner of the Alsatian and its puppies. What is alarming to realise, however, is that all of us reveal the naked truth about ourselves every time another person reads something we have written. For example, you might have to write a letter applying for a job at a local supermarket; the manager, who could well be a university graduate, sees immediately that you are applying for a job, but then proceeds to evaluate you as a person on the basis of the quality of the letter you have written. This happens every time you write, whether it is a letter, a piece of work at school, an essay at university or something as ephemeral as an email to a friend. The person who reads what you have written looks beyond the obvious content and makes an assessment of you. In a way this is terrifying. It means that every piece of writing you produce is a kind of audition. At school, for example, you might dash off a piece of work the night before it is due to be handed in, assuming that nobody is going to pay all that much attention to it. But the teacher reading it is feeding the impression formed from that piece of homework into a more general impression, which will eventually contribute to the reference you receive when you leave school or apply to university.

It makes sense, therefore, to do the best you can in terms of projecting a positive image of yourself every time you write. That, however, is easier said than done. All of us want to convey an impression of ourselves as capable and intelligent, but there are so many things that can go wrong when we write. Time and time again, there is such a gulf between what we were trying to say and what we have actually said. And on top of that there are all those tiny errors in writing, such as commas in the wrong place, and embarrassing spelling mistakes. The worrying possibility is that such mistakes might be revealing the naked truth about our shortcomings. The good news, however, is that most writing difficulties are superficial and easily dealt with. The problem is that we learnt how to write at primary school, and most of us have never taken a refresher course dealing with the challenges that have to be met in more ambitious forms of writing and in more demanding contexts. This is what this book offers: it is a refresher course on how to sharpen and advance your writing skills, although this will necessarily involve reiterating some of the most basic information about the mechanics of language, especially grammar, punctuation and spelling. At every point in the book, however, we have also kept another idea in mind: as writing always offers a revealing sense of the person behind the words, we consistently try to show how you can project a positive impression of yourself in everything you write.

2If you can write an effective letter, you can write anything

Look at the letter below. It is the kind of letter sent and received thousands, possibly millions, of times every day. We have included it here because it provides a neat and simple illustration of the three premises of all effective writing.

This letter relies on a method that is widely used for routine business correspondence. Every paragraph is a new sentence that conveys just one fact in the simplest and most direct terms. The reason why businesses and other organisations adopt this method is that it makes for a very clear letter, reducing the possibility of ambiguous or confusing statements. The writer simply works through the sequence of steps, with a fresh sentence in the letter for every action taken. If, when the letter is written, anything strikes the writer as being unclear, he or she can incorporate additional one-sentence paragraphs or tinker with the expression of the separate sentences.

Gap Year Projects

4 Barchester Mews

Barchester

BR16 4GR

0771 222 5566

Mr Robert Ross

35 Middle Street

Middlemarch

MD4 5TH

23 November 2012

Dear Robert

Thank you for submitting your application form to Gap Year Projects.

I am pleased to inform you that, on the basis of the information provided, we are recommending that you can advance to the next stage for a position on one of our projects in South America.

We will contact you again within a fortnight in order to arrange an interview.

If that interview is successful, we will require an immediate payment of £900 as your initial contribution to the cost of the placement.

In the meantime, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely

Sophie Wait

Overseas Projects Coordinator

It is, of course, the case that the ‘one paragraph = one sentence’ approach is not going to prove appropriate in all forms of writing. Indeed, a job application that consisted of 50 or more separate paragraphs would look silly. But the idea of working through what one has to say in a logical and orderly sequence, the steps in the sequence being made clear by the division into paragraphs, is one of the fundamental secrets of good writing. There are two other secrets. The first, which comes before anything else, is grasping the conventions of the writing exercise you are engaged on. The conventions that determine the shape of this letter are straightforward; when it comes to writing an essay, the shaping conventions might be rather more complicated, but a lot of the difficult work on an essay is done in advance if you can recognise the nature of the conventions involved. Perhaps the major secret of writing, however, is saying what one has to say in sentences that are as simple and as straightforward as possible. In the next three units we deal with the importance of recognising the conventions you are working with, establishing a logical and orderly sequence for your writing, and writing in simple sentences.

3Familiarise yourself with, and employ the standard conventions of, the writing exercise you are undertaking

Whatever kind of writing you embark on, there will be conventions associated with that form of writing which you must follow. The onus is on you as a student to make yourself aware of, and conform to, the conventions in force. Why? Well, there is one very good reason. Clever students will make sure that they know and use the conventions. Some other students, by contrast, will never really realise that a set of conventions exists. These will be the students who then go on to show signs of weakness in every aspect of their written work. Another reason for having conventions in any form of writing, however, is that they help you organise what you have to say, and they also help the person who is reading what you have written. In other words, they help you communicate. Later in this book, we will turn to the conventions of essay writing, but for the moment we want to concentrate on letter writing.

This is a genuine letter sent by a university student, although we have changed his name; this is all he wrote and everything he wrote. His failure to observe the basic conventions not only creates a poor impression but also renders the letter essentially meaningless.

Dear Sir

I have been off college for two weeks with a serious chest infection. I would like it if you could take into account my absence from this part of the course when assessing my work for this term.

Yours sincerely

J. Smith

Not many letters from students will be as shoddy as this, but many people do miss out some or all of the things that this student has missed out. The student has not provided his address. As there is more than one person called J. Smith taking the course, we cannot be sure, therefore, who the student is. There is no date on the letter. Consequently, we do not know what period the student is referring to when he mentions that he has been ill. The letter is also abrupt to the point of rudeness (there is a major issue involved here, which we return to again and again in the second half of this book, which is achieving the right tone in writing). In his defence the student would probably say that this is just a note that he dashed off quickly. But if most of the students in a class are making an effort to do more than just dash off a note quickly, the careless student is bound to miss out in the end.

What makes his slackness more obvious is that the conventions of letter writing are so simple and so easy to master. This is the basic pattern and layout of any formal or business letter (if you are writing a personal letter, for example a love letter, you can make up your own conventions).

Address

Telephone number

Name and address of recipient

Date

Reference number (if appropriate)

Salutation

Subject matter (sometimes)

Paragraph 1

Paragraph 2

Paragraph 3

Conclusion

Signature

You must start with your address. Conventions about small details change over the years. There was a time, for example, when you were expected to include a comma between the house number and street name, a comma at the end of each line, and a full stop at the end of the address, but the advent of word processors and quality printers has made those conventions appear fussy and superfluous. There was a time, too, when you were supposed to include the county name in an address, but the Post Office changed this convention a few years ago; the town and postcode (zip code in the USA) together tell us all we need to know. When you include a number after the address, you do not need to write ‘Telephone’ beforehand; it is, after all, pretty obvious that this is your telephone number and not a set of lottery numbers.

You then move on to the name and address of the person you are writing to (although you would not bother to include this in personal letters), and the date. Once upon a time people would write ‘29th June, 2012’, but these days the punctuation seems superfluous. You could, therefore, write ‘29 June 2012’ or ‘29th June 2012’ (or, in the USA, June 29, 2012). If you are replying to a business letter that included a reference number it is helpful...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About this book
• 1. The Logic of Effective Writing
• 2. Applying for a Course, Applying for a Job
• 3. Writing Correct and Convincing Sentences
• 4. Punctuating a Sentence: Commas, Colons and Semicolons
• 5. Avoidable Errors
• 6. Tricks of the Writer’s Trade
• 7. Essay Writing: Structure
• 8. Essay Writing: Paragraph Control
• 9. Make Every Essay an Effective Essay
• 10. Taking Stock
• 11. Twenty Questions
• Glossary
• Index