Editing Principle 16: -ings Make Readers Itch

In his valuable Writing Tools, Roy Peter Clark offers a succinct diagnosis of many an unpersuasive paragraph: “Too many -ings.”

Contemporary written English is riddled with -ings. We love gerunds (verbs transformed into a noun with the addition of -ing, as in learning, judging, swimming, eating), for one.

We also imagine “He was running” sounds more artful than “He ran.”

But with rare exception, it doesn’t. Too many ‘ings packs on unnecessary syllables. And as Clark points out, verbs ending with “ing” begin to look alike. Compare the four above to learned, judged, swam, ate.

If you have an -ing problem, it may be due to an excess of sentences that start with dependent clauses, like so:

Gathering all her strength, Princess Valiant ran for cover.

Start the sentence with the subject instead, and you lose an -ing plus gain momentum:

Princess Valiant gathered her strength and ran for cover.

Editing Principle 15: Waste Will Be Generated

Many beginning writers think: Start with the blank page. Fill it. Read it. Add more. Revise a little. Tighten your sentences. Done.

Experienced writers will tell you to expect a creative process more like this: Start with a blank page. Fill it. Add more. Add stuff that you’re not sure belongs. Add stuff that you initially think is brilliant but is actually putrid, though you will not realize this for four days. Revise but continue to miss your own central point. Re-revise. Realize that a thing you’ve explained over three long paragraphs can be crystallized in a sentence. Create an “outtakes” document in which you paste lines and anecdotes that don’t survive your revisions. Get upset over how large this document is getting. Tighten sentences. Wait a few days. Tighten more. Achieve some measure of self-satisfaction. Rest knowing that your outtakes word count is AT LEAST 20 PERCENT of the word count of the piece you’ll publish and present to the world, and that this is good, possibly great.

UPDATE: I just came across this thought of choreographer Twyla Tharp‘s. She says it better in this interview with the Harvard Business Review:

The business literature nowadays talks a lot about the need for failure in the pursuit of excellence. Do you accept that?

Of course I do. Sooner or later, all real change involves failure — but not in the sense that many people understand failure. If you do only what you know and do it very, very well, chances are that you won’t fail. You’ll just stagnate, and your work will get less and less interesting, and that’s failure by erosion. True failure is a mark of accomplishment in the sense that something new and different was tried. Ideally, the best way to fail is in private. In my office, the ratio of failure to success on the dances I create is probably something like six to one. I create about six times more material for my dances than I end up using in the final piece. But I need that unused material to get my one success. I have also sometimes failed in public, and that’s very painful. But failing, even in this way, is not useless. It can force you to get yourself together and to produce something new.

Six to one? She’s putting the percentage of created “stuff” that actually makes it to the performance stage at roughly 14 percent. Waste will be generated, sure, but the process depends on it.

Editing Principle 14: Regaining Perspective Becomes Habit

It can be difficult to tell if what you’ve written is any good. You can ask friends to read your ______ , and tell you what they think. You can solicit a professional opinion. There are also ways to start training yourself to read your work as an editor — or a stranger — might. (Flannery O’Connor used to tell writing students that a writer must “judge himself with a stranger’s eye and a stranger’s severity.”)

Here are four exceedingly simple ways to get out of your own head:

— Read your work out loud.

— Listen to someone else read it out loud. (This takes uncommon courage.)

— Change the font.

— Change venues, i.e. read it in a unusual (for you) place.

*Note on changing fonts. I find that switching to a looser font, say, from Times to Courier New, makes the baggy, windy parts of one’s prose stand out more, which helpfully highlights where and what to cut.

Questions We’ll Ask, III

Or: How Information Architecture, Content Strategy, and (Nonfiction) Manuscript Editing Employ Pretty Much the Same Skill Set:

1. Is this information in the best possible place?

1a. If not, why not? Was it delivered too soon? Introduced too late? Would it be distracting / irrelevant / discordant regardless of where it was placed?

1b. Say it IS in the right place…is it so great / important / critical to our mission that it bears repeating (i.e. placed *again* elsewhere)?

2. Who’s reading this?

2a. What are their expectations?

2b. How do we benefit from meeting those expectations?

2c. What would we gain, if anything, by subverting them?

3. Are these sentences earning their keep? Or should we swap out this 500-word description for the 75-word version?

4. Where are the cliffhangers?

5. Is this information / reading experience available elsewhere?

5a. If yes, should we acknowledge this, and join metaphorical hands with the competition (be it through links, bibliographies, or other references)?

5b. If not, how does this reading experience become more itself?

We realize “itself” might seem a strange word choice there. But we’re sticking with it.

Questions We’ll Ask, II

Your audience:

What are they like?

Why are they reading you?

Are you trying to solve a problem they have, or is your only desire to entertain?

Anything you’d like them to do after having read you?

How might they resist? i.e. Some people will not love what you’re doing / trying to say. Would you like to minimize the potential for adverse reactions, or do you simply not care? (There is no wrong answer.)

Editing Principle 13: Syntax Errors Hide Weak Arguments

75% of all syntax errors disguise weak arguments. That is to say, the “technical” mistake often serves a purpose, albeit unintentional. The writer does not *intend* their iffy grammar to act as scaffolding, but the iffy grammar certainly helps. It can obscure a shoddy construction and many logical leaps.

I’ve witnessed this in my own writing. It just happens. When we’re not sure how to complete a thought — or are afraid to — it’s easier to type _something_ and move on, imagining that we’ll fix it later.

But we don’t always get back to it later, and the more times our eyes pass over what’s actually a mistake, the more it looks o.k. to us. (Our ears are less easily lulled into complacency, but that’s another conversation.)

Untangling tangled syntax, then, is like fixing a wobbly table. First you remove the wad of folded-up napkin that’s been stuffed under one of the legs as a temporary solution. Then you lean on the table to gauge the extent of the wobble.

Then you decide: Brandish a saw and shorten one of the legs? two legs? tighten some screws? or just toss the whole mess in the dumpster and move on to the next table? A good editor will help you make these decisions.

Editing Principle 12: It Will Hurt Less, Eventually

Overheard:

“I write copy. I work in publishing and I write copy, and one of the best things that’s happened to me over the years of writing copy is the experience of hearing people say, ‘Nah, doesn’t work. Try again.’ Because it made me much quicker and much less vulnerable about the whole thing.”

“Much less precious, I think, about [my] writing.”

Authors Sam Barry and Kathi Kamen Goldmark on The Leonard Lopate Show, July 23, 2010

Editing Principle 11: Be Wary of Lists

Many nonprofessional writers pepper their writing with lists. I don’t mean bullet points — that’s a whole other subject — but these types of phrases:

“flounder, fail, or seldom perform at their best”

or

“authenticity, nostalgia, innovation and issues of sustainability”

The hope seems to be that if one item in a list doesn’t grab a reader’s lapels, the next one will. Or perhaps the writer subconsciously thinks that by saying, in essence, “consider this and this and that and that thing too,” they make less of a commitment, less of a splash, and expose themselves less than if they wrote “consider this, this one thing.”

And to that extent, they are correct. Readers’ eyes can glaze over after the third list item, and if they’re not paying close attention . . . well, there’s no commitment on either side.

Thing is, trying to cover all bases can compromise rather than enhance your authority. So part of the editing process consists of asking the types of questions that help writers isolate what’s most important to them, then sitting there with this one thing on the table, and staring at it awhile.

One pleasant side-effect of this process is increased confidence and conviction. It’s the written equivalent of losing the “up-speak” that makes it sound as if you’re asking a question.

Editing Principle 10: You Need to Know Whether You’re in the Business of Reminding People of Things They Already Know, or in the Business of Asking Them to Change Their Minds

This principle’s not for professional writers or even aspiring professional writers. It is more of an issue for clients who are cobbling together a communications strategy. But it’s a good question — for anyone, really, publishing anything. Here it is again:

You need to know whether you’re in the business of reminding people of things they already know or in the business of asking them to believe something new.

Which side you fall on has repercussions for your eventual structure. As do your answers to these questions:

1) Who’s going to read this?

2) Why? (You can’t know. But a good guess is useful.)

3) What types of responses have I had to my writing [ external communications / PR efforts ] in the past, and am I happy with those results?

4) Am I willing to risk being misunderstood or criticized if the upshot is more attention?

5) Whatever else I hope to achieve with this text, am I asking my audience to part with their money? i.e. buy something I’m selling? Or does the prospect of compensation leave me cold because I’ve different goals?

Editing Principle 09: Readers Want to Be Seen as Smart

You’re always better off flattering an audience’s intelligence. If your audience smells even mild condescension, you lose their sympathy and may not get it back.

But most condescension — in writing — is accidental. The most common way of unintentionally trying your audience’s patience is to elaborate on a concept that your audience doesn’t need to have elaborated.

Just remember what it’s like to not hear what someone said, beg the speaker’s pardon, and then hear him or her not simply repeat the phrase you missed — say, “Big Ten” — but actually explain the whole concept, starting from first principles. This is frustrating when you didn’t say “I’m sorry; What?” because you don’t know what NCAA basketball is. You simply didn’t hear, period.

If you feel compelled to (re)explain a familiar concept, find a novel, surprising way to phrase it. Or just preface your explanation with some variation on “As we all know….”