Way back in 2009 I edited the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association (VUWSA) magazine Salient. It was a wild ride and I learnt a lot about writing, teams, managing humans, and operating heavy machinery while intoxicated.
VUWSA were (and might still be) muppets, and at some point in the mid twenty-teens they managed to nuke the entire Salient site and its archives, thus robbing you from easy access to my words of wisdom from early 20s JJW and robbing me of nice SEO-padding to hide all the terrible stuff I have done on The Internet.
Through the magic of The Wayback Machine, I have resurrected this piece which I still often think about and refer back to. I stand by 98.5% of it, even the part about Uther Dean (sorry Uther, love you). The part about txt spk made me laugh cos no one really uses it any more (other than Boomers).
All you really need to know is we had a weekly column called teh grammerz by a grammar nerd (Hi Mikey). He, for some reason, couldn’t hand in 600 words about the intricacies of the English language one week. This was probably because he was our best (and only) sub-editor, overworked and we literally paid the guy in boxes of expired mac’n’cheese. So I wrote this delicious piece of content which was originally published 14 September 2009.
The only edits 2024-JJW has made are to add links and to cross out one of the ‘approved reading’ suggestions because it turns out The Dilbert guy is a festering sack of shit.
How to be making the writing goodly
There are many ways to write any given statement. Some of them are ugly, some of them are functional, some of them are beautiful. When you are writing—especially if you’re writing for Twitter-addled youth—you should strive for beauty and functionality.
Being the Editor of Salient has opened my eyes to the many different ways of writing. Tens of emails from prospective writers stream into my inbox a week with people saying they love to write and are good at it. Sorry folks, no you’re not.
Many Salienteers have endured heavy horse whippings before their prose was in good enough shape to be published in these hallowed tomes. Most of the ideas stem from George Orwell’s six rules of writing:
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
The essay Politics and the English Language is just as pertinent now as when it was written in 1946. Keep these in mind when you’re writing and you can’t go wrong.
Sentences
Sentences should be short. You do not need a sentence which endlessly goes on and on with many sub clauses and parenthetical statements. People who mimic Proust’s prose will induce periods of paralysis.
Metaphors, Similes and Allegories
Can be good if you’re doing them right. Metaphors can be golden. If the flow of your work is unrelenting like a lahar down Mount Ruapehu and your descriptions transcend the mundane, then please by all means use these descriptive devices. Remember: avoid clichés like the plague.
Punctuation
When you dont use punctuation it can be quite hard to to figure out what youre trying to say it can get quite confusing in situations where you are writing about gun slinging pandas the term eats shoots and leaves springs to mind this gets even more confusing i have seen this from some of the best writers is when there are parenthetical statements within subclauses a bit shit really.
Are rhetorical questions worthwhile?
No they are not. While being a powerful emotive tool for public speaking, by asking a rhetorical question you introduce the idea that you may be wrong. Ask multiple rhetorical questions and you run the risk the reader will assume you’re stupid (probably not unfairly).
That
After you’ve finished writing something, use the find tool to locate all instances of ‘that’. More often than not you can get rid of half the ‘that’s.
However,
If you’re starting a new paragraph that contradicts the previous paragraph you don’t need to say however.
Writing like you’re talking
Please don’t like, do this, man. Unless you’re Guy Armstrong you will not get away with it.
…’s
Ellipses. If you want to sound like a clueless doofball, use ellipses more than once every paragraph.
Grammerz, spellink, txt spk and tense
Once when I was write a piece of writerngs it all was going to go horribley rong. Th pnt is nt a hrd 1 2 gt?
The only exception is when you’re like being ironic. LOL!!! WTF!? Read all previous teh grammerz by Mikey for more info on these topics.
Thesaurus function
This is a killer. Some words have very specific meanings and connotations. Use the wrong one and you end up looking like a male genitalia. (See what I did there?)
Simplicity
People are stupid. When they read, they don’t want to have to think. Keep words simple. Keep sentence structure simple. Exclude jargon and technical terms unless it’s totally necessary.
Fonts
Please do not use Comic Sans, Times New Roman, Wingdings. For more on this please see page 33.
Read it aloud
This will force you to spot the errors you miss when you’re reading it in your head. As the Salient crew will attest, I read everything out loud.
You can throw away all these rules if your audience is yourself, your Live Journal or WordPress blog. If you want to be able to communicate effectively you need to be able to be understood. The above points address the communication problem but the most important thing to remember when you sit down at a computer is that you need to have fun.
Approved reading
Politics and the English Language, George Orwell
Stained Glass Political Platform, Stewart ChaplinDilbert and the Way of the Weasel, Scott Adams
Disapproved reading
Anything by Uther Dean
The President’s column
The Biography and complete works of Marcel Proust, edited by J I Tadie
