graphic by Aaron Burden @aaronburden
Composition Issues
• You need an angle
An angle is not a gimmick. It’s an approach to your topic that’s interesting and original enough to persuade the reader your piece is worth reading.
A long-respected book of thoughtful advice to writers by Sidney Cox, first published in 1947, is introduced by the curious title Indirections. Why did Cox offer writers indirections rather than directions?
Deft artistic indirection is second nature for an accomplished writer. Writing, for instance, a poem about being in love, a good writer would avoid opening with a dopey-direct line rhapsodizing about Being In Love. Thus, the great playwright and poet Harold Pinter wrote the first line of a brief, brilliant love poem with intriguing indirection: What sound was that?
But, having no artistic imagination, a Sheldon Sensitive might start his poem with I must love you, naught else to do. Anyone asked to read that line would think something like “Good for you, Sheldon” and never again succumb to Sheldon’s request to read his poetry.
Here’s a polar opposite angle, one from a tough corner of the prose world.
In 1985 Miami Herald reporter Edna Buchanan filed a crime report with an opening line (called a “lede” in journalism) that remains legendary. She was reporting on a brief rampage by ex-convict Gary Robinson, who’d tried to order fried chicken at a fast food joint. Told they’d run out of chicken, an infuriated Robinson slugged an employee and was shot dead by a security guard. Buchanan’s lede was one paragraph, four words:
Gary Robinson died hungry.
Now, that’s an angle.
Different types of writing call for different angles of entry. Just ask yourself whether your angle feels more like Sheldon’s or Edna’s.
• Don’t ramble on
This one is challenging, especially when you’re writing on a subject important to you.
Don’t let sentences ramble on too long. Readers weary when slogging through a sentence whose conclusion is several premises or elaborations from its beginning. Such sentences were common in the great 19th century Russian literature I obsessed on when I was young. But those novels and stories were written in another era, for readers with generally more patient sensibilities. In 2020, readers tend to skim long, rambling sentences or flip away for something perkier.
Long paragraphs can also discourage readers, who can see when a paragraph seems a lake too large to swim comfortably. If you could watch a reader flip a page or scroll a screen searching for a paragraph’s end, you’d tighten up your paragraph economy.
Even a discretionary paragraphing for a bit of emphasis can sometimes be beneficial, as this one is intended to be.
• Incoherence by any other name is still incoherent
Maybe because coherence in writing is tricky, it’s referred to by different names: tracking, clarity, or something like logical linkage. The problem of inadequately coherent writing could be described using Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous 1964 definition (which actually seems questionable legal reasoning) of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”
Incoherence is the most common cause of ineffective writing. Writing that falls short of its worthwhile intentions often just slightly fails to cohere. You know it when you see it. An incoherent paragraph has many variations on this pattern:
Sentence one says something understandable. Sentence two is also understandable, but it doesn’t quite follow from sentence one. Sentence three says something substantive, but it’s actually on a different topic. Sentence four would have been a perfectly fine elaboration of sentence one . . . so what’s it doing here?
A piece of writing can be wobbly as a misassembled piece of furniture when one idea doesn’t lead to the next or the development of ideas is poorly directed and discontinuous.
Incoherent writing is another of those diseases whose recognition can provide some degree of inoculation. I decided not to use any of the plentiful examples of flawed coherence available among the published work of well-known authors and journalists. (You could probably find examples in this article.) Instead, I’ll offer one I just wrote: an inflamed comment on politics, a subject specially vulnerable to incoherence.
The malignant state of American politics starts in Washington, but it doesn’t end there. Cultural maladies abound. Incompetence dominates our politics in elections from dogcatcher to president. Don’t be too sure you aren’t feeding into these problems yourself. This is actually an international phenomenon. What starts in Washington doesn’t end in Washington.
Coherent writing is tougher to write and far easier to read:
Political loyalties are inherently arguable, as are religious loyalties. Maybe they’re connected.
The acrimonious environment produced now by increasingly enraged political loyalties might actually involve some transposed religion, and not a particularly charitable one. Perhaps political belief has adopted the faith-based absolutism of certain religious belief, especially for those of us who have turned away from religion as an unquestionable vision of truth.
Is political absolutism subsuming the absolutism (still present though declining) of religious faith? I’m not sure. Maybe.
Whether or not you agree with the example above, I hope it provides an example of coherence in writing. (Feel free to submit your criticism on either count!)
• Read it out loud, and that doesn’t mean with your “inner ear”
Here’s a tip you probably won’t use. You might think it’s unnecessary, even embarrassing or “Mickey Mouse” silly.
Read your writing out loud, that is, with your physical voice so you can hear it with your physical ears. There’s a good reason for this. When you silently read something you’ve written — even more so when you re-read it — what’s reviewed in your mind is usually what you intended to say. It’s often difficult for the “ear” in your brain to hear mistakes and weaknesses in composition. But your physical ears will often hear what a silent reading misses: mechanical / grammatical errors, definitely, but also more important and elusive issues of meaning and coherence.
Reading your manuscript aloud, you’ll hear when it doesn’t work, doesn’t properly articulate what you intended to say. Reading aloud will help you hear the problems your reader will have, such as: Uh, I don’t understand the logic here. This piece is making too many assumptions. What’s this driving at? Is that supposed to be ironic or serious? I’m confused . . . .
For a positive reference point, take a favorite piece by one of your favorite writers and read it out loud. You will hear audibly what you’ve always “heard” silently: the ideas of someone who writes with skill and style.
That’s how you want your readers to hear you.
• You’re probably not Shakespeare, so rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and . . . .
A close contemporary of Shakespeare, English playwright and poet Ben Jonson noted the famous acclamation of Shakespeare’s actors that “. . . in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line.” Jonson tempered that praise, commenting “Would he had blotted a thousand.” But Jonson was only noting that Shakespeare’s work was not absolutely perfect. (He was, after all, The Bard, not quite The Deity.)
Any handful of imperfections in that cannon of nearly 900,000 words hardly matters. As by far the greatest writer in the history of the English language, Shakespeare probably did relatively little rewriting.
You and I need to rewrite a lot. We need to rewrite until we’re not sure that the most recent rewrite is an improvement on the most-recent-minus-one rewrite. Then review the piece again, maybe out loud, and ask yourself a few questions:
- Does this say what I intended to say?
- Is this coherent? Does each sentence usefully derive — even as a meaningful parenthesis — from the previous sentence?
- Is this piece too short to be substantive or too long for a reader’s interest?
- Could I end up having second thoughts about any of the content?
- Is the style attractive but not forced or distracting?
- Could there be factual errors? Should I do more research?
- If some readers don’t like this, would I be more inclined to think, “Good, they needed this provocation” or “Oops. Maybe they’re right.”
- Would one more rewrite help now or would I start going around in circles?
- If this is read by a good reader, have I provided the work of a good writer?