When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It by Ben Yagoda

You need to develop your ear just as a musician does. At first, you may not catch the bad rhythms, the word repetition, the wordiness, the sentences that end not with a bang, but with a seemingly endless series of whimpers. Reading aloud isn't an immediate panacea, even if you shout like Flaubert.

It's the same principle as scrutinizing a photograph by blowing up its image on the computer screen you really can identify the flaws. Gustave Flaubert, himself one of the all-time great stylists, used what he called la guellade: that is, 'the shouting test.' He would go out to the avenue of lime trees near his house and, yes, shout what he had written. There was a spoken language before there was a written language, and good writing has always been intimately connected to the ear, whether the short sentences of Hemingway or the near-endless ones of Samuel Johnson and David Foster Wallace. The most effective short-term way to improve your writing is to read it aloud, sentence by sentence and word by word. Reading is by definition a long-term project. Pretty soon you'll start reaping the benefits in your own writing. Figure out what you like about their style, and what you don't like as well. Follow their work, and read up on their early stuff. Find a half-dozen writers whom you really like, preferably in different genres and subjects. The way I'd suggest going about this is to become a fan. That is, selected and processed by an editor, and then 'published.' But it seems to have to go through the old-fashioned pipeline. It can be any kind of book or article - the more different kinds the better. The stuff that helps your own writing can be in print or online. The material one is exposed to is too off-the-cuff and unilateral it's too much like talking.

But it doesn't seem to have the beneficial effects of more traditional reading. There's nothing wrong with this, and a lot of the stuff is actually pretty good. I'm talking texts, tweets, emails, status updates, blog posts, Tumblrs, product reviews, and so on. People today read huge amounts of stuff… online. Read! You'll absorb it.'īut there's a modern-day catch. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. William Faulkner put it well: 'Read, read, read. They also pick up all sorts of random information, which turns out to be extremely important if you want to be a good, or even not-bad, writer. By osmosis, they unconsciously learn an incalculable amount about vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, style, rhythm, tone, and other crucial matters. But if you do, you are good to go - I guarantee it.Īlmost without exception, good writers read widely and frequently. The catch is that these words - and the three bolded sentences they compose - aren't easy to fully grasp.

When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It by Ben Yagoda