To understand a subject, we need to understand not just how to do things well, but also how to fix what’s wrong. And so, by popular demand, I have gathered a baker’s dozen of flawed sentences and paragraphs.
(Bakers in Medieval England used to give an extra loaf of bread to avoid charges that they were skimping on their deliveries. Hotten’s Slang Dictionary, published in 1864, explains: “This consists of thirteen or fourteen; the surplus number, called the inbread, being thrown in for fear of incurring the penalty for short weight.”)
Each passage presents a unique challenge to the writer and editor. Usually, you can fix these passages by breaking them down, shortening the sentences, emphasizing the subject and verb, and clearing out the digressions.
Who did what?
One of the more thoughtful essayists today is David Brooks of The New York Times, who covers politics, technology, brain research, economics, and social issues with a deft touch. But here he stumbles:
Hotels, sneakers, iced tea and even ice cream is now marketed to people on the basis of psychographic profiles and the result is a profusion of unusual products and distinctive experiences.
What’s wrong? Two things. First, he fails to get his first subjects and verb to agree (“Hotels, sneakers, iced tea and even ice cream” is plural), creating a small (but important) moment of confusion. Second, he fails to develop two separate thoughts before connecting them.
To fix this minor kludge, break the sentence into two. To connect the thoughts, use a simple transition (“as a result”). In each sentence, make sure to say exactly who does what. Like this:
Markets now use psychological profiles to hawk hotels, sneakers, iced tea, and even ice cream. With more information about what consumers want, corporate America offers a profusion of unusual products and distinctive experiences.
Brooks has legions of fans (like me) because he does such a good job explaining abstract, cutting-edge research to nonspecialists. But in this passage, he let himself wander. Take your time, David; even when you want to connect ideas from different worlds, just state one thought at a time.
Huh? Who? Where?
To make a point clear, be sure to connect the subject with the verb. When you deal with two distinct points in time, be sure you know what’s doing what and when. Consider this confusing passage from an article about a former baseball player named Ryan Freel who committed suicide:
His family said that Freel was suffering from CTE on Sunday at a private mass, The Florida Times-Union’s Justin Barney reported.
This passage makes it seem like Freel was suffering from CTE at the mass. In fact, the mass under discussion was his funeral.
To avoid confusion, put actors, actions, places, and times together. One actor was Freel; other actors were members of his family. Talk about each in turn, like this:
Freel suffered from CTE, family members said at a private mass on Sunday.
Notice that I deleted the attribution. I think you could include the attribution in a later sentence, as you explain the issue in more detail. My goal here is to avoid veering off in different directions.
Who’s doing what?
Lots of writers lose the reader right away. Rather than telling the reader what’s happening, they meander along. Take this sentence from Sports Illustrated‘s website:
Even last Thursday, when Yankees manager Joe Girardi’s strategy of sacrificing an AL East title—in order to set up a first-round matchup with the Twins—his club’s traditional whipping boys—instead of with Cliff Lee and the Rangers was close to paying dividends (New York then had a 2-0 series lead on Minnesota), Girardi refused to admit that this had ever been his strategy at all.
The writer uses 47 words to get to his point: Joe Girardi denied blowing the division. The meandering gets in the way of the point of the sentence. Meandering also creates confusion. The phrase “instead of with Cliff Lee and the Rangers was close to paying dividends” takes the reader in two separate directions. Punctuation would help. But what would help more is starting and finishing strongly. Like this:
Manager Joe Girardi still denies that the Yankees purposely lost the AL East title. When the Tampa Bay Rays won the title, the Yankees got a first-round matchup with the Minnesota Twins. The Yankees såwept the Twins in three previous playoff series. By losing the division, the Yankees avoided the Texas Rangers and their ace, Cliff Lee.
The new version cuts twelve words and gives the reader four simple sentences.
The revised passage also offers more information—that the Rays won the title and the Twins lost their last three series to the Yankees. Rambling has a way of making writers forget to tell the readers facts like that. Short, declarative sentences demand clear information.
The long and winding road
Sports writer Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News has a tendency to write long and meandering sentences, as if he’s arguing in a bar and dare not pause lest someone else enter the conversation.
In this 2012 passage, Lupica explores the misfit between the Boston Red Sox and their manager, Bobby Valentine. Amid rumors that the Red Sox plan to fire Valentine, Sox President Larry Lucchino offers a lukewarm endorsement of the manager. Lucchino does not embrace Valentine; he only says that his job is safe for the final month and a half of the season. Then Lupica says:
That is exactly where we are with the Red Sox and with Valentine, who will eventually take the fall for everything that has gone wrong since the Red Sox were still ahead of the Yankees a year ago, right before they played the absolute worst September ever played by a team that had nearly gotten to 40 games over .500 before that. …
These stream-of-consciousness sentences meander over time:
The present: That is exactly where we are with the Red Sox and with Valentine
The future: who will eventually take the fall for everything that has gone wrong
The past: since the Red Sox were still ahead of the Yankees a year ago
More detail on the past: right before they played the absolute worst September ever played by a team
Modification of that detail: that had nearly gotten to 40 games over .500 before that.
How do we revise this 62-word monstrosity? Break it up! Take a look at this sentence-by-sentence revision:
So it goes with the Red Sox and Valentine’s uneasy relationship. Eventually, Valentine will take the fall for everything that has gone wrong with the team. He’ll suffer not just for his team’s failures, but also for team’s funk since September 2012. After going almost 40 games over .500—and leading the Yankees in the standings—the Red Sox played historically badly to blow their playoff hopes.
Lupica might not like my rewrite. He and his imitators at the Daily News love the breathless string of ideas. Maybe they think it sounds like an old-timey coach rambling on about the good old days. But clarity and accuracy should be the primary goals of all writing.
Color takes away focus
Since most readers get their daily news online, as it happens, writers for magazines need to give readers behind-the-scenes glimpses of the newsmakers. In this passage, Newsweek describes an event involving the company that built the website for the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. The company, CGI Federal, gathered his workers to celebrate landing the contract for the job:
Most attendees stayed in the resort’s Chateau Lafayette hotel, a replica of the Ritz-Carlton in Paris, and at a formal dinner under the elaborate chandelier in the ballroom, George D. Schindler, the president of CGI Federal, spoke of the company’s big profits that year and its bright future.
This sentence describes two different facts: (1) where people stayed and (2) what the company’s president said. The reporter is trying to make a connection between the company’s luxury accommodations and its hubris. But the facts about the luxury, a celebration, and the company president’s remarks.
To make the point better, the author could have broken the sentence in two and offered a more direct connection between the luxury and overconfidence. Like this:
CGI workers stayed in the resort’s Chateau Lafayette hotel, a replica of the Ritz-Carlton in Paris. To celebrate the Obamacare contract, they gathered for a formal dinner under the elaborate chandelier in the ballroom. George D. Schindler, the president of CGI Federal, spoke of the company’s big profits that year and its bright future.
Even readers who followed the rocky rollout of Obamacare don’t know much about CGI Federal. If you want to peek behind the curtains at CGI’s culture, you need to take one glimpse at a time.
Block that metaphor!
No one covers sports better than Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post. But even the great Boswell falters. Here, he mixes four metaphors. Most football fans won’t care. But he sounds like a hack here, and he’s not. Take a look:
Yes, it’s happened again. Now it’s the Shanahan era, once trumpeted, now down in flames, that takes its place in the line — for bitterness, for ugly endings and for the endless blame game that always accompanies Snyder’s flops — with the departures of Norv Turner, Marty Schottenheimer, Steve Spurrier, and Jim Zorn.
Let’s review the metaphors:
once trumpeted
down in flames
takes its place in the line
endless blame game
flops
Let’s just say Boswell had a bad day. And let’s add that the Post’s desk editor failed to save Boz from his flaws. Now, let’s fix his cliché prose:
Yes, it’s happened again. The Shanahan era, once a cause for hope, has failed. Shanahan has become part of the Redskin’s sorry recent history — marked by bitterness, ugly endings, and blame. That’s how it works with Snyder’s failure — with the previous departures of Norv Turner, Marty Schottenheimer, Steve Spurrier, Jim Zorn, and, soon enough, with Shanahan
To be sure, most of Boswell’s readers would follow his logic easily. But the best writers not only speak to knowledgeable readers, but to people with a casual interest in the subject.
More meandering confuses who did what and when
This Boston Globe article explores a familiar topic—conflict of interest among state officials. In this case, the head of the state’s gambling commission failed to disclose that one of his friends had a stake in a project that he was responsible for managing. But this sentence, while short, manages to wander off the subject
After Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn toured the former industrial site in Everett where he was thinking of building a casino in November 2012, state gambling commission chairman Stephen Crosby didn’t mention that one of the landowners was his former business partner.
Because this sentence meanders, it makes a key fact unclear. What happened in November 2012? Was that when Steve Wynn visited? Or was it the time to build a casino?
Fixing this little mess is simple. Just separate the separate thoughts into separate sentences. Like this:
Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn toured the former industrial site in Everett, where he was considering building a casino, in November 2012. But Steve Crosby, the state gambling commission chairman Stephen Crosby, failed to mention that one of his friends owned a key parcel of land at the site.
Separating these thoughts not only makes the passage clearer; it also makes it fairer. The passage describes two events—the casino mogul’s visit and the gambling regulator’s relationships. Together, they suggest something fishy is going on. But separating these ideas gives readers the room to make their own conclusions.
So what do you really think?
We write to persuade. Even when we just want to describe something, matter-of-factly, we aim to get someone else to believe something we believe. Problems arise when we push our opinions so hard that we confuse what we’re saying.
For an example, consider Peggy Noonan, a conservative opinion writer for The Wall Street Journal. Noonan, who write speeches for President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, seems to have three passions: loving Reagan, loving Pope John Paul II, and not loving Barack Obama. In her almost-weekly pieces against President Obama, she piles insult upon insult, as if you say: Have I told you that I really, really dislike this guy and people who like him?
Take a look at this 51-word sentence from May 2013:
The president, detached and defeatist when he isn’t in your face and triumphalist, let David Remnick, in the New Yorker interview people keep going back to as the second term’s Rosetta stone, know that he himself does not expect any major legislation, with the possible exception of immigration, to get done.
In one swing, she bashes Obama for being detached, defeatist, in your face, triumphalist. For extra measure, she slights New Yorker editor David Remnick for his interview with Obama, as well as “people” who found the interview revealing. That’s six raps on Obama and his sympathizers. Finally, she gets to her point: Obama has a limited legislative agenda for the rest of his second term.
Noonan, of course, gets paid to express her opinions. My purpose here is not to disagree—personally, I have mixed feelings about the president—but to help her write better sentences.
So let’s fix her mess by breaking it into more digestible pieces:
When the president does not attack Republicans and celebrate himself, he retreats to a detached and defeatist posture. Obama told David Remnick of the New Yorker—in an interview that liberals consider the second term’s Rosetta Stone—he has low expectations for the rest of his term. With the possible exception of immigration, Obama sees little hope for action on any major issue.
I kept all of Noonan’s insults, even sharpening the swipe at people who liked the New Yorker interview.
I cut the average sentence length from 51 to 21 words but increased the length of the whole passage by 12 words. As a general rule, of course, shorter is better than longer. But the primary goal of all writing is readability. To make all of Noonan’s points clearly, we need to use more words.
The dangers of corporate-speak
Writers in large organizations—like government and corporations—tend to avoid direct speech. Why? Here are four reasons:
(1) People in organizations want to avoid saying anything that might offend their constituents.
(2) They tend to speak an “insider’s language” that is abstract and unfamiliar to outsiders.
(3) To make sure they make their point, they often repeat themselves.
(4) They try to pack too much information into a sentence or paragraph.
All four tendencies are visible in this paragraph, taken from the website of a major financial rating service:
Altogether, a total of 950 natural catastrophes were recorded last year, nine-tenths of which were weather-related events like storms and floods. This total makes 2010 the year with the second-highest number of natural catastrophes since 1980, markedly exceeding the annual average for the last ten years (785 events per year). The overall losses amounted to around US$ 130bn, of which approximately US$ 37bn was insured. This puts 2010 among the six most loss-intensive years for the insurance industry since 1980. The level of overall losses was slightly above the high average of the past ten years.
How to fix this monstrosity? Start by identifying the major ideas in the passage. I see two—recent disasters and their costs and the new “norm” of disastrous weather events. So I broke the paragraph into two, then trimmed the details and repetition that turns off readers. Here’s my rewrite:
Natural disasters made 2010 one of the six worst years for losses since 1980. Some 950 natural disasters caused financial losses of $130 billion, of which only $37 billion was insured.
Risk from environmental catastrophe has become the norm. The world experienced an average of 785 catastrophic events in the first decade of the 2000s.
This rewrite cuts the passage from 96 to 55 words and the average sentence length from 24 to 13.75 words. More important, it eliminates needless hedges and emphatics and focuses on hard facts.
Too many modifiers
Now we shift our attention to academic writing. Scholars have earned a reputation for tedious, vague, and abstract writing. Look at this passage, from an academic journal article about the civil rights movement:
After the Second World War, the general drift of American public opinion toward a more liberal racial attitude that had begun during the New Deal became accentuated as a result of the revolution against Western Imperialism in Asia and Africa that engendered a new respect for the nonwhite peoples of the world, and as a result of the subsequent competition for the support of the uncommitted nations connected with the Cold War.
Get it? I didn’t, at least the first few times I read it. Only by hunting for the subject and verb—and then breaking it down into shorter pieces—did I fully comprehend what the writer was trying to say.
So why does this passage go awry? In a seventy-two-word sentence, the author uses sixteen prepositions—after, of, toward, during, as, of, against, in, that, for, of, as, of, for, of, and with. So many prepositions demand too much from the reader. It’s disorienting, like asking a driver to turn sixteen times to travel a short distance.
What do prepositions do? They create modifiers—details that offer new information about nouns and verbs. But do we need so many modifiers? I don’t think so.
To rewrite that passage, I removed all but a handful of prepositional phrases. Then I broke the passage into digestible pieces. Look at this new version:
After World War II, Americans adopted more liberal attitudes about race. The New Deal began this process. Revolutions against imperial powers in Asia and Africa created new respect for the nonwhite populations. The Cold War also prompted the U.S. to consider how racial strife damaged America’s image in the Cold War.
The new version breaks one monster sentence into three ordinary sentences. It uses fifty-one words, twenty-two fewer. And it uses only five prepositions—about, against, in, for, and in—instead of sixteen.
Academese: Judith Butler
Writing in Diacritics, the feminist scholar Judith Butler wrote an essay titled “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” which includes this passage:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
The biggest problem, of course, is the use of too many abstract words in too little space. It’s fine to use specialized terminology. If you cannot think of a better way to say “coming from the same source,” go ahead and say homologous. If you cannot think of a better way to say complete intellectual dominance, say hegemony. If you need to refer to the work of Louis Althusser, fine, go ahead. Use all the fancy vocabulary you want. But just don’t pile it up. Remember that even the most knowledgable specialist can better understand ideas in chunks. Use specialized terms only when you need ‘em, then define ‘em and spread ‘em out.
Another problem is the sentence length. Long sentences, of course, are not necessarily bad. Sometimes you need a long sentence to create a mood or to connect several ideas. But sentences ought not overwhelm the reader. Butler uses 94 words in this passage. How does this happen? As Deep Throat would have told Woodward and Bernstein if they were investigating this scandal of a sentence: Follow the prepositions.
Like the previous passage, this one is a long string of modifiers connected by prepositions. This passage contains 21 prepositions: from, in, in, to, of, in, of, into, of, from, of, as, to, in, into, of, of, as, with, of, and of.
Prepositions help to show the relations of words and phrases. So when you use 21 prepositions in one sentence, you show 21 different relations of words within that sentence.
Here’s one way to translate Butler:
Structuralists say capitalism operates as a powerful “top-down” system, making businesses, schools, and other institutions look and operate the same way. We now think of power as a series of smaller, decentralized interactions. Power does not come from some big force, but from countless interactions throughout society.
I understand that we may lose some ideas with this simple passage. But we don’t lose the reader. And if we keep the reader with us, we can develop the more complex concepts, one at a time.
Academese: Fredric Jameson
In his book Signatures of the Visible, Fredric Jameson writes:
The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer).
This 63-word sentence also goes on too long for most readers. So he and Butler have that in common. But Butler’s major problem stemmed from too many modifiers, which we see with all those prepositional phrases. But Jameson uses only four prepositional phrases here: in, about, from, and from. So why is this passage so bad.
That’s easy. It’s nonsense. The visual is essentially pornographic? The visual “has its end” (someone should call the teleology cops on Jameson, an avowed skeptic of teleological thinking) in mindless fascination. Really? Does that mean that gazing at the works by Leonardo or Brueghel is pornographic? Or Chagal or Rodin? Does Jameson really mean, as he says later, that anything embedded in mass culture is porn? Really? So great photography and modern art and everything in newspapers and magazines and the web … it’s all just porn?
I like the point about austere films drawing their energy by “repress[ing] their own excess.” It’s an interesting idea. You create excess (like the scenes involving the horse head and car explosion in “The Godfather”) and then you draw it back with some kind of contrary idea (“A la famiglia!“). But is that really just modern? Sure, the modern era has multiplied images and ideas, and then broadcast them globally. But are visuals really new? Interesting idea, but debatable.
Anyway, let’s try to simplify Jameson’s passage:
When mass media focus on an object, they inevitably take away its basic integrity. Like pornography, media encourage rapt, mindless fascination. The most artful films, though, generate energy by pushing the subject to extremes and then pulling back.
If I lost or distorted any ideas here, sorry. Sometimes when you pull out deep weeds you also pull out benign plants.
Academese: Roy Bhaskar
Let’s take one last look at academic writing gone wrong. In Plato Etc., the British philosopher Roy Bhaskar writes:
Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal — of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.
Indeed.
First of all, we need to break down this 134-word monstrosity, with its 23 prepositional phrases, into pieces. We learned how to do that with Butler. So let’s move on to some special problems of Bhaskar.
The sentence has two main parts. In part 1 (from “Indeed” to the em-dash), he introduces the idea of the Foucauldian reversal. In part 2 (from “of the unholy” to the end), he says what gets reversed. You can state this idea with the simple SVO sentence:
Foucault’s approach (subject) reversed (verb) previous philosophical traditions (object).
Ah, simplicity! But hold on. Stated that way, the whole passage looks absurd. Roy, you really think all those characters you lump together — Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Comte, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hegel, Baudrillard — would take the same side in a debate? While you’re at it, why not throw in the Marx Brothers too? (Note to self: Send movie idea to the makers of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”)
Look, I understand you want to say Michel Foucault did something consequential. Great. I agree. You also want to say that even competing traditions shared some underlying assumptions. Again, great.
I know I’m oversimplifying here, Roy, but you forced my hand. Your way out — the way you can make your stuff intelligible — is to slow down. Breathe in, breathe out. Now, step by step, tell us what you mean.
You suffer the “Whoa, Nellie!” problem. You think of so many related ideas, and you want to talk about all of them. So you start and it’s like you get taken over by a runaway horse.
Start by getting rid of the compound modifiers: Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean; Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian; and Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean. Just explain how these ideas relate to each other. Don’t try to do too much too soon. Avoid sardine writing, packing ideas densely into the tin.
Let’s look at all the philosophical traditions that Foucault et al. “reversed”:
The Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean “unholy trinity.”
The Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm.
Foundationalisms.
Irrationalisms.
“The primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual.”
Plato’s “problematic,” which “Hegel served only to replicate,” blah blah blah.
Other stuff.
Whew. Did I get that right?
Whatever. Here’s what you do. Find the core idea and lay it out, piece by piece. Embellish only when necessary, only after you’ve laid a foundation. And for God’s sake, keep it simple. Something like this:
Foucault’s approach undercut the ancient debates about idealism and materialism. Foucault also challenged the extensions of those debates– including Kant’s demand for rationality, Descartes’ separation of mind and body, and Nietzsche’s appeal to primal urges.
We might miss some nuance here. But we’ve established a strong foundation for real communication. Remember, we have a whole article to explain the argument. Remember this simple rule of thumb: Take one idea at a time.
And that’s not a bad place to end. Keep it simple. Take one thing at a time. Don’t try to impress people. Just say what you mean, as simply as possible.
For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing.