Probably the most damning criticism that anyone can express about a piece of writing—apart from condemning it as completely illiterate—is that it is lifeless and boring. The two remaining qualities that make up style, vigor and variety, should preserve your prose from any such criticism.What gives vigor to words on a page? Let us start by dealing with some of the more obvious sources of energy available to the writer.Forceful LanguageThere are words that denote vigorous or forceful action, as those chosen by Robert Browning (1812–89) for his poem "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix":"I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I gallop'd, Dirck gallop'd, we gallop'd all three." The use of such language is, of course, not confined to verse:Martha slammed the door, raced down the corridor, jumped into her car, and sped away with a squeal of tires. A torrent of water rushed down the mountainside carrying away rocks, trees, bushes, bridges, cabins, everything that lay in its path. The air was forced out of my lungs in a tremendous gush by the shock of hitting the cold water. It will come as no surprise that the English language is full of words with great dramatic potential—slam, race, jump, leap, spring, torrent, rush, gush, force, strike, hit—and most writers will not hesitate to use such words if they have something exciting to describe. But what if there is nothing particularly exciting to describe? You might write a report of what happened at a meeting as follows:The chairman rapped on the table with his gavel and asked the people in the hall to be quiet so that he could proceed with the business on the agenda. You might then think to yourself that this sounds pretty tame and decide to spice up the sentence a little:The chairman pounded the table repeatedly with his gavel, yelling at the riotous mob in the hall to shut up so that he could finish his agenda. There is no doubt that the second sentence makes rather more exciting reading, and if you were writing a novel or a story, you might decide that a meeting at which the people in the hall ran riot suited your purpose better than one at which they were simply a little noisy. But if you were describing an actual meeting, the chairman and the other participants would probably take exception to your suggestion that there was uproar in the hall rather than a mild disturbance. In other words, you should not overdramatize, or even dramatize, an event, if that event was not in itself particularly dramatic. And even when an incident might seem to warrant the use of dramatic language, understatement sometimes works better than overstatement:My fingers slipped, and I dropped the cup, making a vain attempt to catch it as it fell. It broke. It lay on the floor in small, white, guilty fragments. The cup fell from my nerveless fingers, and, though I grasped and grabbed at it as it fell, it crashed to the floor and shattered in a thousand irredeemable fragments. It is debatable whether the more obviously dramatic language of the second sentence—nerveless fingers, grasped and grabbed, crashed, shattered, a thousand irredeemable fragments—represents an improvement on the first, where the only concession to drama, we might say, is the use of the word guilty to describe the fragments. (This is what is known, technically, as a "transferred epithet." The fragments are not guilty, but the narrator feels guilty for dropping the presumably precious cup and expresses this by applying the word to the result of his or her "crime." Transferred epithets are useful in poetry and imaginative prose but should be avoided in everyday writing.) Despite this, however, in its own quiet way, the first sentence conveys at least as much of the emotion of this small incident as the second. It is often more effective to allow the reader to imagine what you are not saying—to dramatize the silence that follows a period, as it were—than to try to galvanize him or her through the use of words that are highly charged with emotion or action.The chances are that you will only occasionally find yourself describing events that are very dramatic and exciting. Even if you specialize in writing thrillers, there are bound to be long stretches of text where you relax the tension and allow your characters ordinary, peaceful, everyday activities. Furthermore, the law of diminishing returns can easily come into play if you overindulge in the language of speed and violence. If you start with a volcano erupting, what do you do for a climax? Something other than vigorous terms, useful and attractive as these are, is needed to keep up the energy levels of your prose. Let us turn our attention, then, to another source of energy.Colloquial VigorSpoken language is often particularly "lively, inventive, and colorful," especially in comparison to written language. It is, therefore, quite refreshing to come across sentences like the following in, say, the pages of an academic journal:It is a privilege of reviewers to dump on others from a great height. There is nothing in the Internet chat room format to prevent academic specialists from competitively boring the pants off one another, but it does usually give them an incentive to express themselves in a more accessible way. There is a raciness and often an irreverence about slang and colloquial language that can come like a shot in the arm, especially in a passage of otherwise fairly routine serious prose. Unfortunately, we face the same problem with informal language that we faced with dramatic language: It is not generally suited to the long haul or the average task. It is possible to write whole books in vigorous, colloquial, regional English: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is a shining example. But we cannot endlessly rewrite Huck, and most of what we have to write will need to be couched in a more neutral tone. It would be altogether inappropriate to set out to write a serious article, assignment, or report in informal language, however refreshing an occasional lapse into slang might be. Although colloquial language is vigorous, it is not the solution to the problem. We still need to find methods to prevent our prose from being slack and lifeless, even when it is dealing with serious subjects and needs to remain respectable.Vigor for the Long HaulLet us first revisit some of the places we have been to already. Strangely enough, perhaps, several of the qualities that were put forward as basic constituents of elegance—simplicity, compactness, flow—make writing vigorous as well. It stands to reason that a sentence that is loaded down with too many words will be less vigorous than one that is sparing with them and says what it has to say quickly and neatly. In addition, most of the words that were referred to as "forceful" earlier are in fact short, simple words. If you base your style of writing on the use of basic verbs, concrete nouns, and simple but evocative adjectives and adverbs put together to form uncluttered sentences, then the chances of its becoming tired or flabby are immediately reduced.Although a wholesale use of colloquial language is usually inappropriate, you should endeavor to keep in touch with the spoken language, especially language as you speak it. But your verbal resources are not the only resources that you need to draw on. Most of the qualities that we have identified as being hallmarks of good style are achieved through intellectual effort and critical judgment. To be clear, to be elegant, to vary the way in which you write, and even to keep simple what you write usually involve making a conscious choice of selecting the clearest, simplest, or most elegant expression or deliberately differentiating one word, sentence, or paragraph from another. Now, you may apply the same kind of mental effort to being vigorous, but you can also channel vigor directly into your written work from within yourself much more easily than you could channel elegance or variety, for example.The best way of ensuring that your work possesses and retains vigor is for you to have a positive attitude toward it. Your personality transmits itself almost unconsciously into your writing. This was suggested in the opening chapters of this book that dealt with the personal aspects of style. Likewise, your state of mind when you sit down to write and your attitude toward the subject that you are writing about color the way in which you use language. Your input into a text will be emotional and even visceral as well as intellectual. If you feel tired or despondent when you sit down to write, you are unlikely to write with much energy. If you feel that the subject you have set yourself to write about is boring nonsense, your lack of conviction will surely communicate itself to the reader. Anything that you can do to put yourself into a positive frame of mind will bring enormous benefits. If you write with the attitude "I have something to say to you, reader, that you will want to hear because it is really interesting and important," you are far more likely to write vigorously than if your attitude at the outset is "I haven't really got anything to say, and I'm only writing this because I have to." When there is nothing that you want to say, the best policy is to say nothing. But when your interest is awakened and you believe in what you are doing, then your positive engagement with the task in hand will lend an equally positive energy to everything you write.Most writers have to develop strategies to cope with the times when they have to write but are not in the mood to write. Here are two strategies that will assist in keeping your writing vigorous even when you are not at the peak of your form.Avoiding Unnecessary Adjectives and AdverbsYou will reduce the amount of clutter in your sentences and keep your writing strong and vigorous if you use adjectives and adverbs to make your descriptions more precise rather than more emphatic. There is a class of words that grammarians refer to as "intensifiers"—words such as very, dreadful and dreadfully, serious and seriously, terrible and terribly, total and totally, utter and utterly, and so on—whose purpose is to increase the force of what you say, but which, if used too often—and that generally means too instinctively, with too little thought—can actually have the opposite effect. This is especially so when they are linked to nouns that are intrinsically "forceful."A word such as catastrophe, for instance, denotes a terrible event. To call an event a terrible catastrophe, a dreadful catastrophe, or, worse, a serious catastrophe adds nothing. It may, on the other hand, be relevant to specify what kind of catastrophe you are talking about, for example, a political catastrophe, a financial catastrophe, or a domestic catastrophe. The adjectives in these latter phrases are used to make the statements more precise; in the former phrases they are used simply in an attempt to add emphasis. If you are speaking to somebody face to face, you may feel it necessary to say,I'm terribly sorry. I know you must be feeling completely heartbroken, and it was extremely thoughtless of me to make such an utterly uncalled-for remark. Each of the intensifiers—terribly, completely, extremely, and utterly—is like a shamefaced bow of the head or bend of the knee to pacify the person you have offended. Writing a similar sentence, however, is another matter:He was terribly sorry, for he knew that she must be feeling completely heartbroken and that it had been extremely thoughtless of him to make such an utterly uncalled-for remark. Consider whether it would not be more effective without those adverbs:He was sorry, for he knew that she must be feeling heartbroken and that it had been thoughtless of him to make such an uncalled-for remark. If that does not seem to convey effectively the person's remorse, recast the sentence using more forceful language but still avoiding intensifiers:He was devastated. What had possessed him, knowing how heartbroken she was, to make such a thoughtless and uncalled-for remark? In general, you should try to avoid overloading your sentence with adjectives and adverbs, even when they are genuinely descriptive ones. Take the following example:It was only a small, derelict, uninhabited cabin on top of a low, round-topped hill, but in that flat, sparse country it stood out conspicuously, and to Julia, as a child, it had always marked the farthest boundary of her world. Reducing the amount of adjectival and adverbial detail produces a less cluttered and therefore more vigorous and more elegant effect:It was only a small, derelict cabin on top of a low hill, but in that flat country it stood out, and to Julia, as a child, it marked the boundary of her world. Vigorous VerbsVerbs can be used in two ways: actively or passively. In this section entitled "Vigor," the judgment is that we will prefer the active to the passive form.Let us remind ourselves of the difference between the two. In the "active voice," as it is technically known, the subject of the verb performs the action of the verb. In the following simple sentences the verbs are in the active voice:Our cat killed the mouse. A team of legal experts will undertake the work. In the passive, the subject does not perform an action but is acted upon by something or somebody else. It is very easy to convert simple sentences from the active to the passive voice, or vice versa. The object of a sentence in the active voice (the mouse and the work in the examples above) becomes the subject of an equivalent sentence in the passive voice. The passive is formed by combining the past participle of the verb with the relevant form of the verb to be:The mouse was killed by our cat. The work will be undertaken by a team of legal experts. Some verbs take both a direct and an indirect object:Juanita gave me [indirect object] the book [direct object]. In such cases, either the direct or the indirect object can be made the subject if the verb is put into the passive:The book was given to me by Juanita. I was given the book by Juanita. (For more on the grammar of verbs, see The Facts On File Guide to Good Writing.)In any extended piece of writing, you will inevitably need to use verbs in both the active and the passive voice. Which form you choose will depend on what you wish to emphasize, because, in most cases, the subject of the verb is what any sentence is about. For example, if you say,The building was destroyed by fire in 2002. your sentence is essentially about the building in question. But if you say,Fire destroyed the building in 2002. the emphasis switches to the means of the building's destruction.It stands to reason, therefore, that in certain instances, the passive voice is the better form of the verb to use. These include- when your attention is focused on the person or thing that feels the effects of an action:
Why was Maggie selected for the basketball team, when Angela is obviously a much better player? The whole neighborhood was shaken by the blast. - when you do not know, or wish to avoid mentioning, the person or thing that performed a particular action:
He was robbed on his way back to the hotel. The file was shredded. Nobody can now remember how it came to be shredded. It is regretted that the mail was delayed. - when you wish to highlight an action by means of a noun coupled with a relatively unemphatic verb:
The decision was taken only after long and serious thought. Savage cuts were made in spending. In these last two sentences, the actions involved are "deciding" and "cutting" and the verbs "take" and "make" simply serve to show that those actions took place; they do not add significantly to the meaning.Although the passive voice has these important functions, writers should not overuse it. A sentence containing a passive verb will inevitably be longer than an equivalent sentence containing an active verb:A mouse ate the cheese. The cheese was eaten by a mouse. Moreover, if you write a long passage in the passive voice, you not only slow down the tempo by adding extra words, you often give the impression that events simply happen without anyone being responsible for making them happen:The building had been allowed to fall into decay and had eventually been declared unfit for human habitation. It was, however, occupied by squatters before the order for its demolition could be put into effect. The squatters were supported by an action group that had been formed by members of the local community to resist the gentrification of the area. The process of gentrification had been started several years earlier when several former warehouses had been converted into loft apartments by developers. Rents in neighboring buildings had immediately been raised by landlords, and poorer inhabitants felt that they were being priced out of the neighborhood in which they had been born and bred. If we recast this passage mainly using verbs in the active voice, we have to allocate responsibility for what takes place to different people and organizations:The authorities had allowed the building to fall into decay and had eventually declared it unfit for human habitation. Squatters occupied it, however, before the authorities could put the order for its demolition into effect. An action group, formed by members of the local community to resist the gentrification of the area, supported the squatters. The process of gentrification had begun several years earlier when developers converted several former warehouses into loft apartments. Landlords immediately raised rents in neighboring buildings, and poorer inhabitants felt that they were being priced out of the neighborhood in which they had been born and bred. The result is not only shorter and more vigorous, it also gives the reader more and clearer information. So, where you have a choice between using the active or the passive voice to make a statement, choose the active voice unless there is some compelling reason to choose the passive.
|
Email
Print
Save
Citation
Record URL
