Perfect English Grammar: The Indispensable Guide to Excellent Writing and Speaking

These guidelines should help you make the most of this book as you work toward becoming a better writer.

1. Consistency matters. When you make a style choice, stick with it throughout your project. When you choose a tense (see section 6.4 ), person (see section 6.1 ), or tone, think twice before switching to a new one.

2. English offers many options. There may be more than one acceptable choice. There isn’t necessarily just one answer for every language dilemma.

3. Words can have more than one meaning and more than one use. Be wary.

4. English is illogical in places. Trying to make it logical is a mistake. Instead, bend to it.

5. There is a variety of linguistic terms for the same features of English. It is more important to understand the concepts than to know all the terms.

6. Write for your audience (see section 2.2.1 ) rather than for yourself. Write appropriately for the situation.

7. Write to be understood. Don’t let anyone’s rules get in the way of good communication.

8. Avoid doing things differently than everyone else. It can distract from your message. This especially applies to beginning or nonfluent writers, as they often reach beyond their abilities.

9. Avoid the urge to put writerly tricks to work unless they come naturally to you. Simple does it. Before literary writers could do clever things with their work, they had to understand the ordinary ways of language. Basic language rules underlie everything they write.

10. Use a thesaurus only to remind yourself of words you already know. Don’t use a thesaurus to find new words for your writing. You are very likely to misuse new words, because a thesaurus does not always indicate which words are appropriate for which contexts.

11. Throughout this book, I recommend consulting a dictionary. Consider using two dictionaries from different publishers. Each dictionary has its own strengths. Be sure to use dictionaries from well-known publishers, as off-brand dictionaries tend to be out-of-date and less thorough. See my recommendations in the Further Reading section ( here ).

12. Use the style guide preferred by your organization, school, teacher, or industry and stick with it. Well-known style guides sometimes disagree on specifics. In this book, I give guidelines that will, generally, work for everyday writing for school and work.

13. Use the table of contents and the glossary . This is not only a browsable book, but also one that can be used for easy lookups.

Writing well is one of the most crucial tools of the modern person. It is a skill required by nearly every profession, and one that allows you to get your work done, help others, and leave behind a legacy of your thoughts and actions so you may be remembered long after you are gone.

2.1 A Few Words of Advice

Think of words as bricks and boards, sentences as walls and windows, paragraphs as houses, and essays, stories, and articles as neighborhoods. Your writing is a little world for your readers, which you furnish in a way that, you hope, delights them.

Writing is a learned process that doesn’t come naturally to anyone. We all must be taught it. Don’t fret if you think you’re behind where you should be. You can learn it, just as many millions of people have before you. Hang in there.

Writing has different rules than speaking does. What naturally comes out of our mouths may seem fine to us, but if we write it down exactly as we speak it, other people—who can’t see our memories, emotions, knowledge, and ideas—will get only vague, misshapen impressions of what we mean. We must write differently than we speak.

Writing is messy. I know many authors and writers, and none of them writes anything meaningful without planning, revising, and editing. There is a myth of the genius writer who can do it all perfectly in one try. Do not think you’re failing if you can’t do that. Also, everybody needs a good editor. Everybody!

It’s easy to lose sight of what is important. You focus on word count rather than results. You lose track of your good idea because you’re worried about margins or type size. You’re concerned about the introduction but haven’t given a thought to the conclusion. You’re so worried about your deadline it distracts you from doing the work. Many writers go through this! You are not alone. To focus on what is important, look at the finished, published writing around you and think, If they did it, so can I.

Format at the end. Things like bolding, italicizing, and setting margins can be distractions from what matters most. You’ll end up having to redo a lot of the formatting, anyway.

Writing well isn’t magic. Even large parts of the most superb award-winning books have been perfunctory or even mechanical. Sometimes simply following the steps will get you to the end. You don’t always need inspiration. Sometimes you simply need to sit down, do it, and stop worrying.

2.2 Getting Started

For some people, the hardest part of writing is the blank page, that looming, scary place where nothing seems to be happening, and nothing in your head seems good enough to put down.

2.2.1 WRITE FOR THE CORRECT AUDIENCE

I once worked with a young person who couldn’t write light, fun emails for clients because he was still stuck in the university essay mode. Everything came out in a formal tone. I’ve also seen new students who should know better send very casual emails to their professors, completely lacking in even the simplest of composition niceties, such as capital letters, punctuation, or even please and thank you. Don’t be the person who doesn’t recognize when it is the right time for formal versus informal language! Match the tone and register of your audience.

2.2.2 OPENING SENTENCES CAN BE HARD, BUT THEY DON’T HAVE TO BE

If you’re having trouble putting down your first words, try these ideas. They can also break up writers’ block.

Build a structure first. Plan. Use a spreadsheet, outline, or graph paper. You’d be surprised how many writers of all kinds—speechwriters, newspaper reporters, novelists, screenplay writers, and so on—first sketch out their ideas in a structured form. Some use a slideshow program’s outline view to build a structure on which they can hang all their ideas, and then easily rearrange them by moving slides around. Use your big ideas as headings. Then break those down into their component parts. Then explain those parts with sentences.

Just write. Write anything. Write what you ate for breakfast. Just get started putting something on that blank page. Break that psychological barrier. Know it’s not going to be perfect yet and be fine with that. It is fine. I promise. You can cut or edit it later (see section 2.8). But for now, these are your first lines, you did them, and that’s something.

Write a complete plot summary as your first line. For example:

■There are solid reasons you and your party members should completely support State Bill 301b and join our coalition in urging the governor to sign it.

■She was a wicked woman, but purely so, and by the time she ruled the enchanted forest, she’d forgotten what it was like to love.

■When I think about myself a few years down the road, I see myself working at Lexxtopia, Inc., managing a team of software developers, and making the best mobile software on the market.

Tell someone else about your writing. Some people feel that talking to anyone else will void their ideas of meaning, that in the telling, the magic is gone, and all that is left is dusty vagueness. But the important part is to ask the other person to tell your ideas back to you. You’ll probably find yourself wanting to correct what they’re saying, or add to their words. As the two of you discuss your project, take notes. Take lots of notes as quickly as you can. Those notes become your outline.

Start at the end. If your hero dies in the end, write that first. Then, write what happened right before the hero died. And then write what happened before that. Keep working backward until you reach the beginning of the story. This also works for speeches, essays, and even complicated emails: put down your final, summarizing thoughts, and then justify them.

Write the fun part first: the big love scene, the explanation of all the convincing survey data, the recital of the project that won you a promotion, the anecdote that perfectly illustrates the spirit of what you’re doing.

Write simply. Write below your level of learning. Write for a five-year-old. Don’t try to write the most educated first line ever. Write to be understood. Write what helps you understand what your goals are: Who is your audience? What do you want? What do they want? Who are the characters? What motivates them?

Tell it like gossip or a family memory. Begin as if you’re at a family reunion, or on the front porch, or at the hair salon, or as if you’re an old-timer who wants to pass something along to the youngsters:

■There’s a story I’ve been meaning to tell you. It’s about . . .

■When I think back to that time, I remember feeling . . .

■When I was a child, I had just one goal. It was . . .

Make a puzzle for yourself. Think of yourself as both a puzzle-maker and a puzzle-solver. You don’t know which paragraph will be the first one until you’ve written them all down and can see what’s what. Then, you can rearrange each of the bits until you find a pleasing order. Hunter S. Thompson was known for sending his stories to the editors of Rolling Stone in long streams of faxes. Once in the office, the faxes were cut into pages and paragraphs, and then rearranged on the floor: editing was like solving a jigsaw