6.2: Improving Your Writing Style

The manner of presentation of a piece of writing is its style. You’ll need an effective style. How do you get it? Here are some suggestions.

Be brief One mark of good writing style is brevity but with sufficient detail. There are exceptions, however. Brevity is not a virtue when writing letters appealing for contributions to your organization. Fund raisers have learned that a simple, clear, and concise request does not bring in the money. What works is a long letter that provides more information about the organization and that goes into great detail about how the money will be spent. The letter makes the recipient feel like he or she is part of the inner workings of the organization. Another exception to the rule of brevity is that a complicated point sometimes requires repeating. Just don't repeat it with the same words, and don't do it more than once.

Be straightforward. Another mark of good style is "saying it straight," as Emily Dickinson would say. You should say that Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow. Only a lawyer could get away with "Mary was the legal owner of a diminutive, potential sheep, whose fleece was as innocent of coloring as congealed atmospheric vapor." Avoid jargon or technical-ese. Also, remember that it is easier to follow a group of sentences, each expressing one idea, than a single sentence that strings several ideas together. Break up those long, rambling strings.

Let’s elaborate on these two suggestions. William Faulkner could have made his point briefly and simply by saying:

Five miles farther down the river from Major de Spain's camp there is an Indian mound, which we children fear. A small Chickasaw Indian reservation is nearby.

But saying it that way is less interesting and less memorable than the way Faulkner wrote it:

Five miles farther down the river from Major de Spain's camp, and in an even wilder part of the river's jungle of cane and gum and pin oak, there is an Indian mound. Aboriginal, it rises profoundly and darkly enigmatic, the only elevation of any kind in the wild, flat jungle of river bottom. Even to some of us—children though we were, yet we were descended of literate, town-bred people—it possessed inferences of secret and violent blood, of savage and sudden destruction, as though the yells and hatchets which we associated with Indians through the hidden and secret dime novels which we passed among ourselves were but trivial and momentary manifestations of what dark power still dwelled or lurked there, sinister, a little sardonic, like a dark and nameless beast lightly and lazily slumbering with bloody jaws—this, perhaps, due to the fact that a remnant of a once powerful clan of the Chickasaw tribe still lived beside it under Government protection.¹

Yes, you usually want to rid your writing of excess vegetation, but a tree can be pruned so much that it dies. There are five-page plot summaries of Faulkner novels, but the only people who buy them are students in English courses who hope the test will not cover anything subtle. The people who read for their own pleasure and interest prefer less brevity and more complexity.

The suggestion above that you adopt a style that is straightforward means, among other things, avoiding the abstract when you can just as well be specific and concrete. For example, a student who misunderstands Heidegger may say too abstractly, "IBM faces Microsoft, not with the nothingness of Being, but with the nothingness of dread." You should say, more concretely, "IBM executives fear their stock will be less valuable if they merge with the Microsoft Corporation."

Give examples; get to the point. That advice is good, but it is a little superficial. If the audience will immediately catch on to your general claim, skip the examples. Some of your textbooks have no doubt moved too quickly through the subject matter and have not given enough examples, while other textbooks have plodded along wasting your time by giving example after example of a simple idea that you caught on to right away.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Which response below is the most straightforward answer to the request "Give a specific description of the Indian mound in Faulkner's short story above"?

a. The mound rises significantly above the plain of the surrounding river bottom.
b. Even to some of us—children though we were, yet we were descended of literate, town-bred people—the mound possessed inferences of secret and violent blood, of savage and sudden destruction, as though the yells and hatchets which we associated with Indians through the hidden and secret dime novels which we passed among ourselves were but trivial and momentary manifestations of what dark power still dwelled or lurked there, sinister, a little sardonic, like a dark and nameless beast lightly and lazily slumbering with bloody jaws—this, perhaps, due to the fact that a remnant of a once powerful clan of the Chickasaw tribe still lived beside it under Government protection.
c. The mound is an earthen cone with a base of about 100 feet and an altitude of 30 feet. The mound sits on a plain that contains a river bottom.

Answer

Answer (a). Answer (b) is not correct because it is not a description of the mound but instead is a description of the children's reaction to the mound. Answer (c) is not correct because there is no basis for claiming that the mound had those specific measurements. Answer (c) would be a better answer than (a), however, if (c) were true.

Here is a final suggestion that is perhaps the most important of all in producing logical writing: Reread what you've written. After you have written what you set out to write, let it cool. Forget about it for a while; the longer the better. Then go back and reread it with an open mind, as if you were a member of your intended audience seeing it for the first time. Or ask a helpful friend to read it and give you a reaction. You are likely to gain valuable information about what you may need to clarify.

The rest of this chapter explores the process of creating arguments.

---

¹ From William Faulkner, "A Bear Hunt," Collected Stories of William Faulkner, (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 65.