Writing Wisdom This page includes bits of advice from my own experience and things others have taught me. If you would like to offer a bit of writing wisdom for this page, please e-mail me. Ted J. Rulseh The Right to Bore Avoid the Deadly Pause Beware the Idea Salad Throw Out the Puzzle What happened tonight? Freedom of the press does not include the Right to Bore This lead paragraph ran in a respected pollution-control trade magazine: “The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) defines "hazardous waste" as wastes with certain characteristics and/or wastes cited on one or more of the U.S. Environmental Protection (EPA) lists. According to RCRA, characteristics that make a waste hazardous are toxicity, reactivity, corrosivity and ignitability. Lists of RCRA hazardous wastes can be found in various EPA codes in the Federal Register. This article describes an approach to developing cost-effective treatment systems for wastes in general and particularly for wastes that are hazardous in the larger, more inclusive sense of the term.” Assuming you made it this far, would you keep reading? No law says trade press writing has to be dull. Remember, readers won’t let you waste their time. Bore them and they’re gone. Top of Page Avoid the deadly pause This advice comes from Joe Lindner, a former internal communications manager with S.C. Johnson. Readers are busy people, he said. If they encounter a sentence with a defect that makes them pause, they are likely to stop reading and turn the page. Does this sentence make you pause? As more sophisticated instrumentation has emerged with highly sensitive detection capabilities and research techniques have become increasingly complex and meticulous, the requirement for purer water drives the need for strict adherence to water quality standards.  The fix? As more sophisticated instrumentation has emerged with highly sensitive detection capabilities, and as research techniques have become increasingly complex and meticulous, the requirement for purer water drives the need for strict adherence to water quality standards. It’s still not a great sentence, but the main “reader pause” is now gone. Don’t make readers pause. Keep them moving with proper grammar and punctuation. Top of Page Beware the Idea Salad  Some bad sentences are bad because they contain two or more ideas tossed together without clear definition. Consider: "Driving is the most dangerous, yet oftentimes underestimated aspect of any job." This is perhaps a gross example of an idea salad, but it makes the point. There are two ideas here: ♦Driving is the most dangerous aspect of any job. ♦Business owners often underestimate the danger of driving. So why not say, “Business owners often underestimate the hazards of driving, which is the most dangerous aspect of any job.” Moral: If you’re struggling with a sentence, try pulling the ideas apart, then rewriting. Sometimes the way to fix an idea salad sentence is to make it two sentences. Top of Page Throw Out the Puzzle From Dan Heim, Heimhenge Enterprises, New River, AZ The director of a charter school asked me to review introductory comments on the home page of their website – the first thing visitors read and important for making a good impression. One sentence bothered me: Students aged 11-18 can be seen on the campus grounds talking as friends, regardless of age or height. I didn't like the "aged 11-18."  Fine cigars are "aged." Elderly people are "aged" (two syllables). I could have substituted "age" or "ages," but neither seemed to fit. So I rewrote the sentence as: Students from grades 6 to 12 can be seen on the campus grounds talking as friends, regardless of age or height. This had the advantage of emphasizing the school's 6-12 grade structure. It also removed a redundancy, as “age” also appears near the end of the sentence. The lesson: Sometimes when a particular word or phrase hangs you up, the best thing to do is throw it out and try a whole new idea. Top of Page What Happened Tonight? From Jan Gottfredsen, Lockheed Martin Corp. Struggling with how to start a story? Tell someone what the main point is -- that's your lead. As a cub reporter, I returned to the newsroom on deadline from a very lively city council meeting. There were at least six items that night that could have been the story's lead. I was struggling trying to decide which was the most important one, staring at the computer screen, fingers frozen to the keyboard. The editor was waiting for the copy, becoming more impatient as each second ticked away. Less than five minutes before deadline, he pulled me into his office and shut the door. Staring at me, he said "What happened tonight?" I opened my mouth to tell him, got two words out, and he snapped: "That's your lead. Go write your story." It has worked every time since then. Whenever I "freeze" and cannot decide where to start, I say: "What happened tonight?" and I go on from there. It's like pulling the cord on the lawnmower. It gets the engine running, and the rest is just finishing the job. Top of Page