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I enjoy Ben Yagoda’s columns in the New York Times now and then. He’s one of the few people who can write an essay about commas and make me laugh. When I was offered a review copy of his newest book How to Not Write Bad I couldn’t say no. I own and have read plenty of books that promise to tell me how to write well. I even own that perennial classic by William Zinsser. But I have never read a book that offered to teach me how to not write bad.

There is a difference, isn’t there, between writing well and not writing bad? Learning how to write well suggests I might be able to rival Strunk and White just by following their rules. Not writing bad says I can feel confident I won’t embarrass myself in public. I don’t really care to write like Strunk and White but I do care about not looking the fool. Yagoda guesses that he has graded somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 pieces of student work in the last twenty years. In How to Not Write Bad he proposes to use his experience to provide us with the fifty most common mistakes he has seen and ways we can avoid them. Simple.

Even simpler is Yagoda’s short answer on how to not write bad: read. Good writers are nearly always good readers who read widely. One can absorb a lot about writing just by reading it. It is also a good idea to read your own work out loud; it won’t fix everything but it will save you from a clunker or two.

No one is going to buy a whole book just to be told to read more and following his short answer Yagoda is kind enough to include the long answer. Those fifty or so pesky and all too common mistakes people make take up the bulk of the book. Starting small with numbers, capitalization and italics, we move swiftly to punctuation then up the food chain to words and grammar. You are probably familiar with many of them, I know I was. Commas and comma splices, semicolons and colons, em dashes and parentheses, their mysteries all laid bare in a short and painless way. Of course there are dangling modifiers to puzzle over and verb tenses to to untangle and prepositions to end sentences with. Yagoda also provides frequent reminders of why we should love our print dictionaries and not trust spell-check.

The final portion of the book focuses on things that aren’t necessarily mistakes but are definitely unforgivably sloppy. Here we have discussions about cliches, qualifiers and intensifiers, long and Latinate versus short and Anglo-Saxon, and ambiguity. The section on ambiguity is a hoot. Examples include headlines from respected newspapers, “British Left Waffles on Falklands” and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge” and the classic Groucho line, “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas.”

Yagoda focuses on the nuts and bolts mainly at the word and sentence level. There is brief discussion on tone and paragraphs that is just enough to be suggestive but not enough to be big picture useful. Throughout the book he encourages us to be mindful writers: stop the multi-tasking, pay attention, figure out what you want to say and then make every word in the sentence serve a purpose. Good advice I too often ignore.

How to Not Write Bad is useful and even fun reading. Yagoda’s light and humorous approach goes much farther than dour finger shaking that makes you feel stupid and ashamed. The book is good for students, bloggers, and anyone who wants to work on not writing bad. This is one I definitely will be keeping at hand on my reference shelf.

Filed under: Books, Nonfiction, Reviews, Writing Tagged: Ben Yagoda

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Readers of this blog may not be able to guess that I am a lover of books not just about words, but about their placement between marks of punctuation.  From where I sit I see (on my shelf) Karen Elizabeth Gordon (Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness, Torn Wings and Faux Pas), Roy Blount Jr. (Alphabet Juice), Roy Peter Clark (The Glamour of Grammar), Patricia T. O'Conner (Woe is I), Kitty Burns Florey (Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog), Peter Bowler (The Superior Person's Book of Words), and all manner of thesaurus and dictionary.  I've actually read these books.  I have learned from them.

I also own three Ben Yagodas:  When You Catch an Adjective Kill it, Memoir: A History, and, as of two weeks ago, How to Not Write Bad.  A professor at the University of Delaware, an historian of The New Yorker, a man who can talk knowledgeably about many things (we have shared a place at Elizabeth Mosier's table, we have chatted over Facebook, we have talked about truth and my own long-in-the-making Handling the Truth), Ben is a conversationalist of the first order.  He has stories to tell, and he tells them wit-fully.

(There I go, making up words again.)

Ben's new book is an advice book aimed toward those who hope to "not write badly."  It was inspired by his students' work, he tells us—by their penchant for using misunderstood words, dangling clauses, spliced commas, homophones, and poorly placed possessives, among other things.  Ben has seen bad writing flare.  He has returned to tell us about it.  He is asking (mostly politely) if we could please do better.

How to Not Write Bad is intentionally full of the basics, in other words.  That little reminder to set the right apostrophe in the right place.  That hope that we will put "lie" and "lay" to proper use. That gentle corrective regarding I, myself, and me.  It is a book that asks us to be mindful, to look back over own shoulders at the language trail we leave, to be our own best copy editors, to read, to look things up.

My favorite parts of the book are those that trace the history of phrases or words.  Those parts that decode what was once wrong but is not necessarily wrong now, or could be right tomorrow.  It is the transitional nature of language that gets us most confounded, I would suggest.  The "certain grammatical constructions [that] are considered okay by some or most authorities but retain an offensive odor for many readers (and, crucially, for teachers and editors), and should be avoided."  Ben is well aware of the pitfalls and the trapdoors, and he leads us through his understanding of both in a way that could be helpful when talking with a client, say, about that word "alright," or the streamlining of adjectives, or any other number of things.

Packed with student examples, percolated with Ben's trademark style, easy to read and easy to remember, How Not to Write Bad will now join the other word books on my shelf.  I will hope to get more right here in the future—despite my penchant for longish sentences and odd little words, despite my tendency (I'm sorry; there are pressures; I will do better when I can) to blog too fast.   

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I chose to spend my two stolen hours of the week not with The Girl with Glass Feet (a glorious-seeming book that I hope to finish reading during my train ride to Manhattan tomorrow), but with recent issues of The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Newsweek.

Or The Three News, as I think of them here at my house.

I have (and I'm more surprised by this than anyone else could be) written five memoirs and one autobiography of a river that is more memoiristic than a casual reader might guess. I therefore began my readerly escapades with Daniel Mendelsohn's "But Enough about Me," which appears in the January 25, 2010, issue of The New Yorker and uses as its diving platform Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History. The second paragraph begins thusly:

"Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupcon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family."

I'm not pretending that the black sheepedness is news to me, but let me just say this: what a line-up of adjectives, adverbs, and accusations we have here, all in one place. In my own self-defense I might say that my memoirs are not of the juiced-up, slicked-down, you can't-top-this-one, commercially successful sort (I'm too boring a person to even attempt such a seige). Still, wow. That's some mirror to find oneself staring into. (Read the whole article to see how Mendelsohn, who has also published memoir, adjusts and alleviates this description by the end of his piece.)

I moved on, in the same issue, to "Kid Goth: Neil Gaiman's Fantasies," by Dana Goodyear. Neil Gaiman, I'm thinking. Love Neil Gaiman. Was even voted one of the top five author bloggers alongside Neil Gaiman. Gonna love this story. But, well, I'm not certain that my idea of Neil Gaiman has been well-served by meeting this particular version, in which Goodyear quotes Gaiman as saying, among other things, "I have at this point a critic-proof career" and Coraline is a "beloved text," and "When I try to explain that I attracted more attention than [Angelina Jolie at a convention], people say, 'Oh, ho, he's being funny.' I'm not." We also learn that, whenever Gaiman Twitters fans telling them to buy a certain book on a certain day, they readily comply. "It means I'm nobody's bitch," Goodyear quotes.

Update: Karen Mahoney, a dear reader, indicates that Gaiman has perhaps been misquoted re the "nobody's..." business. I am fervently hoping so.

Onto the Jonathan Mahler "James Patterson Inc." profile in today's The New York Times Magazine. The story of the ad-man with the stable of co-writers (five co-writers!) who produces up to nine new books each year (an increasing number of them in the YA category) and has several Little Brown employees dedicated just to his brand is familiar fodder. I did not know, however (did you?), that since 2006 "one out of every 17 hardcover books bought in the United States was written by James Patterson," nor that he has had (to date) 51 books on the Times bestseller list. "Each of Patterson's series has its own fan base, but there are also plenty of people who read everything he writes," Mahler tells us. "His books all share

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Aspiring authors, published authors, and non-authors alike, do yourselves a favor and take a moment to check out Ben Yagoda's essay in the New York Times on readers' access to writers in our technological age. 
I can only think of one occasion that I've done it on a purely personal level: I was trying to recall the title of a beautiful novel I'd read in college (Bapsi Sidwha's Cracking India) that had been titled one thing when originally published, another in the US, and a third when made into a film.  Upon googling, I stumbled across the author's website. Uncharacteristically, I took a moment to reach out to her and say how fantastic her book was and how much it had stuck with me. And I was delighted when, over a year later, she came across my email and realizing she had not thanked me, wrote back.

Since I haven't done it again, apparently the reward of hearing back wasn't enough to encourage me (though by that point I was an agent, and ethically it had become more complicated) to continue reaching out.  Obviously the examples in the essay are the odd, amusing, or frustrating ones, but do any of you routinely contact authors of books you've read?  And published authors, what emails do you get to rival Mary Karr's love letters from the incarcerated?

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Judith Shulevitz reviews Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History in this week's New York Times Book Review, and I read, with fascination, lines such as these:

Yagoda uses the words 'memoir' and 'autobiography' interchangeably. But they are not the same thing; practitioners know this.

If the flux of life conforms so readily to the constraints of convention, and conventions come and go, then how do you draw a line between truth and art? The last time I checked, truth wasn't boxed in by convention.

... maybe what makes a memoir edifying is not truthfulness but the memoirist's ability to justify a life appealingly. In the five memoirs I have written I don't ever recall working toward or away from a justifying impulse. I recall wanting to understand, wanting to reach out, wanting to write my life in a manner that opened doors for readers, set them thinking about their own journeys, their own choices. The memoirs that I love to read do the same thing. Is, to use our Penn class examples, Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family a justification? Is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? If so, what are they justifying?

Truth is the least of memoir, he suggests, though truth can't be dispensed with. (There's that little matter of having to speak in good faith.) The power to persuade is all. Is it all about persuasion, then? I'm wagering that the best of memoir aspires to something greater, something more.

I respond here to a review, of course. Ben Yagoda is a terrific writer; I need to read this book for myself.

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