# One man's look at writing

This article by Dan Polansky looks at the art of writing. It could also be called a look at rhetoric and composition, following the model of the name of a book in Wikibooks. Some ideas are from a slender book by Gary Provost.
One could think that writing on the art of writing should better come from an accomplished and competent writer. Maybe so. Be it as it may, the objectives of instructions on the art of writing include turning bad writers into half-decent ones or better. It may be true that excellent writers do not need any principles and rules of thumb. But may also be that excellent writers figure out rules of thumb themselves. And that I find plausible enough.
Some ideas from Gary Provost, from memory so perhaps some elements are mine:
* Get yourself some reference works, including a dictionary, an encyclopedia and Roget's thesaurus (word finder).
* Writing is an auditory art. Sentences should also sound good. You can test your sentences by reading them out loud.
* A small physical exercise can make you more ready to write. (Perhaps more blood gets into the brain?)
* Revising is key. Hardly anyone can do an excellent writing job without heavy revising. It was perhaps Hemingway who was known to rewrite his drafts an incredible number of times.
* Vary sentence length. Too many too long sentences tire the reader. Too many too short sentences bore the reader.
There are many more of them. The book by Gary Provost seems to be a popular and worthwhile read.
Some ideas from memory, some mine, some from or inspired by various sources:
* Written sentences are composed of discrete items that are words, phrases, collocations, idioms and such. Unless one is a genius, one can greatly benefit from repeatedly reading documentation of these building blocks, including dictiony definitions.
* Apart from revising, one can use the techniques of engineering review, which includes accumulation of stated issues/defects with the text. This method is more bureaucratic: one not only corrects issues one finds but one also formulates descriptions of these issues.
* Apart from revising, one can also start anew, as if restart the writing. During the writing, the short-term memory structures of the mind change, in support of the written text. In an incrementally revised text, there is something like burden of history. By starting anew (without destroying the old version), one can get free from that burden of history.
* Outlining is a traditional technique used by professionals in writing. I find it valuable, although I often write without outlining. The present writeup is written without outlining, and perhaps it shows.
* Checklisting is similar to outlining but is different in principle. The idea is to list items to be covered in any old order and then make sure they are covered, possibly rejecting some of them. Something like this is mentioned in Pirsig's ZMM, when Pirsig helps Chris write a letter to mother.
* Similar to the above items is Pirsig's idea from his philosophical novel Lila to use catalogue cards as some kind of information system into which to write ideas in a random-access manner. It seems like a neat idea.
* Terminology clarification is one dedicated activity. It includes figuring out what terms to use to refer to concepts, out of multiple candidates.
* One of the few stylistic advices that I got from Czechs is to rotate synonyms, avoiding using the same word or phrase again and again. While the advice is perhaps not complely bad for all circumstances, I find it rather pitiable. For engineering writing, I find it completely inappropriate: to the contrary, the same concept should always be referred to using the same name. As a reader of a technical document, I don't care about anyone's professed richness of vocabulary.
* I must have read a Czech writing guide state something to the effect that if writing comes bad or difficukt to you, you should better give up since you probably do not have enough talent. I find it so-called advice pitiable or outright despicable. The only way to procude a half-decent writer from a bad writer is practice. I would echo Pirsig here, paraphrasing: so you want to know how to become a great writer? Just make yourself perfect by practice and then write naturally. Sure enough, where there is no talent, practice does not help. But then again, I see nothing wrong per se in one trying to become a half-decent writer by practice.
* Cut needless words. Make every word tell. This must be from Strunk and White.
* Sometimes I find myself too wordy. When I make a pause and take the time and effort, I can often find a much shorter way without any information loss. This requires discipline and sometimes I do not have it, being in a hurry.
* The quality/excellence requirements do differ between textual artifact types, novels and short stories on one hand and technical documentation on the other. In technical documentation, it is much less important that it reads well or is interesting; it has to be accurate, have good reader usability, etc. Yet different are probably requirements on clerical writing, e.g. filling request forms.
* Good writing was not turned into a fully algorithmic process for humans, unlike e.g. correct decimal multiplication.
* Taste and style does play a role. Thus, there is certain relativity in the word good as applied to good fiction writing. As a result, a reviewer may raise issues that are not in reference to objective badness but rather merely issues of deviation from the reviewer's preferred style. That said, there are some objectively given classes of defects in writing, and not only petty trivialities as spelling and grammar.
* From information value perspective, bad writing is better than no writing. And thus, sometimes the reader would do well to thank the author for trying to express valuable ideas rather than avoiding the task for the fear of being a bad writer.
Books that I have read or have in my library that pertain to writing:
* 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing by Gary Provost, 1972
* Good Style: Writing for science and technology by John Kirkman, 1992, 2005
* Writing in Style: a guide to good English by Richard Palmer, 1993, 2002
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, 1974
* Lila by Robert Pirsig, 1991
* The Elements of Style by Strunk and White