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Authors: Gary Provost
100 Ways to Improve Your Writing (Mentor Series) (10 page)
BOOK: 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing (Mentor Series)
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11. Provide Facts
12. Put Emphatic Words at the End
1. Make Yourself Likable
2. Write About People
3. Show Your Opinion
4. Obey Your Own Rules
5. Use Anecdotes
In the following paragraph, the writer has drawn the right conclusions. His statements are factual. But because he is telling the reader his conclusions instead of providing the facts from which the reader can draw his own conclusions, the writing will not have impact.
A lot of banks hand out gifts when you open an account. Since you know that they want your account, it’s reasonable to assume that that’s the only catch and that the gift is not costing you any money. But sometimes you lose money by taking the gift. In other words, you’re getting ripped off.
The above information lacks the facts needed to prove the author’s point. Look below at an article Barbara Gilder Quint wrote on the same subject in
Glamour
Magazine’s February 1981 issue to see how much more persuasive an author can be with facts.
Glamour
Magazine’s February 1981 issue to see how much more persuasive an author can be with facts.
In New York City one major bank recently advertised a ‘free’ 19 inch TV set to people who would deposit $3,000 into a 3½ year account that would pay 7% interest.But at the same time, other banks were paying 12% on
2½
year $3,000 accounts
—a
difference of about $150 each year in interest on the $3,000, which raises the question of how ‘free’ that TV set is.
Emphatic words are those words you want the reader to pay special attention to. They contain the information you are most anxious to communicate. You can acquire that extra attention for those words by placing them at the end of the sentence.
If you want to emphasize the fact that redwood trees are tall, you might write, “Some redwoods are more than 350 feet tall.” But if you want to emphasize the fact that one of the attractions in California is the redwood trees, you would write, “Also found in California are the 350-foot redwood trees.”
If you want to emphasize the amount of money that somebody owes you, you write, “By June first please send me a check for $107.12.” If you want to emphasize the due date, you write, “Please send me a check for $107.12 by June first.” And if you want to emphasize who the check is to go to, write, “On June first the check for $107.12 should be sent to me.”
This is a lesson best learned by ear. Listen to how the impact of a sentence moves to whatever information happens to be at the end.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.Ask what you can do for America, not what America can do for you.Ask not what America can do for you, ask what you can do for America.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Eleven Ways to Make People Like What You Write
1. Make Yourself Likeable
2. Write About People
3. Show Your Opinion
4. Obey Your Own Rules
5. Use Anecdotes
6. Use Examples
7. Name Your Sources
8. Provide Useful Information
9. Use Quotations
10. Use Quotes
11. Create a Strong Title
In order to write successfully, you don’t have to become a great writer. But you do have to make yourself likable. If you are asking people to buy your product, take your advice, mail a check, or worry about the problem you present, you first want them to care about you. When you write well, you share a private moment with the readers. Present yourself to readers as someone they would welcome into their homes. Write clearly and conversationally, and strive always to present in your writing some honest picture of who you are.
Readers will like you if you edit from your work French phrases, obscure literary allusions, and archaic words that are known to only six persons in the world.
Readers will like you if you seem to understand who they are and what their world is like. If you write an article called “Getting Back on the Budget” for
Woman’s Day,
and you begin by advising the readers to go out and borrow $100,000, you will reveal your ignorance of the readers’ financial status. The readers won’t like you. (And of course the editors at
Woman’s Day
won’t like you and won’t publish your article.)
Woman’s Day,
and you begin by advising the readers to go out and borrow $100,000, you will reveal your ignorance of the readers’ financial status. The readers won’t like you. (And of course the editors at
Woman’s Day
won’t like you and won’t publish your article.)
Readers will like you if you use humor in almost everything you write. Of course, there are times when humor is inappropriate (on a death certificate, for example), but don’t hesitate to bring humor into your business correspondence and articles.
Readers will like you if you show that you are human. In a how-to piece, for example, you might write, “This third step is a little hard to master. I ruined six good slides before I got it right. So be smarter than I was; practice on blanks.”
People are why TVs get turned on. People are why books get opened. People are why magazines are purchased. And people are why the well-told tale has been listened to for centuries.
People is the one subject that everybody cares about.
What do other people think? How do they act? What makes them angry, happy, enthusiastic? How will they vote in the next election? How can I get them to fall in love with me, buy my product, support my plan? These are the questions readers ask.
So try to put humanity into everything you write. There are times when you cannot comfortably dress your prose in flesh and blood, but those times are rare. Even a how-to article is about a person named “you.”
Don’t write about the new bookkeeping system. Write about how the new bookkeeping system will affect people.
If you are writing about the welfare crisis, begin with an anecdote about one family that lives in a car because they cannot pay rent out of their small welfare check.
If you are writing a brochure to attract new members to your church, don’t write about the steeple and the organ. Write about the people who come to church suppers, the people who volunteer for committees, the people your readers will meet if they show up for church on Sunday.
Few things are duller than a man or woman without an opinion. Your opinion is not always appropriate, but often it is the thing that gives writing its life and color. In fact, it is frequently dishonest to hide your opinion because it will find its way into your writing anyhow by influencing your choice of what material to include and what to ignore.
I often color my stories with my opinion. I think it makes for more interesting writing. But I try to be fair, also. If I put my opinion into the story, I also include opinions of people who don’t agree with me.
Below is the lead for an article I wrote about hitchhiking (Worcester Telegram). There’s nothing secret about my view of the subject: it’s all over the piece. But in that article I also included the views of policemen, parents, kids, and drivers.
By any rational standard, the idea of hitchhiking—good Samaritanism in its purest form, people helping people, etc.
—
should be a good thing.And yet if you stop any ten people on the street and ask them about hitchhiking, you will hear the darkest sort of fumblings. You will hear that hitchhiking is a bad thing.Hitchhikers are muggers, you will hear, they are thieves and rapists. And if they are not, then they are fair and fragile prey for an army of savage cretins that haunts our highways. Either way, so the story goes, when hitchhiking takes place, someone is scheduled to end up in a shallow roadside grave bludgeoned into oblivion by some highway lunatic.With over 30,000 hitchhiking miles behind me, and perhaps another 10,000 miles of driving hitchhikers, I was anything but objective about this. It rankled me to the core that society had become so concerned about hitchhiking, and I was convinced that hitchhiking, like apartment living and late night walks, had been sensationalized all out of whack by TV and movies. Every time a hitchhiker shows up on TV, you can bet somebody is finished.
By including my opinion in the article, I gave the reader a basis for discussion, either with other people or in his own mind. Even if the reader says, “I totally disagree,” I have made him or her think about my subject. I have accomplished my goal. I don’t care if the reader agrees with my opinion. The important thing is that he or she respond to it. If you can stir your reader up, then your writing has achieved some success.
When you begin to write, you also begin in subtle ways to set down a list of rules, just as you set down the rules at the start of a game. Through your title or first paragraph you communicate to the reader certain guidelines about the subject, the scope, or the tone of the story.
If your title is “Black Mayors in America,” you have set a rule that says, “Everything in this story is related to black mayors in America,” and you will be violating that rule if you write too heavily about mayors who were not black, black people who were not mayors, or black mayors who were not in America.
If your story begins “Angelica put a spell on Mark three times, and suddenly he found himself craving her body,” you have set a rule that says, “Impossible things can happen here.” But if you are writing a contemporary love story, and you bring in a witch in chapter nine, you are breaking the rule that says, “This is a true-to-life story,” and you will lose your reader.
If you begin your story, “Many people, it seems, weave from their own experience, hopes, fears, and deepest desires a fabric of conviction in UFOs that is so strong it cannot be ripped apart,” you have made a rule that says “the tone of this story is serious and respectful of the subject.” If you begin, “It seems as if every nut case from Tallahassee to Timbuktu has a scorched circle in his back-yard from a flying saucer landing—aliens must be particularly drawn to the mentally ill,” you have made a rule that says, “This is going to be a lighthearted look at the subject.” You must stick with the tone you have established. Readers won’t object to any particular tone or rule. They only ask that they be informed and that you don’t break the rules you set.
An anecdote is a little story or incident that makes a point about your subject. The word comes from the Greek
anekdota
which means
things unpublished,
and ideally your anecdote should be an unpublished incident you discovered in your research. Anecdotes are great reader pleasers. They are written like fiction, often contain dialogue, and reduce a large issue to a comprehensible size by making it personal. Anecdotes crystallize a general idea in a specific way.
anekdota
which means
things unpublished,
and ideally your anecdote should be an unpublished incident you discovered in your research. Anecdotes are great reader pleasers. They are written like fiction, often contain dialogue, and reduce a large issue to a comprehensible size by making it personal. Anecdotes crystallize a general idea in a specific way.
Writing a short, colorful anecdote is one of the most compelling ways to begin an article, query letter, or business proposal, and a couple of well-placed anecdotes in your longer stories will break the lock of formality and win your reader’s affection as well as his or her attention.
Here is an anecdote which I used to begin a magazine article about psychics (Sunday Morning).
When Mal Brown of Leominster was a kid, he fell out of an apple tree, got one leg knotted in a branch, tipped upside down, and was yanked to a stop.It was a mishap that Brown believes could have killed or seriously injured him, but it didn’t. And he believes it didn’t because the Tibetan monk was with him.“That was the first time I saw the Tibetan monk,” says Brown, now the 35-year-old father of three daughters.Brown says the Tibetan monk, a vision that never speaks, has been with him all his life, helping him out in jams, appearing at moments of jeopardy, offering reassurance that danger will pass.
BOOK: 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing (Mentor Series)
9.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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