Words Fail Me (9 page)

The computer crash was a
minor
disaster.

Miss Pym offered us a slice of
twelve-ounce
pound cake.

In October 1929, the market plunged in an
unparalleled
spiral.

Unless you're curiously indifferent, there's more about illogical writing in chapter 17.

Do you use macros when you work on a computer? They let us store multiple commands on one key, so we can do several things with a single stroke. Sometimes an adjective or adverb acts like a macro. It lets us compress several words of description into one nifty modifier. These sentences, for example, mean the same thing:

Courtney wore jeans
that were faded
and a shirt
that was dirty
and
full of wrinkles.

Courtney wore
faded
jeans and a
dirty, wrinkled
shirt.

The second sentence, with its tighter adjectives, makes the first seem loose and flabby. Adverbs can be just as efficient at firming up pudgy sentences. These sentences, which say the same thing, show how one word can do the work of four:

They dismissed her
in a thoughtless manner.

They dismissed her
thoughtlessly.

Of course, you may not always want to cut a description short. If Courtney normally dresses in immaculate Armani suits with nary a thread out of place, you might want to call attention to her dishevelment. Most of the
time, though, shorter is better—especially when you're short on room and long on description.

A little imagination can do a lot more for your descriptive writing than a pageful of adjectives and adverbs. Take a closer look at some of your favorite authors. You'll be surprised at how little their vividness depends on modifiers and how much it owes to imagination.

I'm not necessarily talking about the literary All-Stars. There's imaginative writing in every field, writing that jumps off the page. Whatever your favorite reading is about—birds or cooking or fashion or movies or gardening—that's where you should look for descriptions that aren't smothered in adjectives and adverbs.

Are you a bird-watcher? In one of his field guides, Roger Tory Peterson described the chimney swift as "a cigar with wings" and said the purple finch looked like "a sparrow dipped in raspberry juice."Do you read the fashion pages? Kennedy Fraser, writing about a Balenciaga dress, pictured a woman's legs coming out of the ruffled taffeta "like stamens from a black chrysanthemum."

Gertrude Jekyll, the English landscape architect, wrote that a blanket of columbines looked like "patches in an old, much-washed, cotton patchwork quilt." And the critic Pauline Kael described a noisy, abrasive action movie filmed in the Big Apple as"an aggravated case of New York."

In
The Smithsonian Guides to Natural America,
Suzanne Winckler had this to say of my home state: "Iowa
is voluptuous, its landscapes all gentle angles of thighs, elbows, scapulas, vertebrae, and big round buttocks." Wowee!

The food writer M.F.K. Fisher once sneered at party dips as "mixtures to be paddled in by drinkers armed with everything from raw green beans to reinforced potato chips." If that doesn't make you swear off crudités, nothing will.
Good Dog, Bad Dog,
a training book by Mordecai Siegal and Matthew Margolis, compared a seated basset hound to "a jacked-up car with a flat tire."

As I've said before, don't overlook the newspapers. A tribute by Frank DeCaro in the
New York Times
described the late TV talk-show host Virginia Graham's lacquered hairdo as "an abstract form resembling a Dairy Queen soft-serve crossed with the Nike Swoosh."

So the next time an adjective or adverb comes too readily to mind, do what your favorite writers do. Use your imagination instead. Rather than reach for the thesaurus to describe something, imagine it. Think of that little cigar with wings.

Like a superhighway, the sentence is a triumph of engineering: the stately capital letter, the procession of words in their proper order, every arch and tunnel, bridge and buttress perfectly fitted to its job.

If many writers believe bigger is better, who can blame them? Building a sentence can give you a thrill. It's easy to become infatuated with your own words, and once you get started you hate to stop. The noble pageant goes on and on, especially if you've discovered dashes and semicolons, and gluey words like
however
and
nevertheless. Your
mighty sentence swells, as does your head. "Awesome," you think.

Your poor readers, meanwhile, trudge on, peering wistfully toward the horizon in search of a period. They soon lose track of the subject, and the mighty sentence becomes a road to nowhere.

What went wrong? Length alone isn't the answer. If you've been told that short sentences are always better than long ones, forget it. It's better to mix them up, because writing that has too many short, choppy sentences is just as tedious as writing that has too many long ones. What matters most with any sentence, short or long, is how it's put together. A long sentence will hold up if it's structurally sound, and a short one will collapse if it'snot properly constructed.

This business about sentence construction isn't some abstract idea. It can determine whether your writing makes sense. Let's inspect some of the structural flaws that can undermine sentences.

When a sentence works, we can follow it smoothly from beginning to end. If you saw this one in your local paper, you'd have to read it twice:

The get-rich-quick scheme that Karl LaFong, the former mayor, and Egbert Souse and Cuthbert J. Twillie, his confederates, cooked up—a theme park built on alligator-infested swampland near a derelict nuclear power plant on the northern outskirts of the city—is believed to have bankrupted some of Lakeville's leading citizens.

The problem with the sentence isn't its length but its bumpy construction. Ideas don't follow one another
smoothly. One interrupts another (bump!), and is interrupted in turn (bump!), until we lose the point of the sentence.

Look again at some of the speed bumps. The subject in the sentence is that
get-rich-quick scheme.
But before we learn what mayhem the scheme caused (the point of the sentence), we hit two teeth-rattling bumps, interrupting to tell us (1) who did the fleecing and (2) what the scam was about. Even those interruptions get interrupted. No wonder we lose our way.

Here's a version that gives us one idea at a time:
Former Mayor Karl LaFong and his confederates Egbert Souse and Cuthbert J. Twillie are believed to have bankrupted some of Lakeville's leading citizens with a get-rich-quick scheme—a theme park built on alligator-infested swampland near a derelict nuclear power plant on the northern outskirts of the city.

It's still a whopping big sentence, bigger than I'd like, but it works. It gives the reader one idea at a time, each completed before another is introduced. No speed bumps, thank you.

In the hands of our best writers, long sentences can knock your socks off. In this passage from
Rabbit,
Run, John Updike alternates long and short sentences to build suspense as Rabbit Angstrom, cigarette in mouth, shoots a basket before a group of schoolboys.

"As they stare hushed he sights squinting through blue clouds of weed smoke, a suddenly dark silhouette like a smokestack against the afternoon spring sky, setting his
feet with care, wiggling the ball with nervousness in front of his chest, one widespread white hand on top of the ball and the other underneath, jiggling it patiently to get some adjustment in air itself. The cuticle moons on his fingernails are big. Then the ball seems to ride up the right lapel of his coat and comes off his shoulder as his knees dip down, and it appears the ball will miss because though he shot from an angle the ball is not going toward the backboard. It was not aimed there. It drops into the circle of the rim, whipping the net with a ladylike whisper."

We can follow a long sentence when it's presented one idea at a time. But often, long sentences are too much to swallow. This one would choke a horse:

The play of moonlight and shadow in the darkened, unfamiliar kitchen, which reminded Fergie of her boarding school days and her daring midnight raids on the pantry, hair-raising adventures that could have gotten her expelled, made it difficult for her to copy her mother-in-law's secret recipe for Windsor compote.

Unless a long sentence demands to be consumed in one gulp, break it in two:

The play of moonlight and shadow in the darkened, unfamiliar kitchen made it difficult for Fergie to copy her mother-in-law's recipe for Windsor compote. She was reminded of her boarding school days and those daring midnight raids on the pantry, hair-raising adventures that could have gotten her expelled.

Don't rule out long sentences—just remember that they're hard to write well. If you've written a long sentence and you're not sure that it works, it probably doesn't.
Break it up. Not many writer scan handle long sentences as gracefully as Updike.

There's an old saying that it's not the pearls that make a necklace—it's the string. The parts of a sentence won't make a necklace, either, without something to hold them together.

This sentence, for example, has no string:
Warren says the stock is undervalued, he doesn't know whether it's hit bottom yet.

It sounds as if there's something missing, doesn't it? That's because the example isn't really a sentence. It's two sentences trying to be one. This sin of omission is sometimes called a run-on sentence because, well, it runs on. Its parts are unconnected, like pearls without a string. The comma alone can't hold them together.

There are three ways to fix a sentence whose parts aren't joined correctly:

• Add a connecting word (and,
but, or, although, however,
etc.):
Warren says the stock is undervalued,
but
he doesn't know whether it's hit bottom yet.

• Use a semicolon instead of a comma:
Warren says the stock is undervalued; he doesn't know whether it's hit bottom yet.

• Break the sentence in two:
Warren says the stock is undervalued. He doesn't know whether it's hit bottom yet.

All three are correct. But since the two-sentence version is choppy and the semicolon seems too formal, my choice in this case is to add a connecting word.

Be careful about some connecting words, however. In fact, let's use
however
as an example. It's often misused because writers don't make clear which part of the sentence it goes with:
Warren says the stock is undervalued,
however,
he doesn't know whether it's hit bottom yet.

Where does
however
belong, with the first part of the sentence or the second?Here's how to fix a
however
problem:

• Make two sentences, attaching
however
to the appropriate one. You could mean this:
Warren says the stock is undervalued,
however.
He doesn't know whether it's hit bottom yet.
Or perhaps this:
Warren says the stock is undervalued.
However,
he doesn't know whether it's hit bottom yet.

• Use a semicolon and attach
however
to the appropriate part of the sentence. You might mean this:
Warren says the stock is undervalued,
however
;he doesn't know whether it's hit bottom yet.
Or this:
Warren says the stock is undervalued;
however
, he doesn't know whether it's hit bottom yet.

Before sharing your pearls of wisdom, make sure there are strings attached.

Gosh, I admire hosts who seat dinner guests perfectly every time, who have a knack for arranging a group of strangers so the conversation never flags. Seated differently, these same guests might endure an evening of awkward, throat-clearing silences.

I also admire people who know instinctively how to arrange sentences. Every sentence is in the right place and leads comfortably to the next. Ideas fall naturally into line. For some writers, putting sentences together naturally is a gift. The rest of us have to learn how to make our sentences compatible. Happily, it's not hard to help them mingle.

When you feel your writing is choppy and disjointed—or when someone else tells you it is—suspect that a sentence is out of line. If a reader has to rearrange sentences to follow your thinking, then the sentences are in the wrong order.

You might find an example like this in the business pages of your newspaper, especially if the copy editors are on vacation:

Nervous investors struggled all day to understand the significance of the sell-off. Just before the market closed, a spokesman for Netscape said the company had no comment. The Dow's steep plunge followed early-morning rumors that Netscape would buy Microsoft.

The sentences seem disjointed because the thoughts are out of order. Readers can't appreciate the significance of the first two sentences (investor nervousness and Netscape's no comment) until they find out what everyone was so upset about (the Dow's steep plunge and the takeover rumors). Notice how everything falls into place when we put the last sentence at the head of the lineup:

The Dow's steep plunge followed early-morning rumors that Netscape would buy Microsoft. Nervous investors struggled all day to understand the significance of the sell-off. Just before the market closed, a spokesman for Netscape said the company had no comment.