Writing well is a life-long job, I’ve learned. People and mores change, but
if I ever let-up on the idea that I must always be a student of good writing,
I’m doomed.
So how does that work?
Reading good writers is one way. And learning from editors.
When I was a teenager, my father perceived that I was a potential writer.
So he encouraged me, and along the way he gave me a couple of books by Theodore
Bernstein, then an assistant managing editor of The New York Times.
The books were collections of Bernstein’s critiques of writing by Times staff
writers. They were a huge helps and even fun to read. I’ve missed them over the
years, but recently I’ve discovered that The Times still
does in-house critiques of its writers’ work. In a column called After Deadline
-- Newsroom Notes on Usage and Style, Philip B. Corbett does the job. He
praises good examples, and offers positive criticism when it’s required. It’s
published internally, but you can find it on the Internet right here.
For my writer friends and friends of writing – and I know you follow this
blog – these are for you:
Uber Adds a Low-Tech Twist to Its Modern Business Model in India
Some of the green-and-yellow “autos” come equipped with speakers in the back that blare Bollywood hits. Many drivers will allow more than the legal maximum of three riders, leaving some passengers clinging to the sides of the vehicles. Few use their meters without a fight.
This feature by Nida Najar, about Uber’s move into India’s auto rickshaws, was full of fine descriptive touches. This paragraph is particularly effective because of the three-part structure, building to the short, sharp final line.
* * *
Hunting a Serial Killer as a Political Enemy Nips at Their Heels
“Child 44,” directed by Daniel Espinosa from a screenplay by Richard Price, is an English-language movie set in Russia, which means that it is above all a festival of accents. Gary Oldman, Paddy Considine and Vincent Cassel measure their vowels and consonants carefully, but the most floridly enjoyable voices belong to Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace, last seen together speaking Brooklynese in “The Drop.” In that film, Mr. Hardy dropped his r’s like a champ. Here he lands heavily on the aitches and contracts the words “it is” into the letter Z. “Zimpossible,” he says. “Zdifficult.”
As for “Child 44″: Znot too terrible, but znothing great, either.
A typical funny touch by A. O. Scott, one of several that make the review worth reading even if the movie isn’t much to cheer about.
An Unprecedented Tsunami of Hyperbole
We all want our stories to be engaging, even exciting. Deep reporting, clear writing and sharp detail are the best tools. But sometimes we can’t resist the impulse to pump up the prose with hyperbolic language.
It generally doesn’t work. Often, the overhyped language seems clichéd or trite rather than gripping. If every dispute is bitter, every development unprecedented, every performer a superstar, then there’s nothing so special about yours.
By all means let’s be vivid and descriptive. But restraint is a virtue, too. Here are a few recent overheated examples:
That is the largest such gap, or “spread,” since 1989, according to Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman. And it has unleashed a tsunami of capital flows from Europe to the United States.
Unless you’re describing an actual natural disaster, metaphors like “tsunami” or “earthquake” are almost always over the top. (And speaking of earthquakes, let’s not say “epicenter” when all we mean is “center.”)
But in a volatile example of how thorny and tangled the debate can become as communities nationwide implement new rules to protect the brains of young athletes, Florida’s mandate has created a combative firestorm that has reverberated across the country.
What’s more powerful than a tsunami? A “firestorm,” of course. Here, we embellished further — and mixed the metaphor — with “volatile,” “thorny,” “tangled,” “combative” and “reverberated.” The subject, by the way, was girls’ lacrosse.
The history of Atlantic Records, now part of the Warner Music Group, is populated by a small country’s worth of megastars from across the spectrum of jazz, pop and rock — names including Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack, Charles Mingus, Wilson Pickett, Yes, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Abba and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
First, there were singers, musicians and other performers. The truly outstanding ones were singled out as “stars.” At some point, all performers became stars, and the most successful were promoted to “superstars.” Now, apparently, in a world full of superstars, we have to switch from Latin to Greek and single out a handful of superstars as “megastars.” Putting aside the question of whether Aretha and Abba really occupy the same niche, this passage would not suffer a bit if we just called them “stars.”
In fact, Mr. Obama’s ties with teachers’ unions have grown increasingly toxic.
“Toxic,” meaning poisonous, seems like an overstatement; “strained” may be closer to the mark. And once again we’re mixing metaphors; as a colleague said, a “toxic tie” sounds like a weapon in a James Bond movie.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu despite his victory in this week’s elections, signaling that it is in no rush to repair a historic rift between the United States and Israel.
Perhaps it will prove historic — that is, important in history. Or perhaps it’s a blip that will pass with a new administration or other unforeseeable developments. The Times’s stylebook urges care in using “historic”:
Use it with caution for a current event, because history’s verdict is rarely predictable by journalists, and the word suggests hyperbole.
