User:Tony1/How to improve your writing

Computers have transformed the writing process by facilitating continual editing; this frees writers from the need to produce a succession of entire versions on a typewriter or by hand.

The featured article criteria are demanding requirements to ensure that featured articles (FAs) are of the highest quality. They have a powerful impact on Wikipedia, because FAs set the standards for all articles. Criterion 2a states that FAs are “well written”, i.e., that the prose is “compelling, even brilliant”. For many contributors, this is the most problematic aspect of preparing an FA candidate (FAC). Unlike such tasks as neutralising POV, adding inline references, and justifying the copyright status of images, identifying and fixing suboptimal prose requires skill and experience that are typically acquired only after years of writing and editing. Wikipedia flourishes through the input of your expertise, yet the FAC process shows that the prose of many articles does no justice to that expertise. You can pursue three strategies to satisfy 2a.

• Improve your article in direct response to the comments of FAC reviewers.

This sometimes works, but it’s typically hard to achieve significant improvements in the short time allowed for the review process. Reviewers are under no obligation to specify every problem in the prose of a FAC, or to edit a FAC themselves.

• Network with other Wikipedians who are interested in the topic and who are skilled at editing prose, and request input from them (preferably before nomination).

Wikipedia comprises numerous communities of like-minded users. List yourself in one or more categories that are relevant to your own fields, and research the talk pages and contribution lists of other users in those categories. Aim to build a group of friends through mutual discussion and assistance. Establishing subject-based projects (there are many already) can facilitate the networking of contributors who may assist you by copy-editing your article during peer review and before FAC nomination. Alternatively, research the FAC archives and the history pages of good articles in the field; identify reviewers and contributors who’ve successfully worked on those articles. Posting a nice message requesting help on one or more users’ talk pages often works wonders. In your message, show that you’re familiar with their work.

• Improve your own writing/editing skills.

This is the concern of the current article, which offers general advice on how to improve your writing/editing skills, lists the common problems that reviewers identify in the prose of FACs, and discusses strategies for avoiding those problems. The advice in each area is followed by exercises, with links to suggested solutions. The exercises are drawn from past FACs. We hope that working through the exercises sets you on a path towards improving your editing skills.

This article is aimed at both native and non-native speakers of English. Although each group faces different challenges in writing and editing English, most issues that we cover are applicable to many languages. The advice here complements the information in Great writing, The perfect article, User:Taxman/Featured article advice, User:AndyZ/Suggestions and User:Jengod/Some common objections to featured status and how to avoid them.

While most aspects of good writing in English are widely accepted, authorities may vary in their attitudes to particular technical and stylistic matters. Please take this into account here: most wordings are clearly right or wrong, but some of our advice and suggested solutions may be the subject of debate. We welcome feedback on our talk page on how to improve this article.

Typewriters, in general use during the 20th century, were unsuitable for continual editing and provided little control over the formatting of the product.

Making best use of your existing skills

Attaining and applying “strategic distance”

It may seem counterintuitive, but it is nevertheless true that the closeness to a text that comes with working on it intensively can inhibit your critical appraisal of it. This is why other people may immediately see problems and errors in your text that eluded you, even though you may be a superior writer. Editing a text as a stranger has distinct advantages, chiefly the ability to approach it with fresh eyes, untarnished by the complications that you've gone through to create it in the first place.

You can attain “strategic distance” from your own text by using techniques that allow you to see it in a different way. The following techniques are only suggestions: you need to develop methods that work best for you, which may not include this advice.

• Print out your text and mark up the hard copy (i.e., highlight the places that need improvement, by circling, underlining, and handwriting improved wording in the margins). Reading hard copy is a significantly different experience from reading off a monitor: the resolution is better, and you can see more text at one time (synoptically), grasp the product in your hands, and readily work on it in a different environment. Some writers create a draft on their computer, then get into a four-part cycle of printing it out, marking it up, keying in the changes, and editing the new version on-screen; then they go through the same process again and again. Doing this iteratively may not suit you, but consider going through the process at least once for each article.

• Use Wikipedia’s “Show preview” function to see your text as a finished product on the monitor before you commit to your new version. The difference between this and what you see in the edit box positions you further from the process of writing or editing the text, and is a valuable stimulus for identifying further improvements. It’s the reason that Wikipedia has provided you with the “Show preview” button.

• Leave your text for a few days or more, and return to it fresh; the longer the break, the more strategic distance you’ll achieve.

• Edit the sentences in reverse order. A variation on this is to forward-edit each paragraph in reverse order, from the bottom paragraph back to the lead.

• Read each sentence aloud: this can help you to identify where commas should be inserted or removed, or to check that the clauses run smoothly and grammatically.

• As you read every word or phrase, ask yourself whether it can be removed without damaging the meaning. This might seem like hard work at first, but through practice, good editors achieve a relatively easy automaticity in this respect.

All Wikipedians have skills that would have placed them in the literary elite in medieval times.

Longer-term self-training

Like all forms of expertise, proficiency in writing and editing comes from years of effort. Most people significantly improve their writing skills up until early adulthood. At that point, the “near enough is good enough” frame unconsciously justifies relaxing the effort that has been put into reaching a level of literacy that will suffice for most everyday activities. Thus, a plateau is reached that is typically surpassed only when the need to write compelling prose is at issue. This is a pity, because writing effective, even powerful prose is within the grasp of most educated people, and can bestow considerable advantages in life, even if their work does not require writing. There is strong evidence that sustained effort is more important to the acquisition of expertise than underlying talent. Most authorities agree that expertise arises from fine-tuning structures in the long-term memory that you can draw on in performing a demanding task. For us, it’s a matter of programming the commonly occurring faults in prose so that we can have at our fingertips the typical patterns of fine and poor prose. For example, after becoming aware of the good and bad ways of connecting ideas in a sentence, with practice, you’ll come to see poorly constructed sentences in Wikipedia’s articles almost automatically; and by learning to consciously identify and weed out common redundancies, you’ll start to become adept at turning flab into crispness.

Being a Wikipedian involves close engagement with prose, whether by writing it, improving it through editing, or critiqueing it. The “10-year rule”, first proposed in the 1970s, suggests that acquiring expertise in these tasks, like others, is not a quick process; but don’t be discouraged—your efforts will reap palpable rewards in a short time, too.

Wikipedia itself is a rich and little-used resource for self-training, because it provides a huge reservoir of text at all stages of its transformation from raw into stylish, easy-to-read text. A good way of focusing your efforts on improving your prose is to:

• display an earlier version of a FAC that has received complaints on the basis of Criterion 2a;

• read through the early version critically, trying to identify the faults; and

• use the “compare” function (on the “history” page of the article) to compare that version with the final one in the FAC room.

Many articles are suitable for this purpose; the FA log—for the current month and (by hitting a link on the right-side of that page) for previous months—is likely to be a good source of material for your study.

The art of writing has been glorified through the ages. This scene was painted by a Middle-Eastern artist in 1287.

The rest of the article deals with specific problems.

Eliminating redundancy

It’s typical for 10% of the words of a FAC to be redundant; that is, removing these words will not damage the meaning, and in most cases will strengthen it. Crisp, elegant writing demands that redundancy be eliminated. In the ironic words of one muse: “Why use one word when four will do?”

It takes concentrated practice to identify redundancy, but after a while you’ll learn to test every word subconsciously against its context. The questions you need to ask constantly are: “Will the text lose meaning if I remove this word (or phrase)?” and “Is there already a word in this sentence that provides the meaning?” As you strengthen your ability to tighten up prose, you’ll find many types of redundancy. Here are four common types.

• Additive terms—“also”, “in addition”, “moreover”, “furthermore”. In a way, every sentence is additional to what you’ve just written, but most of us, including otherwise good writers, have got into the habit of sprinkling them through our writing, because they give us a vague feeling of adding to the cohesion of the text—the strength with which it all hangs together. However, only occasionally are these additive words required for textual cohesion; in most cases, the flow is stronger without them.

• Temporal terms—“over the years”, “currently”, “now”, “from time to time”. Although these items are more likely to be required than the additives, in many cases they add nothing to the sense, or are too vague to be useful. “They planned their future response.” (Try the converse: “They planned their past response.”) Often, the tense of the verb is sufficient to convey the temporal sense; e.g., “Mumbai is currently India's foremost financial centre”. Here, the present tense of “is” says it all.

• Vague terms of size, number and proportion—“some”, “a variety/number/majority of”, “several”, “a few”, “many”, “any”, “all”. These items are often too vague to bother inserting, or their meaning is already conveyed in the rest of the text; e.g., “All seawater is salty”, “We conducted a number of laboratory experiments to prove the hypothesis”, and “Here are some examples of fine prose”.

• Words for which the meaning is already assumed by another word in the clause. For example, “Born the youngest child of a Mexican immigrant couple, her talent was unmistakeable from an early age.” Here, “Born” is assumed in the word “child”; therefore, the sentence works better without the first word.

• Words for which the meaning is easily recoverable from the context or from general knowlege. For example, "Tobacco smoking is the act of burning the dried leaves of the tobacco plant and inhaling the resulting smoke. We already know that smoke results from burning dried tobacco leaves.

You may wish to undertake some or all of the exercises that we have prepared to sharpen your ability to identify redundancy. These exercises use sentences taken from FACs.

Achieving flow

When you explain something in writing rather than orally, many aspects of language are removed, such as your intonation, pitch, speed, rhythm and bodily gestures. In writing, you need to make up for the absence of those speech signals, so that your readers will be just as engaged with your message as they are when they listen to you: optimising the flow of your writing is an important way of doing this. Flow comprises a number of aspects, from the smallest punctuation mark to the cohesion of the text on a large scale. Flow can make your writing smooth, clear and easy to read, or bumpy and disjointed.

While some aspects of the flow of a particular text will be the subject of widespread agreement by language experts, flow can often be achieved in more than one way; thus, there’s a strong element of personal style in the way a text is made to flow. We offer advice here on flow, but inevitably, it will be less definitive than our advice for other characteristics of good writing. There are three major aspects of flow; they involve the structure of your language—the mortar between the bricks large and small. Ironically, flow is achieved by manipulating the breaks in the continuity of the text.

Eight centuries ago, writing was a rare and elaborate skill, such that it was displayed with great artistry. This Apocalyse manuscript shows St John writing to the seven churches of Asia.

Paragraphing

Apart from writing your Wikipedia article in sections, paragraphing is the largest scale on which you’ll need to structure your text. A paragraph break allows your readers to tie up the idea that they’ve just read about—to “download” it more deeply into their memory—and to start afresh on a new idea or a new aspect of the same idea. Aim for paragraphs of roughly equal size, without being overly strict in this respect.

Overly long paragraphs make it harder for your readers to stay interested; a mass of grey text will force them to work hard to keep an ever-increasing amount of information active in their working memory as they wade through. In this situation, try to identify a sentence in the middle of the paragraph that appears to be a departure—to offer something new. Make it the first sentence in a new paragraph.

Similarly, short, “stubby” paragraphs tend to break up the prose, interrupting the flow: give your readers the chance to link a number of sentences into a cohesive whole; that is usually the easiest way for them to absorb your message. Stubby paragraphs are all too common in Wikipedia articles, and reviewers in the FAC room are apt to object to them. Apart from the psychological effect on the readers, one-sentence paragraphs can result in a fragmented visual appearance; they typically involve areas that should either be expanded into full ideas or merged smoothly with other paragraphs (most often the previous one). However, very occasionally, a single-sentence paragraph might be appropriate to emphasise or summarise an idea.

You may wish to try your hand at our exercise in manipulating paragraph length.

Sentence length

Chopping up “snakes”

Similarly, your readers will want to “tie up” the information on a more frequent, smaller scale: the sentence. Sentences that are too long are too demanding on readers’ working memory: give them opportunities to download what you’ve just told them in convenient chunks. Here’s a sentence that is too long and complex; there are too many ideas packed into a single thought-unit, and the parentheses make it even harder to grapple with. This is what some people call a “snake”. Snakes need to be chopped up into manageable portions.

The need for a stronger central government with a unified currency and the ability to conduct the affairs of state, such as foreign policy (and that could bind all of the states under negotiated treaties and agreements rather than be undermined by a single state’s refusal to agree to an international treaty) led to the stronger federal government that was negotiated at the Convention.

How do we fix this sentence? The first step is to isolate the separate ideas. There are usually a number of locations for the boundaries between these ideas. Here’s one way of drawing the boundaries.

The need for a stronger central government with a unified currency and the ability to conduct the affairs of state, such as foreign policy (and that could bind all of the states under negotiated treaties and agreements rather than be undermined by a single state’s refusal to agree to an international treaty) led to the stronger federal government that was negotiated at the Convention.

Each of these ideas could stand alone as a sentence. (Since the middle two ideas are particularly close, we could separate them by a semicolon rather than a full-stop.) We’ll need to carefully change the grammar so that each idea is a stand-alone sentence. In our chopped up snake, the four ideas are coloured as above. We’ve added extra bits, in black—either through simple deduction to fill in the context (e.g., “the delegates identified”) or to make the sentences fit together grammatically (e.g., back-connectors, such as “In particular” and “This”, which form a link with their previous clauses).

The delegates identified the need for a stronger central government with a unified currency and the ability to conduct the affairs of state. In particular, they saw federal control of foreign policy as a way of binding all of the states under negotiated treaties and agreements; until then, foreign policy had frequently been undermined by a single state’s refusal to agree to an international treaty. This led to the negotiation of a stronger federal government at the Convention

.

We started with one sentence of 64 words. We’ve transformed this into three sentences (four if you count the semicolon in the middle), that are slightly longer in total: 77 words: 23 + 23 + 18 + 13. By chopping up the original snake and stitching it back together in a way that gives the readers places to rest and easily process the ideas into their memory system, we’ve made the text much easier to read, even if it’s a little longer.

We’ve prepared exercises along the same lines, in case you want to practise chopping up long sentences.

File:Womanwriting.jpg

Writing is no longer restricted to scholarly and religious contexts; skilled writing can enrich people's lives over a wide range of leisure and career activities.

Smoothly integrating shorter ideas into a sentence

Just as snakes require too much working memory to read, stubby sentences don’t allow readers to use the full capacity of their working memory; they usually interrupt the flow of the text, resulting in a stop-start effect. To achieve sentences of comfortable length, it is typically necessary to construct them out of more than one idea. These ideas need to be integrated smoothly and logically into the sentence. One of the commonest problems in FACs is sentences in which the ideas are poorly connected.

To integrate ideas into a sentence, we need to ask ourselves whether their relationship is additive, contrastive or causal. Causal relationships are usually obvious, so we'll deal with these first.

Causal links

There are two types.

Forwards-->, where the first statement causes or leads to the second statement. The typical forward-connectors are therefore and thus. They're largely interchangeable, although thus is more at home in technical contexts. Here are examples:

Wikipedia needs to raise the standards of its prose; therefore, we should create infrastructure that enables contributors to improve their writing skills.

Researchers have identified the three genes responsible for this disease, thus paving the way for the development of gene therapy for this disease.

Other forward-links, less common because they're elaborate, are accordingly and for this/these reason(s). Usually avoid them.

<--Backwards, where the first statement was caused by or led to by the second statement. The typical connector is because. Two others—since and as—are often used instead of because, but we discourage this. Since can refer to time back from the present, and as can mean "at the same time as". In the following sentence:

Dr Gupta was unaware of the underlying complexities, as she moved with her extended family to Mumbai in 1999.

it's unclear whether she was unaware because she moved to Mumbai, or during the move. It's safer to use because as your causal connector in every case.

The typical placement of the comma is in the direction of causality: after for forward causality; before for backward causality. Although punctuation is usual here in formal registers such as Wikipedia, this can vary. For example, the following sentence is short and punchy, and thus needs no comma:

The President lost the election because he's a fool.

But lengthen the sentence and a comma may make it easier to read:

The President won the election, because many African-Americans were not permitted to vote and the Supreme Court endorsed the injustice.

A comma is usually unnecessary if the causal link is in the middle of a clause. For example, this sentence:

Thus, the surveys failed to reveal the problem.

could be changed into:

The surveys thus failed to reveal the problem.

Sometimes the causality is obvious; in these cases, you may be able to dispense with an explicit connector altogether, enabled here by the presence of the semicolon:

This FAC suffers from faulty prose throughout; therefore, the nominator should have first identified good copy-editors who are interested in the topic.

Max Liebermann's The granddaughter, writing (1923): effective literacy training in schools can release the imaginative power of childhood.

If you don't need a word, don't use it!

Contrastive links

Typical contrastive links are:

• but (avoid at the start of a sentence in formal registers)
• however,
• although (usually better than though in formal registers)
• nevertheless/nonetheless, (less common)
• in/by contrast, (very pointed)

Additive links

The typical additive link is:

• and

Usually avoid the following additive links:

• while (ambiguous)
• as well/as well as, (usually too strong and/or redundant)
• also, (usually redundant)
• moreover, (tired and usually redundant)
• furthermore, (tired and usually redundant)
• additionally, (ungainly and usually redundant)
• in addition, (tired and usually redundant)
• not only ... but also (very tired)

Academics and technical writers seem to love the last five words in this list; they should know better.

Two poorly used additives on WP

While is a particular problem on Wikipedia. For example:

"Planning" expenditure is allocated to development schemes outlined in the federal goverment's plans, while "central" expenditure is allocated to the state governments.

Does the writer want to emphasise that both spending categories occur at the same time? Surely not—here, while is a poor substitute for and; better still, just use a semicolon:

"Planning" expenditure is allocated to development schemes outlined in the federal goverment's plans; "central" expenditure is allocated to the state governments.

With as an additive link is another common problem on WP; it's usually awkward. For example:

There are 10 chapters in the protocol, with the third chapter—International money laundering—aiming to prevent, detect, and prosecute international money laundering and the financing of terrorism.

Ouch. Tweak the grammar to make it:

There are 10 chapters in the protocol; the third chapter—International money laundering—aims to prevent, detect, and prosecute international money laundering and the financing of terrorism.

Confusion between additive and contrastive links

This is surprisingly common in FACs. Take the following sentence, which connects two ideas with the commonest contrastive link, but.

She was raised in London and Manchester, but went on to live in Hong Kong.

However, the second idea doesn’t contradict the first; it just provides additional information. While Hong Kong may be a very different location from London and Manchester, it’s perfectly possible to live in Hong Kong having been raised in the UK. But is wrong here, because it introduces a statement that contradicts the previous statement or that is surprising or unexpected coming after the previous statement. Here, replacing the contrastive link with the most common additive link—and—will fix the problem:

She was raised in Newcastle and Brisbane, and went on to live in Hong Kong.

Grammar at its worst.

Additive relationships: how close are the ideas?

When you're adding ideas together—rather than contrasting them or showing that one leads to the other—the way you integrate them will depend on how close and long they are. There are three basic ways of linking them.

• A link with and—very close ideas; when combined, the resulting sentence should not be too long)
• A link with a semicolon—reasonably close ideas; length is not as important.
• A link with a full-stop—less close ideas, neither of which should be stubby.

The use of these methods is partly a matter of personal style, although there are cases where most readers would prefer one method over the others. Here's an example of two relatively short ideas:

(1) Most emu species have a grey-brown plumage of shaggy appearance. On close inspection, the shafts and tips of the feathers are black.

Both ideas concern the visual appearance of the birds, specifically that of their feathers. By integrating them into single sentence, we're making this closeness obvious to the readers, and avoiding the stop-start effect of two short, successive sentences:

(2) Most emu species have a grey-brown plumage of shaggy appearance; on close inspection, the shafts and tips of the feathers are black.

In (2), the semicolon keeps the readers' minds focused on the same issue: the feathers. In (1), The full-stop suggested that the next sentence would take a different direction, but in (1), it didn't. The next example shows a good use of the full-stop—the second sentence addresses a different issue, food:

(3) Most emu species have a grey-brown plumage of shaggy appearance. They eat a variety of native and introduced plant species, depending on seasonal availability.

The sentences are still close enough to juxtapose, but the common theme is much broader than feathers or food: i'ts "most emu species" ("they"). The full-stop warns readers to prepare for something different, although they'll still expect it to flow smoothly from what they've just read.

This next example is satisfactory:

In 1996 and 2000, he was the nominee of the Green Party; Winona LaDuke was his vice-presidential running mate.

However, the ideas are so closely connected that we might consider joining them with a comma plus and:

In 1996 and 2000, he was the nominee of the Green Party, and Winona LaDuke was his vice-presidential running mate.

You may wish to try our exercises in correcting sentences with poorly integrated ideas.

THE REMAINDER OF THIS ARTICLE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION; IT WILL BE COMPLETED OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS. TOPICS WILL INCLUDE: REPETITION, FALSE CONTRASTS, UNNECESSARY MARKING, JINGLES, LISTING TECHNIQUE, AND MISPLACED FORMALITY.

References

External links