Good Advice About Bad Writing

Posted: July 03, 2012

If you're worried that your writing isn't all it can be, here are some tips that can help you become the best writer you can be.

If you're worried that your writing isn't all it can be, here are some tips that can help you become the best writer you can be.

How does one avoid being a bad writer? Presumably, most people visiting or subscribing to this site needn’t concern themselveswith being accused of high crimes against the English language, but allow me to make a distinction between poor writing and bad writing.

Poor writing is lazy, careless writing, an attempt to communicate without adequate preparation or care. It is writing replete with passive construction, limp verbs, leaden clichés, mixed metaphors, dangling participles and misplaced modifiers, and other enemies of clear prose.

Without vigilance, we are all vulnerable — we can easily produce any one of these errors, and perhaps more than one, in a single article or essay or short story. But poor writing is a multiplicity of such mistakes, and it is a sin of omission rather than one of commission: We might commit all these transgressions because we don’t know or recognize them.

Bad writing is more of a challenge, because it is a sin of commission: You have to make an effort to write badly — though it is easier to achieve than you might think, because many very accomplished, intelligent people do so. How does one manage to join such exalted company?

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