Basic Prose Style (13 steps to better style)

Unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, always choose the active, rather than the passive, voice. With the active voice, the agent (the person or thing carrying out the action expressed by the verb) is the subject:

There are two types of passive voice constructions. In one, the agent is identified, but the person or thing toward which the action is directed (rather than the agent) is the subject of the sentence:

In the second type of passive voice construction, the agent is not identified at all:

(Note: The verb "to be" [am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been] often flags the passive voice.)

In addition to being less natural, less direct, and less vigorous, sentences that fail to identify an agent can raise ethical questions, since they fail to attribute responsibility for the action they express. The passive voice can, however, be an effective means of doing at least three things:

Focusing attention on the thing acted upon:

Placing the agent at the end of a clause where he, she, or it can more easily be modified by a long modifier:

Many science and technical writers once considered passive voice more objective than active voice and, hence, more appropriate to their writing. As the quotations below suggest, however, the traditional preference for passive voice in scientific and technical writing is changing:

The active is the natural voice, the one in which people usually speak or write, and its use is less likely to lead to wordiness or ambiguity. The passive of modesty, a device of writers who shun the first-person singular, should be avoided. "I discovered" is shorter and less likely to be ambiguous than "it was discovered". The use of I or we...avoids dangling participles, common in sentences written in the third-person passive. -- Council of Biology Editors, CBE Style Manual, fifth ed.

[Passive voice] implies that events take place without any one doing anything. Moves files, desks, and ideas without any assistance from a human being. Makes readers wonder whether they should be doing something or just sitting there waiting for the system to perform. It turns actions into states of being. It's somewhat mystical, but tends to put readers to sleep....

To get more active, say who does what. Assign responsibility to the system or to the program or, if necessary, to the reader. If you have to tell readers to do something, don't pussyfoot around--tell them. (Are you slipping into the passive because you don't dare to order readers around?) -- Jonathan Price, How to Write a Computer Manual

2. Avoid Nominalizations

Unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, avoid nominalizations. A nominalization is a noun derived from and communicating the same meaning as a verb or adjective. It is usually more direct, vigorous and natural to express action in verbs and qualities in adjectives.

Nominalizations frequently crop up in noun strings. A noun string, a series of nouns that modify one another, is often concise but ambiguous. If the noun string is short, it can usually be tamed with a few judicious hyphens:

Longer noun strings, however, are often confusing, and it is generally best to unstring them by converting nominalizations back to verbs or by adding a few strategic articles and prepositions:

3. Express Parallel Ideas in Parallel Grammatical Form

Parallelism is the principle that units of equal function should be expressed in equal form. Repetition of the same structure allows the reader to recognize parallel ideas more readily:

Note that any two (or more) units of discourse--words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, chapters--can be made parallel with one another. Note also that, although it is a powerful rhetorical device, parallelism is only one of many factors writers must consider as they compose. Hence, parallelism is occasionally overridden by other, more pressing considerations, such as clarity and variety.

4. Place the Emphatic Words at the End of the Sentence

Joseph Williams offers two complementary principles of order and emphasis:

In the first version, the emphasis is on the title of the article; in the second version, the emphasis is on the substance of the article. Note that according to the two principles above, what justly needs emphasis in a sentence generally depends upon what has already been said or what is already known; that is, upon the given information. When the given information is placed at the beginning of a sentence, it is understated and serves as a transition or introduction to the new information in the sentence, which is thereby emphasized.

What Haviland and Clark call the "Given-New Strategy" not only creates proper emphasis within a sentence, it also creates cohesion between sentences since the new information of one sentence often becomes the given (or old) information of the next. Schematically, the movement of given to new information in a series of sentences might look like this:

AB--BC--CD--DE

Look, for example, at the following pair of sentences:

Lines that contain printer-control characters will not look right-justified on your screen. They will be right-justified, however, when you print them.

In the first sentence, the given information is lines (A), and the new information is right-justified (B). In the second sentence, the given information is right-justified (B), and the new information is when you print them (C).

Although the end of the sentence is generally the most emphatic position, as Strunk and White point out in The Elements of Style,

The other prominent position in the sentence is the beginning. Any element in the sentence other than the subject becomes emphatic when placed first:

A little bit of this inverted style, however, goes a long way--use it sparingly.

5. Express Statements in Positive Form

The positive form of a statement is generally more concise and straightforward than the negative:

As Joseph Williams points out,

To understand the negative, we have to translate it into an affirmative, because the negative only implies what we should do by telling us what we shouldn't do. The affirmative states it directly.

Williams goes on to point out that we needn't translate every negative into an affirmative, for (as this sentence illustrates) we sometimes have a special reason to emphasize not, no, or never. The negative is especially effective when used as a means of denial, contradiction, or antithesis:

Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.

6. Vary Sentence Patterns

A series of sentences that follow the same general pattern (e.g., a series of three or four simple
sentences or a series of three or four compound sentences) can be tedious. Avoid monotony by varying sentence patterns.

One of the best ways to avoid a tedious series of simple sentences is to use subordination (or embedding) to combine the information presented in these sentences into a single, complex sentence.

For example,

Another way to avoid a series of simple sentences is to use coordination (the tying together of language elements that have equal rank, such as independent clauses) to combine several of these sentences into a single, compound sentence. For example,

becomes

Compound and complex sentences can themselves, however, become tedious. And sometimes, they're just plain awkward or confusing. Don't overload your sentences or your readers. If you find a sentence is becoming too long and confusing, or if you've used three or four complex sentences in a row, reverse the process described above and break your sentence up into several shorter sentences.

Note that although sentence variety is illustrated here only in terms of sentence type, this same principle applies to other sentence features, such as sentence openings and sentence length.

One of the best ways to discover problems with sentence variety is to read your writing aloud. Human language is primarily oral/aural and only secondarily graphic/visual; hence, most of us have a better ear for language than we have an eye for it. In fact, reading your writing aloud can help you discover problems not only with sentence variety but also with order and emphasis, parallelism, coherence, redundancy, syntax, rhythm, and grammar.

7. Choose Your Words Carefully

Linguists estimate that the English language includes over one million words, thus providing English speakers with the largest lexicon in the world. From this vast lexicon, writers may choose the precise words to meet their needs. The list below describes some of the factors you might consider in choosing, from among a Basic Prose Style 10 number of synonyms or near synonyms, the word or phrase most appropriate to your purpose. Notice that the distinctions between these factors are not always sharp; some might properly be considered subsets of others. For example, tone, formality, and intensity might be considered subsets of connotation.

Be aware, however, that achieving an appropriate level of formality is as much a question of choosing less formal as it is of choosing more formal words. As Strunk and White point out,

Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten center handy, ready, and able.

And Joseph Williams adds,

When we pick the ordinary word over the one that sounds more impressive, we rarely lose anything important, and we gain the simplicity and directness that most effective writing demands.

You might, for example, replace initiate with begin, cognizant with aware, and enumerate with count. Williams offers the following example and translation of inflated prose:

This section describes the commands used for translating programs written in the four languages mentioned above. These ranslators create object-code files with a filetype of TEXT from programs written by the user.

This section describes the commands used for translating programs written in the four languages mentioned above. These commands create object-code files with a filetype of TEXT from programs written by the user.

Sometimes, however, repeating the same word can become awkward, tedious, or confusing. Alternating between a pronoun and its antecedent is one obvious way of avoiding the tedious repetition of the same word to refer to the same thing. You can usually help to avoid confusing your readers by not using the same word (or variations of the same word) to mean two different things in one sentence or in two closely related sentences:

Avoid overusing adjectives and adverbs. These modifiers have their place, but in the most vigorous prose, action is expressed in verbs, and the agents of that action are expressed in nouns. This principle applies to both ornate, pompous modifiers and to such commonplace intensifiers as really, pretty, and very.

One of the best ways to avoid overusing modifiers is to select specific, self-modified nouns and verbs--ones that don't require adjectives and adverbs to supplement their meaning. For example, you might replace "long black car" with "limousine" or "ran very quickly" with "sped" or "bolted".

9. Clarify the Logical Relationship Between Your Ideas

In order to make your writing coherent and the transitions between your ideas smooth, you must clearly express or imply the logical relationships between your ideas. If you fail to do so, one idea is simply juxtaposed with another, and readers are left to make the logical connections for themselves. In this situation, experienced readers will suspect that you have not clarified the logical relationships between your ideas because you don't know what those relationships are--or worse, because there aren't any.

There are a variety of ways to express or imply logical relationships; some of the smoothest and most subtle use the very structure of the sentence. For example, you can use the principle of order and emphasis (see 4) to indicate that one part of the sentence is more important than another; you can use subordination (see #6) to indicate that one idea is less important than (or subordinate to) another; and you can use parallelism to indicate that two or more ideas are of equal importance.

You can also use punctuation to indicate the logical relationships between ideas. For example, you can use a colon to indicate that what follows is a further explanation of what's just been said; you can use commas to indicate whether or not a clause restricts the meaning of the sentence; and you can use dashes to indicate that the enclosed material is important to the discussion and should be emphasized.

Of the various means of establishing the logical relationships between ideas, the most blatant is the use of transitional devices, such as therefore, thus, however, and hence. These devices are more prevalent in analytical writing--where logical relationships are more important--than they are in narration or description. There is a point, however, at which such devices begin to be abused. Properly used, transitional devices signal logical relationships--they do not create them. In fact, there is no transitional device in the English language that can wrench two ideas into a logical relationship that simply doesn't exist. The table below (taken from the Harbrace College Handbook) lists eight logical relationships and some of the transitional devices that may be used to indicate each of them:

Deadwood is material that adds nothing to the meaning of the sentence, words that serve only as filler. When you edit your writing, eliminate any words or phrases that can be removed without damaging the meaning of the sentence or paragraph:

11. Avoid Redundancy

Redundancy, the unnecessary repetition of information, is a subset of deadwood, but one that is important enough to deserve separate mention:

Occasional exceptions to this principle may be justified for the sake of emphasis or coherence.

12. Use Metaphor to Illustrate

Metaphor may be broadly defined as an imaginative comparison, expressed or implied, between two generally unlike things, for the purpose of illustration. By this definition, similes (expressed comparisons) are a subset of metaphor. In prose (as opposed to poetry), metaphors are most often used to illustrate, and thus make clear, abstract ideas:

Whenever you use figurative language, be careful to avoid cliches--trite, overworn words or phrases that have lost their power to enliven your writing. If you can't think of a fresh, imaginative way to express an idea, it's better to express it in literal terms than to resort to a cliche. Hence,

Note that even solitary nouns, verbs, and modifiers can be cliched. For example,

Often such cliches are what George Orwell calls "dying metaphors"--words and phrases that were once used figuratively, but that now border on the literal. That is, we've used these terms so often that we now scarcely consider their figurative implications.

As with tone, rhythm, and many of the other stylistic considerations discussed here, you must ultimately rely upon your own sensitivity to the language to guide you in determining when a word or phrase is cliched.

13. Finally, according to Collett Dilworth and Robert Reising, the golden rule of writing is to write to be read fluently by another human being...the most moral reason for observing any specific writing convention is that it will shape and facilitate a reader's understanding, not simply that it will be used "correctly".

So as George Orwell says in "Politics and the English Language,"