I don’t. It’s a fantastic writing guide, and I would recommend it to anyone that writes professionally. I’m not sure why you think S&W advocates dull prose. Care to elaborate?[/quote]
Simple: I started using it and made sample essays that I never bothered with again because they were dull. I found that having to follow all these rules took the fun out of the act of writing, and thus had the side-effect of making my own writing dull.[/quote]
Writing technically need not make writing dull. If you are writing simply to learn format and function, don’t be surprised if the essay ends up reading like a Toyota manual. Writing is dull when it has nothing interesting to say. Writing “sample essays” to fit a template in a writing manual is a recipe for dullness. You shouldn’t have been shocked by this.
But taking the lessons learned and ingesting them to the point where they become second nature - that’s the value of a style manual. You might be able to get away with playing fast and loose in a 750 word piece meant for a knowledgeable audience. Try writing something longer - a ten page short story or two-hundred word dissertation without some knowledge of how to write coherently.
I was lucky. I had an excellent public high school education with a lot of writing practice. And this writing practice boiled down to: write a sonnet, write a parody, use metaphors, etc. Simple technical exercises with a goal in mind. Very little of it was interesting or fun. But every good writer has a good writing education behind them. I didn’t need Strunk and White. A lot of people do. If you don’t, great. Style manuals do not make people interesting writers, but they can make them good technical writers. That’s their job. To expect otherwise is lunacy.
At this point another student in class (wasn’t me, I swear) said, “You’re kidding!” The prof looked really confused. She pulled out her copy of the book and started to explain what was in it. The student then said, “Oh, I see. I thought you told us to go out and get drunk tonight.”
I’m sure this would be funnier under the influence of alcohol.
Do we really need to continue a thread pointing out the fact that, yes, Virginia, there is bad writing on the intarweb? I know. It’s shocking.
dragging Chet and Erik behind their chariots as punishment for daring to poke fun at gamers, game design flaws and conventions, and game reviewers who took no notice of them.
If anything, quite the opposite-- I think popularity and growing influence with gamers and developers alike destroyed what made the site interesting. Being a popular anti-hero isn’t “edgy”. Erik’s probably spinning in his grave as I type this…
I hereby submit this example of completely confusticated prose from one Kevin Williams, in the second part of his essay on the arcade game industry at Video Game News, Reviews, and Walkthroughs - IGN
Who’s responsible for digging the hole?
The cat has been thrown amongst the pigeons by accusing previous Sega executives of being influential (if not the only executives) of not just shooting, but plucking and stuffing the golden goose – that laid the eggs of rebirth after the Crash.
Strunk & White is a great book. The most valuable bit of advice in it is:
“[Good writing] requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
A clean, concise, well-structured phrase or sentence or paragraph, in which every word has a purpose, is a thing of beauty. This doesn’t mean everyone should write like Hemingway. Nabokov engages in plenty of self-indulgent prose, but each word has weight, it has a reason for being there – albeit sometimes a primarily musical reason.
I always try to keep my writing from being flabby and weak, but it’s hard to do. I’m always finding “basicallys” and “rathers” and “a bits” and “in terms ofs” and “with regard tos” floating around everywhere in my prose. Horrible, horrible stuff. My job entails a lot of writing, but it’s quickie one-off fare that I don’t get paid enough to revise, so some of it is pretty flabby.
Jakub, you may want to consider going back and re-applying the S&R rules. My guess is that you found the process and results dull because learning the process itself was dull. Learning and practicing is not fun as a rule. Learning a new way of writing can be very frustrating and uninspiring. But once the process becomes second-nature, after a sufficient amount of practice, it will no longer be dull. Nobody likes grammar exercises or spelling tests, but they build writing character.
It couldn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt me. I went though the sometimes arduous process of learning how to write well, academically and during leisure time, and now I write for PC Gamer, in house, albeit as a contributing editor. Before this, I worked at Maximum PC, cranking out reviews and other articles. I got that internship based almost completely on my writing skils, plus a technical proficiency test.
I had no previous relevant job experience, and you could argue that I’d be a full-time staff member at one of these mags by now, in better economic times. I’ve been at Future Networks for about six months now, with an editorial load pretty near that of my peers.
These days, it’s best to arm yourself with all the career tools you can, even when they don’t look like tools at first glance. I now have a much better shot at tech journalism, mainstream journalism, and editorial than I did fresh out of college. A 1000% better chance of getting a high-profile gig, and I have that book to thank in part.
And for the record, I almost never write this dully. Check out the reviews intro in PCG’s May issue for a completely different version of my writing style.
I always thought the main way to learn to write well was to read lots of good authors, and mercilessly revise your own writing (mainly by cutting out weak words and insisting on concreteness above all else). I’ve never thought much of “practicing” writing per se, in the sense of doing drills or something like that. Though I have read that Somerset Maugham dissected the prose of various past writers (i.e. Swift, Dryden) in order to see how their sentences were put together, and absorb their style, etc.
Blah, blah, blah. You crazy kids are fooling yourselves if you think anyone reads page after page of text. Here at the Mark Asher school of journalism, we want our goddamn screenshots! Preferably full page!
