I was reading Stephen King’s On Writing and he wrote something that at first enraged me, “Let me repeat my basic premise: if you’re a bad writer, no one can help you become a good one. If you’re good and want to be great… fuhgeddaboudit.” To start with, that’s pandering; everyone reading a book on writing already thinks they are a good writer. I am still offended by that. But at first, I thought he was totally wrong that a bad writer could never become a good writer. I give you as evidence myself.

Now I’m not actually a good writer. I have my moments. But I’m a competent writer, and King states earlier in the book that a competent writer can be made into a good writer. And as our friend Aristotle would tell you, that means that King is saying a bad writer can’t be made into a good writer. Or maybe not. The truth is the book is self-indulgent at times. Those two sentences are good examples. What does “no one can help you” mean? Does he mean you have to do it yourself? I really don’t know. Nor do I really care. My question is whether I might not be a good example of someone who learned how to write.

Becoming a Writer

For the longest time, I just didn’t write. I was in all the idiot English classes in grammar and primary school. In college English, I barely escaped with a C-. If I learned to write, it was quite suddenly. In order to graduate college, I had to take an upper-division writing class. I took the same instructor who had given me the C-. I liked the guy, even if, as a teacher, he was kind of a jerk. Anyway, the first assignment was to write a five page analysis of a single comic strip.

I picked a Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin was complaining to Hobbes about how disappointing the future was. “Where are the jet-packs?!” And that’s when I got it. Writing was just thinking on the page. You were just telling a story. I got an A- on it, because my teacher was incapable of giving anyone an A on their first paper. But more important, I loved the process. Of course, I had always loved telling stories.

I remember when I was in the fifth grade, we did a unit on tall tales. And everyone had to stand up in class and tell everyone a tall tale of their liking. Everyone picked one of the stories we had studied. I, as usual, was not prepared. As I got up, I didn’t really know which of the many stories I was going to tell. But in the time it took me to walk to the front of the class, it occurred to me that James and the Giant Peach was, in fact, a tall tale. And I wasted ten minutes of the class’ time recounting the entire novel.

Becoming a Good Writer

So maybe I am hardwired to tell stories. And maybe other people aren’t. But that Calvin and Hobbes essay wasn’t that different from my fifth grade triumph — except that in my last year of college I had something original to say.

Just the same, maybe there is something that changed. In the couple of years before, I started reading — a lot. It was mostly 19th century British literature — especially the women: Austen, Eliot, the Brontës. Reading is critical to learning to write. So I guess ultimately, I both agree and disagree with King. If you don’t love communicating — telling stories made-up or true — you will never learn to write. But if you care, can become quite a good writer — if you work on it. You much care to be able to do the work.

Today, we are going to consider a very bad sentence. And it was written by a really smart guy.

When people tell me I’m smart or knowledgeable, I tend to scoff at them. It isn’t false humility. I do know that in an absolute sense, I’m quite smart and knowledgeable. But I’ve spent most of my adult life in a social group where I am accepted because of creativity rather than my pure intellectual fire power. I can normally keep up with others, but I’d have to put myself in the bottom half of the group. One person who is really smart and knowledgeable, by my way of looking at it, is Corey Robin.

A couple of weeks ago, Robin wrote, When Advertising Is Action: Clarence Thomas Channels Hannah Arendt and Friedrich Von Hayek. It’s often the case that he writes things that tax my intellect. This is one of the reasons I hold him in such high regard. If I can just stick with him, I learn things. And, of course, he isn’t just smart; he’s a creative thinker; he doesn’t bore me.

The Very Bad Sentence

But he ended this article with such a bad sentence that I had to say something. I don’t present it to make him look bad, of course. He’s writing on a blog. I would hate for anyone to judge my writing (much less my editing) on the basis of my blog. But the sentence presents a great pedagogical opportunity that I just can’t pass up. Plus, it is something I run into all the time while editing:

There are lots of little things that make this a bad sentence. For example, there is needless repetition. Why would one write “finds or identifies”? Either that’s some kind of legal distinction or a verbal tick. But what most makes it a bad sentence is its structure.

What’s Wrong

It’s a long sentence: 51 words, if I counted correctly. That in itself is not a problem. One can write very long sentences that are clear. But in this case, there are two sentences put together in the most confusing manner possible. The base sentence is perfectly understandable, “Whether and how he thinks it relates to these other political arts remains to be seen.” And that would be a fine way to end his article.

Fixing the Sentence

But in the middle of the sentence, he asks a question that muddles up the whole thing. It would be different if it were a simple question. But it is quite a complex sentence that can’t be interjected this way. If he wishes to retain the overall structure, he needs to break it up into a number of sentences. The way I look at this kind of writing is that at the end of every sentence, there is an unstated question, “Got that?” The reader should be able to answer yes every time.

So he can start in roughly the same way: how does he think it relates to these other political arts. And he can end the same: it remains to be seen. But he can’t expect the reader to remember what it is that remains to be seen (at least without rereading the sentence). So that’s the first change that needs to be made — if he wants to maintain the overall structure (which I think is a mistake).

The middle section needs to be cleaned up. It is the part of the sentence that makes me uncertain of the sentence’s meaning. Is he saying one or two things? I think it is one. I think he means this, “Is it meant to be a substitution for those political arts, such that the First Amendment, in protecting commercial speech — finds or identifies a new realm of political action in the sphere of the economy?” But I still think that deserves two sentences.

A Better “Sentence”

I propose the following sentence:

Yes, this paragraph is now 15 words longer than the original one-sentence paragraph. But it is far more clear. It only requires one read-through. None of it is great, but it doesn’t include one bad sentence. And you can see how the unstated “Got that?” works after every sentence. And if we put a “Got that?” at the end of the paragraph, I think we can truthfully answer yes. That wasn’t true with Robin’s original sentence/paragraph.

I may have changed the meaning of what Corey Robin originally wrote. But that simply makes the case that his sentence was not well constructed to start with. This is about more than a bad sentence. When you are a great thinker like Corey Robin, what you most want is clarity. And that may be why I noticed why this was such a bad sentence. I want to know what he has to say. I wouldn’t have cared if I were reading a lesser mind.

As you all know, I work with writers all over the world. This creates a special problem. It’s difficult to work with freelancers regardless. When you work with employees, everyone can be depended upon to know the company style. But that’s asking a bit much for a writer who might have a dozen clients. But I find dealing with the British variants of English to be more annoying. This is mostly because I think the British are just being difficult by insisted upon things like adding unnecessary “u” characters into words that clearly don’t need them. I’m also not keen on the use of “s” when “z” is obviously called for. The quotation marks are different.

The British are absolutely right about quotation marks. And in practice, they are far more important than all the Us and Zs combined. There are two aspects of this. The one that most offends me is the ordering of quotation marks. It’s very possible that I will die due to a brain aneurysm because I start thinking about how we move from two to one to three when nesting quotes. The second issue is equally maddening but it doesn’t upset my sense of mathematical clarity quite as much. I am talking about, of course, the way quotation marks interact with punctuation.

Numbering Quotation Marks

The British number quotation marks the way that one would if one were simply not crazy. You could be stupid or ignorant or lazy, and it wouldn’t matter. You would decide that quoted material should go inside a single quote. If the quoted material contained quoted material, that would go inside double quotes. And if that quoted material contained its own quoted material, it would go inside triple quotes.

If, by chance, your triple quoted material contained quoted material, it would be a sign that you were brilliant, mean, or both. But in the British system, we would know that it would go inside quadruple quotes. This is, I have been told, the same way it works with the American system. But I doubt very seriously that American typesetters would have decided something that simple if this were an issue that ever came up in practice. For one thing, how is it that the sequence goes 2-1-3-4? I suspect the Americans would have decided that the proper designation would be something bizarre like five tilde marks, two quotation marks, and five more tilde marks.

There is simply no reason to go from 2 to 1 to 3. But I go along because that is the way we do it here in the good old United States of Typesetters (typesetters having more power in this country than linguists). Strangely, though, I don’t so much mind it in sentences; I more mind it when used in a scare quote or some other place where a single word has quotation marks around it. Because in that case, it really doesn’t matter. But, you know: consistency!

Quotation Marks and Periods

The British sensibly apply quotation marks to the text being quoted. Americans understand this, because we do the same thing when it comes to exclamation and question marks. We understand that the following two sentences mean very different things:

1. He said “yes!”
2. He said “yes”!

The placement of the exclamation marks in those two sentences dictate who is excited about him saying yes. It’s critically important.

But when it comes to the period or the comma, there is no distinction. It really doesn’t make sense to write, “He picked up ‘the book.'” It implies that the period belongs to “the book,” but it doesn’t (just as it does with the comma in this sentence). This really bugs me. The main reason is that it is almost always the case that the period or comma logically belongs outside the quotation mark. So if you just wanted to make the language as easy as possible (and I do), you should always have them outside and not inside the quotation marks.

But the reason we do this is because typesetters of one time thought inside looked better than outside. Undoubtedly, they would have done the same thing with the exclamation and question marks as well, but there are too many cases where this would lead to utter confusion.

We Must Be Wrong Together

So I have to apologize to my writers who learned British English. On matters having to do with quotation marks, they are totally right. And I am forced to “correct” them. It sucks. But there is nothing I can do. I have written our style guide (and continue to expand it). In theory, I would stipulate that we do things the logical British way. But practically, I can’t. I have to maintain a style guide that makes sense to the reader, even though the reader is wrong.

For example, the style guide says:

Copy editing is really not concerned with making sure the copy is correct. It is concerned with making sure the copy seems correct to the intelligent and “educated” reader. And really, we use a stupid approach to quotation marks because the United States has a bigger GDP than the United Kingdom. It’s sad.

It is possible to overuse the well-turned fragment, but frags can also work beautifully to streamline narration, create tension as well as to vary the prose-line. A series of grammatically proper sentences can stiffen that line, make it less pliable. Purists hate to hear that and will deny it to their dying breath, but it’s true. Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story… to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. The single-sentence paragraph more closely resembles talk than writing, and that’s good. Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed?

—Stephen King
On Writing

This is a photo of the Express Lane at Whole Foods. In general, I won’t shop there because I believe that a really expensive supermarket should at least pay its people well, and it doesn’t. Also: John Mackey. But I was in a rush and I needed a bottle of really expensive beer. And so I made my way to the Express Lane and that’s where I was confronted with the less vs fewer question.

For those of you who are not into grammar, there has been a raging debate among pedants about less vs fewer. Well, it’s not exactly a debate, because all the pedants are on the same side. You will set them off if you say, as the sign above might, “15 items or less.” You see, “fewer” is for countable things and “less” is for non-countable things.

So you might have fewer bottles of water, but you would have less water. But would you be confused if someone ran up to you during a fair and said, “A guy just grabbed a box of bottled water! Now I have less bottles of water!”? No, you wouldn’t. And you wouldn’t be confused if someone said they had fewer water, even if it sounded really weird.

Pedant at the Checkout

So there’s this guy in front of me, who is one of these blow-dried health nuts — a combination of Gordon Gekko and Johnny Appleseed. And he looks up at the sign and says to the clerk, “I love it when they get the grammar right.” The clerk is at first confused and then says, “Oh, fewer! Yeah, I’m kind of a grammar guy myself.” I don’t mind the clerk; he’s just doing his job. But the customer! It took all my powers of restraint to not start shouting. It’d be something like this:

The truth is the less vs fewer question is a made up one. The word “less” dates back to before the 12th century. It was at least 600 years later that someone decided that what really distinguished a learned person from a prol was how they used two identical words.

Less vs Fewer Is Pointless

This kind of stuff enrages me all the more now that I do so much editing. Because this kind of rubbish just gets in the way of work. Even a good writer needs a tremendous amount of help from their editor. There just isn’t time to worry about such trivialities. I’m far more concerned about than vs then than I am less vs fewer. At least those first two words have very different meanings.

Worrying about less vs fewer is just foolish. Or fatuous. Or silly. Oh my God! What is the exact right word to describe this?! I’m sure there are people buying eggplants in Whole Foods right now who won’t have a clue what I’m talking about.

Vacuous maybe?

Stupid?

Absurd?

Ridiculous..?

I’m a professional editor. I’m all right at the job. In the past, I’ve worked with some great editors, so I’m well aware of where I am lacking. But I do a reasonable job. And I am capable of turning a bad writer into a competent one — if the writer has any interest in that.

There are two attitudes that writers have toward editors. Some, like me, love editors — as long as they are reasonably good. They help the writer out enormously. Writing is a very introverted activity and just having a sane outsider to point out unclear sections is very helpful. But a good editor (much less a great editor) is a collaborator who can greatly improve a writer’s work.

Then there are writers who hate editors. I am not one of them. But I can speculate because I’ve had a recent run in with someone who is nominally my editor. That wasn’t truly an issue of my not getting along with an editor, however. I was never asked to change any text. Instead, I got a flood of complaints about constantly changing format requests. But I suspect that writers who hate editors feel much as I did.

I felt as though I was being abused. The “editor” was simply trying to assert her authority on me — not doing her job and not asking for anything that would actually improve what I had written. In fact, in the case of this “editor,” I don’t think the text for the vast majority of the work was read. And that is doubtless how editor hating writers feel: that what they produced is just fine and that the editor is just being difficult.

In my experience, writers who hate editors are bad. I suspect a lot of it has to do with their inability to take criticism. There are a lot of people who think they can write who really can’t do much more than talk on paper. And the situation is getting worse because the internet has created an explosion in the need for written content. So it isn’t hard to be a professional writer.

But there’s a problem. If you do something long enough, there is a good chance that you will become at least competent. And then where will you be? Because being a bad professional writer is great! I mean that. When I’m being paid to write something, I fret over it endlessly. I’ll spend an hour working on a single sentence if it is critical to the piece. But for the bad writer, it doesn’t matter. You just dump your thoughts on the page and collect your check.

Editors can stand in the way of that. They can force you to improve. And so, given that I would hate so see any bad writer lose out on the gravy train that they’ve found, I offer the following three easy steps for staying a bad writer:

1. Submit a thousand words of really mediocre copy. Don’t worry about it being in the least bit interesting. Just dump some words on the page, make sure no more than two to three words are misspelled, and submit it.
2. You will hear back from your editor who will, fearing for your fragile writer feelings, ask for a “polish.” But because the editor knows that you are bad writer, they will give a specific list of numbered changes to make. Ignore these changes. Spend maybe 15 minutes noodling with some of what you wrote, but be careful: don’t make any changes that would notably improve the copy!
3. You will hear back from your editor who will, fearing for your fragile writer feelings but now somewhat pissed off because you ignored their previous request, ask for a “polish as I requested before.” The editor will usually restate the requested changes in a different way so that the two of you can pretend that you are not just a hopeless, arrogant, and bad writer who they would fire if they were allowed. Now you must go in and make all the changes requested. But don’t do them artfully; do them as quickly as possible. And then — this is critical — don’t do a final read through to see if it all makes sense. This last bit should be easy, because as a bad writer, you never do a final read through anyway.

At this point, the editor will just fix what the bad writer wrote. The truth is that the editor knows that the bad writer is incapable of doing any better. And even if they were, they wouldn’t care enough to spend the time to do it. What’s more, if the editor hurts the fragile feelings of the bad writer, the bad writer will just complain to the editor’s boss.

Eventually, of course, the bad writer will be fired. But they will just get another job where they will torture another editor.

It’s amazing how the internet can allow you to seem a lot more knowledgeable than you are. For example, I was thinking of the phrase “Johnny-come-lately.” But I thought that the middle word was “cum” and not “come.” It is, after all, a weird construction. And I was used to phrases of this form that used “cum”: something-cum-something. So so why not Johnny-cum-lately? I decided to look up the word “cum.” And then I released that if I entered that word into Google, I was not going to get the information that I was looking for.

It reminds me of a time years ago that I was working on an underground magazine called Orange Toast. And I had this idea for a comic called, “Alf: Prostitute for Peace.” And we all thought it would be extra funny if I drew it. Then, the mastermind of the whole thing, Mark Neville, would do the pen work. So it ended up looking kind of professional, but with my total lack of perspective and whatnot. But I remember that Mark was unhappy that I used the word “come” for what he thought should be “cum.” Mark was pedantic in that way.

The truth is, I didn’t really know. Having an orgasm seems to me rather like “coming.” And the use of “cum” in the porn industry strikes me even today as an affectation. Regardless, I always knew that “cum” was a real Latin word, so I entered “cum Latin” and I got the answer that I was looking for. In Latin, “cum” means “with.” Although it also means “together,” which I find amusing. It gives a whole new meaning to the idea of simultaneous orgasms. But when the word is used in everyday English, it is with the former meaning — or perhaps “along with.”

Grammarist offers a good example of the use of the word, “Jimmy is a hunter-cum-animal-activist.” And in that example, you can see how easy it is to get confused. It means that Jimmy is a hunter and an animal activist — a somewhat ironic, or at least unusual, combination. But if you read the sentence out of context, it would be more natural to read “cum” as “become” as in, “Jimmy is a hunter turned animal activist.” So you can see why I might have thought the original phrase was “Johnny-cum-lately.” And I think the case can be made.

For example, when “cum” is used as a conjunction it can mean “since” or “while” or “although.” The last of those works rather well. It isn’t that I’m trying to justify my ignorance. It’s just that “Johnny-come-lately” is so strange a way to describe a newcomer. That’s not to say that it isn’t useful, because none of the definitions I’ve seen get at the critical thing about the phrase: it is a pejorative. The implication is always that someone has joined a group or movement only after it became popular and most likely only because as well.

Regardless, I wish it were “Johnny-cum-lately.” It just feels right. The right spelling of it doesn’t make distinctly more sense.