Part 6 — Language, voice, and style

Readers never meet your outline. They meet sentences, one at a time, in an order they did not choose, and whatever the Work has to say it must say through them. Structure, character, research and purpose all arrive as grammar.

Sentence-level craft is also the easiest part of writing to turn into rules, and the rules are everywhere: prefer the active voice, distrust adverbs, show instead of telling. Most of them are partly true, and writers you admire have broken most of them to good effect. This part adds none. Each practice takes a habit of language as a decision with a mechanism and a cost, and sends you to real sentences to see what the decision does.

Some of those sentences are from public-domain works by Austen, Dickens, Darwin, Crane, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Woolf and Hemingway, among others, quoted briefly and read closely. Some belong to living or recent writers on craft, whom we name and mostly paraphrase, with a few short quotations. The rest we invented to isolate one effect, and each of those is labeled “Sample” so nobody mistakes it for a quotation. Where we describe what a writer did, we trace it to a published source; where we could not, we left it out.

The practices build from the single word to the places where ambition goes wrong, but you can enter by problem. Overwritten pages call for 51 and 60 first. Pages that are correct and strangely lifeless call for 57 and 55, and pages where readers lost the thread, for 53 and 58. If you cannot hear anything distinctive in your own prose, or you hear one distinctive thing too often, begin with 54. If a sentence you love will not sit still on the page, 56 and 60 will tell you why.

This book elsewhere argues that revision should proceed from large scale to small and that you should not polish a passage whose function is unsettled (Practices 82 and 83). Sentence-level attention is not only a finishing task, though. Many writers find a scene by finding its sentences, and Joan Didion’s account of how she writes, discussed in Practice 55, puts the sentence at the start of thinking rather than the end. Use these practices as diagnosis on a finished page or a half-finished one.

Plain language is not more honest than ornate language, and ornate is not richer than plain. The opening paragraph of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which Practice 54 takes apart, is plain in vocabulary and built from long chains of coordinated clauses. Woolf’s paragraphs in Mrs. Dalloway are lavish and also exact. The question to put to any sentence is the one Practice 60 turns on: what is this sentence for?

The exercises take ten to thirty minutes on your own pages and each leaves something you can see, marks in a margin, a list, or two versions side by side. Keep a copy of the page before you change it; Practice 89 explains why.