Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark Read Free Book Online Page B

retained? State your case for keeping it.
    2. Get a copy of On Writing Well. Study the cuts Zinsser makes on pages 10 and 11. See if any patterns emerge. Hint: notice what he does with adverbs.
    3. Watch a DVD version of a movie, and pay attention to the feature called extra scenes. Discuss with friends the director's decisions. Why was a particular scene left on the cutting room floor?
    4. Now review your own work. Cut without mercy. Begin with big cuts, then small ones. Count how many words you've saved. Calculate the percentage of the whole. Can you cut 15 percent?
    5. Flip open to a page of this book at random. Search for clutter. Cut words that do no work.

This tool celebrates simplicity, but a clever writer can make the simple complex — and to good effect. This requires a literary technique called defamiliarization, a hopeless word that describes the process by which an author takes the familiar and makes it strange. Film directors create this effect with super close-ups and with shots from severe or distorting angles. More difficult to achieve on the page, this effect can dazzle the reader as does E. B. White's description of a humid day in Florida:
    On many days, the dampness of the air pervades all life, all living. Matches refuse to strike. The towel, hung to dry, grows wetter by the hour. The newspaper, with its headlines about integration, wilts in your hand and falls limply into the coffee and the egg. Envelopes seal themselves. Postage stamps mate with one another as shamelessly as grasshoppers, (from "The Ring of Time")
    What could be more familiar than a mustache on a teacher's face, but not this mustache, as described by Roald Dahl in his childhood memoir Boy:
    A truly terrifying sight, a thick orange hedge that sprouted and flourished between his nose and his upper lip and ran clear across his face from the middle of one cheek to the middle of the other. ... [It] was curled most splendidly upwards all the way along as though it had had a permanent wave put into it or possibly curling tongs heated in the mornings over a tiny flame. ... The only other way he could have achieved this curling effect, we boys decided, was by prolonged upward brushing with a hard toothbrush in front of the looking-glass every morning.
    Both White and Dahl take the common — the humid day and the mustache — and, through the filter of their prose styles, force us to see it in a new way.
    More often, the writer must find a way to simplify prose in service to the reader. For balance, call the strategy familiarization, taking the strange or opaque or complex and, through the power of explanation, making it comprehensible, even familiar.
    Too often, writers render complicated ideas with complicated prose, producing sentences such as this one, from an editorial about state government:
    To avert the all too common enactment of requirements without regard for their local cost and tax impact, however, the commission recommends that statewide interest should be clearly identified on any proposed mandates, and that the state should partially reimburse local government for some state imposed mandates and fully for those involving employee compensation, working conditions and pensions.
    The density of this passage has two possible explanations: The writer is writing, not for a general audience, but for a specialized one, legal experts already familiar with the issues. Or, the writer thinks that form should follow function, that complicated ideas should be communicated in complicated prose.
    He needs the advice of writing coach Donald Murray, who argues that the reader benefits from shorter words and phrases, and simpler sentences, at the points of greatest complexity. What would happen if readers encountered this translation of the editorial?
    The state of New York often passes laws telling local governments what to do. These laws have a name. They are called "state mandates." On many occasions, these laws improve life for everyone in