About Editing and Writing

Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if  you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.

—From the book, The Elements of Eloquence, by Mark Forsyth.

By Mike Feinsilber

Back when I was the writing coach for the Washington bureau of the AP, I wrote a memo about the overuse of adjectives. A particular target was the word “very,” which I argued performs contrarily to the writer’s intention—it dilutes what the writer intended to underscore.

Adjectives (and adverbs) are generally unneeded. Adjectives exaggerate. They invite skepticism, maybe even cynicism. They undercut the we’re-in-this-together partnership that should exist between writer and reader. They take away the reader’s role.

From her conversation with Tyler Cowen, part of a series called Conversations With Tyler:

COWEN: What’s your best work habit, in your opinion?

ATWOOD: I have no good work habits.

[laughter]

COWEN: Well, there’s evidence to the contrary on this table, right [points to books on bookshelf]?

ATWOOD: Yeah, but those were not produced by good work habits. I tried to have good work habits once, but it was a terrible, terrible failure. I tried to be organized and methodical, but that didn’t work.

COWEN: What’s your most unusual work habit?

“Why, no. You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins and bleed.” –Red Smith

“Let’s face  it. Writing is hell.” —William Styron

“You build a book out of sentences. And the sentences are built up out of details. So you’re working brick by brick. And the bricks are heavy.” —Philip Roth

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.” —Stephen King

“I hate writing. I love having written.” —Dorothy Parker

From a review, by Harold Evans, in the 4/21/19 New York Times Book Review of Robert Caro’s book, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing:

At Princeton the acerbic literary critic R. P. Blackmur precisely identified a course correction for his undergraduate short-story aspirant: “You’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.” What Blackmur meant was that Mr. Caro couldn’t just type “The young congressman Lyndon Johnson’s rural electrification program was a boon” and leave it at that. He had to work out how Johnson got it done and won the adulation of more than 200,000  Texas Hill Country people — what their lives had been like working “dark to dark” before “the lights” arrived at their isolated homes, with maybe 30 miles of dirt road to the next place.

Once upon a time The Washingtonian ran an annual feature that showed pictures of the homes of prominent DC residents—it was called Map of the Stars, a knockoff of a book published in Los Angeles that featured homes of movie stars.

We’d take a picture of a VIP’s home (from the sidewalk or street, never going onto the homeowner’s property), give readers the general location but not the street address, and include its purchase price and year it was bought, its current value (estimated by a real estate agent), and its assessed value. The assessed value was a reason to do it other than voyeurism—if a city council member lived in a house worth $900,000 and the house was assessed at $400,000, it  seemed a public service to point that out.

But some experts worry that our assumptions of canine guilt may be self-fulfilling. Julie Hecht, a doctoral student who studies animal behavior at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, cites research showing that the more dogs are punished, the more they tend to act in ways that drive their owners mad. Scolding, Hecht believes, may confuse dogs, resulting in “an anxious cycle of destruction and appeasement” that could ultimately “harm the dog–human bond.”

—From an article, “Your Dog Feels No Shame,” by William Brennan, in the March 2018 Atlantic.

Those who spoke to The Washington Post for this report did so on the condition of anonymity, citing the matter’s supreme sensitivity.

—From today’s page one Washington Post story about the release of a redacted version of the Mueller report.

From an April 14 New York Times story, “Cut Out to Play a Media Tycoon,” by Matt Trueman. The story’s deck: “In ‘Ink,’ Bertie Carvel explores the depths of Rupert Murdoch.”

Mr. Carvel comes from a long line of newshounds—another reason he was so right for “Ink.” His great-grandfather wrote for The Star; his grandfather, for the Evening Standard; and he retains a “visceral” childhood memory of The Guardian newsroom where his father, John, worked for 36 years.

“Desks piled high with papers and phones and all sorts of mess,” Mr. Carvel recalled. The play’s set design brought it all rushing back: “I love the smell of newsprint,” he said.