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Very well written, great characters and I loved the setting! Going to look for more books by this author! Justyna A short but with lovely book for fans of both authors, but also a lot of insight into freedom of speach, creativity and the importance of libraries. Some words to take to heart, some words to live by, some words to get more liberated in the pursuit of artistic endeavours. Keep in mind E. The chances of your having said it are only fair.

Toning your point down and tiptoeing around it may, in many circumstances, tempt the reader to tune out and allow his mind to wander. Here are some more suggestions: 1. You know how to organize your thoughts into a coherent order. Now you must make that organization clear to the reader. When you write anything longer than a few paragraphs, start by telling the reader where you are going.

First you must know where you are going yourself. Make an outline of your major points, placing supporting details in their proper position. Then, in your paper, use your outline to signal the major points for your reader. Underline and number each important section heading. This serves the same purpose as chapter titles in a book.

End with a summary. And keep in mind that a summary is not a conclusion. Your summary should introduce no new ideas; it should summarize, as briefly as possible, the most important points you have made. Summary: Make an outline; use your outline to help your reader; number and underline section headings; summarize. Use short paragraphs, short sentences — and short words Three major articles start at the top of the front page of every issue of The Wall Street Journal.

The first paragraphs of these articles are never more than three sentences long. Many paragraphs contain only a single sentence. Readers and editors alike give much of the credit to its readability. Journal editors have put into practice this simple principle: Short sentences and short paragraphs are easier to read than long ones. And easier to understand. Nobody will excoriate you for using a long word whose precise meaning no shorter word duplicates. But prefer the short word to the long one that means the same thing: Prefer t his… …t o t his Now Currently Start Initiate Show Indicate Finish Finalize Speed up, move along Expedite Use Utilize Place, put Position Reliance on long words, which are often more abstract than common short ones, can be a sign that you have not worked out exactly what you want to say.

If you have distilled your thinking to its essence, you will probably be able to express it in simple words. Shakespeare expressed the deepest emotion in the simplest words. No, no, no life!

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all? Never, never, never, never! The last sentence pointed out, to the surprise of most readers, that no word in the eloquent three-page essay had more than one syllable.

Active verbs add energy to your writing. This simple practice also improves your writing by making it more personal, a human being talking rather than an institution. The passive voice hides who is speaking or taking action; the active voice reveals it. Here is a typical passive construction — followed by active alternatives. It is respectfully requested that you send a representative to our conference. Exactly so. Yet another advantage of the active voice is that it tends to push you to decide precisely what you want to say, to be more specific.

How unexpected is that? Or does the writer mean that a reasonable person would not have expected such an outcome at all? Depending on the intention, it would be a lot less vague to write: Few of us expected this outcome.

Adjectives and adverbs are parts of speech, often indispensable to precise expression. But we do distinguish between lazy ones and vigorous ones. Do not use them as mere exclamation points. Use down-to-earth language The pervasive use of professional jargon arises more out of fear than arrogance, hypothesizes Harvard paleontologist Dr. Stephan Jay Gould, author of nineteen books. There is always a simple, down-to-earth word that says the same thing as the showoff fad word or vague abstraction.

What we did say — that we expanded the book and updated it — may stir you less but tells you more. The use of this kind of language became the target of an office game called Buzzword Bingo. The game is played in meeting rooms across the country. A discreet cough, rather than a shout of Bingo! We often urge people to write the way they talk. But developments like Buzzword Bingo indicate a perverse trend: More and more people in business seem to be talking the way they write.

In the box on the next page, there are some words and phrases that might appear on Buzzword Bingo cards, followed by down-to-earth alternatives. If you mean limits, say limits. If we expect to be hard to evolve.

The kind of writing on the left is long-winded and heavy-handed. It is what E. The language on the right is clear and direct. It illuminates your meaning.

Be specific A fatal weakness in much business writing is the overuse of generalities. The reader is left to guess. Friendly readers may guess sympathetically, but a neutral or skeptical reader will remain uninformed, unimpressed, and unpersuaded. The first draft of a letter reporting to financial backers on a series of educational seminars in Wyoming said: Our adult program was a great success.

We attracted more students from more places than ever before. The reader, not knowing whether the increase in students was one or a hundred and lacking any other specific information, must take the generalized claim of success on faith.

When rewritten, the letter said: Our enrollment doubled to Students came from Wyoming and twenty-seven other states, and from Germany and Canada. There can now be no doubt about the success of the program. The specifics speak for themselves. Choose the right word Know the precise meaning of every word you use.

Here are some words that many people confuse: Effect can mean a result noun or to To affect something is to have an influence bring about verb : The effect of the new on it:The new program affects only the clerical program on the morale of the drivers will staff. Its profits grow year after year. Hit, Miss, Duck, Dive. Principle is a guiding rule: Our principle is Principal is the first in rank or importance: to use our own money rather than to Our principal problem is lack of cash flow.

Imply means to suggest indirectly: Her report Infer means to draw meaning out of implies that she will soon promote her something: The assistant infers from her assistant.

Milit at e means to have force as evidence Mit igat e means to lessen in force or intensity: usually in a case against something: The She mitigated the bad news by giving bad news militates against an early end to everybody the afternoon off.

Grat uit ous means unasked for, excessive: Grat eful, grat it ude. You know what He had done his job to perfection for years. The point here is that The advice from the newcomer was they have no connection with gratuitous. Something that comes first. A Forward. Moving ahead, as in forward, preface. Fort uit ous means happening by chance, Fort unat e means favored by good fortune — accidental.

Being seated next to his ex- lucky. Alt ernat e verb means to go back and forth from one to another: The coach alternated Alt ernat ive refers to a choice among two between passing plans and running plans.

Definit ive means complete and Definit e is most often used to mean positive, authoritative, determining once and for all: absolutely certain; It is now definite that the It was the definitive design for a steel mill, factory will open on schedule. Fulsome means excessive to the point of Full, abundant are in no way insincerity: His fulsome praise was a synonymous with fulsome.

They carry their transparent attempt at flattery. Not orious means famous in an unsavory Not able means worthy of note: His research way: Jack the Ripper was perhaps the on Jack the Ripper is notable for its most notorious criminal of the nineteenth thoroughness.

Int o must be handled with caution. The In t o is not synonymous with into. You go headline writer wrote, murder suspects turn into the house, or you go in to find your themselves into police — stunning as magic, wallet.

You look into the subject before you but not what he meant. When the preposition hand your paper in to your boss. Be alert to the use into. Illiteracy does not breed respect. Make it perfect No typos, no misspellings, no errors in numbers or dates. If your writing is slipshod in any of these ways, however minor they may seem to you, a reader who spots your errors may justifiably question how much care and thought you have put into it.

Spelling is a special problem. Good spellers are an intolerant lot, and your reader could be among them. Whenever you are in doubt about how a word is spelled, look it up in the dictionary. Computer spell checkers can help, but they have serious shortcomings as demonstrated poetically in Chapter 3.

There are only words in the Gettysburg Address. Write simply and naturally — the way we hope you talk One office worker meets another in the hall. Anyone can understand. What more is there to say? But let the same man write the message, and he pads it with lots of big words.

Should the supply of manuals sent you not be sufficient to meet your requirements, application should be made to this office for additional copies. A message needing ten words and eleven syllables is now twenty-four words with thirty- nine syllables, heavy reading, and sounds pompous. Most Americans are taught that the written language and the spoken language are entirely different. A first step in achieving that effect is to use only those words and phrases and sentences that you might actually say to your reader if you were face-to-face.

They can safely ignore this section. The tone of your writing will vary as your readers vary. You would speak more formally meeting the President of the United States for the first time than to your uncle Max. For the same reason, a letter to the President would naturally be more formal than a letter to a relative. But it should still sound like you.

Poetic license may be granted for a song, but not for expressions like those on the next page. He always acted like he knew what he was talking about. New usage offends many ears; established usage offends nobody.

Somewhat defensively, lawyers explain that such language is essential to precision in contracts and such. Perhaps, but we suspect that the same ideas could be expressed more briefly, more clearly, and without any treacherous increase in ambiguity: BLANK Corporation wants to offer holders of its Ordinary Shares who are U.

This includes U. If you find yourself writing like that, try putting down what you want to say the way you would say it to your readers if you were talking to them face-to-face. A good start in breaking out of bureaucratese is to banish from your writing unnecessary Latin. Never expect people to read your mind as well as your letter or paper.

Take into account how much you can assume your reader knows — what background information, what facts, what technical terms.

Watch your abbreviations. Will they be an indecipherable code to some readers? Might they be ambiguous even to those in the know? K is code for a thousand in the United States, M means million in England. If you must use abbreviations, define them the first time they appear in your paper. Punctuate carefully Proper punctuation functions like road signs, helping your reader to navigate your sentences.

A left-out comma, or a comma in the wrong place, can confuse readers — or even change your meaning altogether. Here is a statement that most women will disagree with: Woman without her man has no reason for living. With a colon and a comma, the writer would get a different reaction: Woman: without her, man has no reason for living.

When the head of a large company put quotation marks around a word in an important paper, his administrative assistant asked him why he did that. He replied that it was to stress the truth of the point. Understate rather than overstate Never exaggerate, unless you do so overtly to achieve an effect, and not to deceive. It is more persuasive to understate than to overstate.

A single obvious exaggeration in an otherwise carefully written argument can arouse suspicion of your entire case. It can be hard to resist the tendency to stretch the facts to support a strongly felt position. Or to serve up half-truths as camouflage for bad news. Or to take refuge in euphemisms. For the same reason, you should always round out numbers conservatively. Mencken died. Write so that you cannot be misunderstood It is not enough to write sentences and paragraphs that your reader can understand.

Careful writers are ever alert to the many ways they might be misunderstood. A student paper began: My mother has been heavily involved with every member of the California State Legislature.

Ambiguity often results from a single sentence carrying too much cargo. Breaking up your sentences can work wonders. Here is a statement from a report by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: It would be prudent to consider expeditiously the provision of instrumentation that would provide an unambiguous indication of the level of fluid in the reactor vessel. If you break that idea into two sentences, and follow other suggestions in this chapter, you might end up with something like this: We should make up our minds quickly about getting better gauges.

Good gauges would tell us exactly how much fluid is in the reactor vessel. A law clerk assigned to rewriting a variable annuity prospectus at Prudential Investments was given this direction: Write it as if you were sending it to someone you know — say, your grandparents.

The more technical the material, the less likely your reader will understand it unless you put it into the language we all speak. An exception is when both writer and reader practice the same technical specialty.

An advertising campaign for New York Telephone points up the difference. It can make the difference between success and failure in getting across what you want your reader to know, to understand, or to do. Most murky writing is inadvertent, a sincere if doomed effort to communicate. Bad news is not made better by being baffling as well as unwelcome. When you spit it out in plain English, readers still may not like it. Consider the surprising bestselling business book Who Moved My Cheese?

Its appeal, says Fortune, is both its message — prepare for change, accept it, enjoy it — and its telling, in simple language. Fortune cites a book on strategy by four management consultants: In the specialist model, a company competes across geography by leveraging specialization advantages and intangible scale effects i. It compares that sentence with this one from Who Moved My Cheese? Every day the mice and the littlepeople spent time in the maze looking for their own special cheese.

CEOs of important companies are buying and distributing thousands of copies. It makes an important point — and does so in words that communicate. On international flights, pilots ask passengers to extinguish all smoking materials instead of to put out their cigarettes. Resource constrained instead of not enough people to do the job.

Bake in the numbers instead of include. In the August timeframe instead of August. Tasked by the organization instead of assigned. The optics of the plan instead of how the plan will look. Double-click the point instead of emphasize.

Drill down instead of analyze. Scope this out instead of check further. On a go-forward basis instead of in the future. Operationalized its goal, instead of achieved.

Aggressively ramp headcount instead of hiring a lot of people. This style of talk is generally heard among middle managers. It seldom comes from the CEO, who, having risen to the top, is less interested in impressing people than in clear communications — and getting things done. Some terms that jarred originally have come through relentless usage to be accepted as more precise than their substitutes. Delta from forecast, instead of change from what we predicted; What are the metrics?

This is a gray area. The practices we advocate in this book turn out to be easy, even fun. Even those few still attached to their typewriters may soon find their clickety-clack days coming to an end. Author Tom Wolfe told an interviewer that his novel A Man in Full would be his last typewritten work, but not because he had fallen in love with a computer.

They will not miraculously change a bad writer into a good one. They can even entrench a couple of the worst practices of bad writers, by making it so easy to send out half-baked material. Most computers have dazzling charms for the writer. There are templates for memos, business letters — anything you write repeatedly — that preset font, paper size, margins, as established by you.

This saves a lot of time. Other tools allow you to do all sorts of useful things with page numbers, footnotes, inserts, section headings. You can get a word count in two seconds. In the rest of this chapter we will run through the ways you can enlist your computer in your efforts to write well. How to Use Your Computer in Writing There are as many ways to write on a computer as there are personal habits of writing. One writer likes to go back and correct after every paragraph or two, another roars through an entire draft without pause.

No two people will find exactly the same set of practices suitable for their individual turns of mind. Longtime users, however, are in broad agreement on the merits of a number of procedures. Among them: 1. Write first, format later Formatting is not writing.

Playing with the details of the appearance of your paper can distract you from grappling with its content. The drafter of this chapter, for instance, formatted the headings and subheadings — all from his outline — as he typed the first rough version.

This kept his thoughts in order as he went along. But going counter to his own advice, he also fiddled with indents and put the numbers and subheadings into boldface. They looked nice on the screen but wasted time and interrupted his train of thought. Hard drives can crash, floppy disks are not forever. The authors save everything that is important on disks and print hard copies as well.

Power surges, input errors, and other obliterators of your work are far from theoretical hazards. Companies that used to catch a major virus every quarter now find one almost every day. While some programs make that possible directly on your computer screen, comparisons are often easier to read and to consider on side-by-side hard copies. Date your drafts using the Insert key. The authors would have been totally confused on chapters of this book without dates on every draft.

Never ever circulate anything more than two pages long without numbered pages. Give thought to your file names Newer versions of word processing programs have made it possible to use descriptive titles not limited to eight characters for documents in your files. They also made it easy to be clever and get carried away. As your disk fills up, it gets harder and harder to remember the cute title you gave that letter.

And a complicated hunt through everything on your disk will have you longing for the good old days of physically riffling through a file drawer. You should develop a logical and easy-to- remember system for your file names. Professional writers think of their electronic file as a giant drawer with a small number of major folders, each divided into various subfolders, and so on.

For the current edition of this book, WTW3 was the primary folder; e-chapter and c-chapter two of the subfolders for new material on e-mail and computers respectively. In choosing your file names, prefer logic and simplicity to ingenuity. Your file should be a handy tool, not a puzzle or an amusement.

Proofread — and proofread again. Never send any document without checking everything with your own eyes. Use the spell check program — with care. While it does a good job in highlighting words it thinks are misspelled, sometimes it tries to be too smart and automatically corrects words without asking.

That can be dangerous, as one of us found in writing that Savill Gardens outside London had been introduced to him by his friend Stanley Pigott. Computers are only human, one expert noted. A cartoon showed this on a PC screen. The grammar checker is even more fallible. Stick to the point. With just a flick of the finger I can write reams of nothing. I call it streams of unconsciousness. Good writers heed their outlines and stick to the point.

Since even a loose first draft can look crisp and finished on your screen, you can fool yourself into mistaking it for a taut masterpiece. Careful writers try not to be fooled by appearances. Be conservative in your choice of type fonts. The most readable fonts type faces are the ones used most often by well-edited magazines and newspapers.

Choose fonts that resemble what you see in Time or Sports Illustrated, for example. For anything longer than a paragraph or two, ordinary roman faces are more readable than italics, and serif faces like this text are more readable than sans serif — like t his. It has been proved over and over in careful studies of readership around the world. Whatever font you choose, stick with it throughout your document. Keep your fingers off the boldface and underline keys. Boldface and underlining are fine for headings but should be used only for occasional emphasis in text.

The same goes for italics. When you emphasize too many words, the effect is not what you intend. It may even be the opposite — when everyt hing is emphasized, nothing is emphasized. And your page looks messy. Writing That Works is the definitive guide to business writing. These blinks are full of advice on how to write clear, compelling and succinct business communications, covering everything from quarterly reports to presentations, emails and even resumes.

Upgrade to Premium now and get unlimited access to the Blinkist library. The Blinkist app gives you the key ideas from a bestselling nonfiction book in just 15 minutes. Available in bitesize text and audio, the app makes it easier than ever to find time to read.

Get unlimited access to the most important ideas in business, investing, marketing, psychology, politics, and more. You may be surprised to know that even after writing over books two-thirds of those novels over the last 40 years, 21 of them New York Times bestsellers most notably the Left Behind Series , I deal with those exact problems every time. I use a repeatable novel-writing plan —one that helps me smash through those obstacles.

Imagine a finished manuscript in your hands, or your name on the front of a newly published book —does that excite you? Better yet, imagine letters from readers saying your novel changed their lives, that your words gave them a new perspective.