Write to the Point: A Master Class on the Fundamentals of Writing for Any Purpose

276 Pages·2018·1.3 MB·English

by  Sam Leith

“A useful, persuasive guide to English usage.”
—GUARDIAN
A Master Class on the
Fundamentals of Writing
for Any Purpose
S A M L E I T H

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S A M L E I T H
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Write to the Point: A Master Class on the Fundamentals of Writing for Any Purpose
Copyright © 2017, 2018 by Sam Leith
Originally published in the UK by Profile Books Ltd. in 2017.
First published in North America by The Experiment, LLC, in 2018.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television,
or online reviews, no portion of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Leith, Sam, author.
Title: Write to the point : a master class on the fundamentals of writing for
any purpose / Sam Leith.
Description: New York, NY : The Experiment, LLC, [2018] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017052670 (print) | LCCN 2017059369 (ebook) | ISBN
9781615194636 (ebook) | ISBN 9781615194629 (softcover)
Subjects: LCSH: English language--Rhetoric--Handbooks, manuals, etc. |
Rhetoric--Handbooks, manuals, etc. | English language--Style--Handbooks,
manuals, etc. | English language--Errors in usage--Handbooks, manuals,
etc. | Composition (Language arts)
Classification: LCC PE1408 (ebook) | LCC PE1408 .L4113 2018 (print) | DDC
808/.042—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052670
ISBN 978-1-61519-462-9
Ebook ISBN 978-1-61519-463-6
Cover and text design by Sarah Smith
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing August 2018
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For David Miller
Contents
1.
Surviving the Language Wars .........................1
2.
The Big Picture ............................................10
You Talkin’ to Me? Speaking, Reading, and Writing ........10
Audience Awareness, or, Baiting the Hook ..................21
Plain and Simple ............................................ 26
Hitting the Right Note .......................................31
Abstract Versus Concrete ................................... 36
3.
Nuts and Bolts ............................................40
Nouns and Pronouns ........................................40
Adjectives and Adverbs ..................................... 52
Verbs ......................................................... 58
Building Sentences .......................................... 68
Paragraphs, Sections, and Chapters ........................ 78
4.
Punctuation and Symbols ..............................81
The Period ................................................... 83
The Question Mark .......................................... 83
The Exclamation Point ...................................... 85
The Ellipsis .................................................. 88
The Comma ................................................. 89
The Colon ................................................... 93
The Semicolon .............................................. 94
The Dash .................................................... 96
The Hyphen ................................................. 98
The Apostrophe ............................................102
Brackets and Their Friends ................................ 105
Quotation Marks ........................................... 112
The Slash ................................................... 119
Bullet Points ................................................120
The Hashtag ................................................120
The Ampersand ............................................ 121
The Smiley and Other Emoticons ......................... 121
5.
Sentence Surgery: The Writer as Editor ..........124
Pomposo Furioso ...........................................128
The Academic Repeater .....................................131
The Confuser ...............................................133
The Monster ................................................136
The Interrupter .............................................141
6.
Bells and Whistles: Bringing Things to Life ......144
Cadence .....................................................151
Using the Figures ...........................................161
7.
Perils and Pitfalls ........................................171
Contested Usages ...........................................171
Red Rag Words ............................................. 187
Wrong Notes ............................................... 195
8.
Out into the World .....................................199
Long-Form Structure ......................................199
Letters ...................................................... 211
Writing for the Screen .....................................225
Layout and Presentation ...................................242
Forms of Address ...........................................247
Acknowledgments ..........................................253
Index ........................................................255
About the Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .264
1
Surviving the Language Wars
M
ost public discussion of how language is used—and certainly
the most vociferous public discussion—is concerned with
mistakes. Should that be a capital letter? Is it “different from” or
“different than”? Where should that comma go—inside the quo-
tation marks or outside them? On questions such as these, we’re
encouraged to think, rests the difference between civilization and
barbarism.
These arguments have been characterized as “language wars”—
and they can look like that. The sound! The fury! To one side, the
Armies of Correctness mass behind fortifications made not of
sandbags but of secondhand copies of Fowler’s Modern English
Usage, Gwynne’s Grammar, and Strunk and White’s Elements
of Style. Here’s Lynne “Deadeye” Truss, of Eats, Shoots & Leaves
fame, her sniper rifle loaded with apostrophes, taking potshots at
mispunctuated grocery advertisements; and there’s the William
Safire platoon, preparing a shock-n-awe offensive involving the
word “decimate,” which they hope will reduce the enemy forces by
a tenth.
On the other side, equally well dug in, are the Descriptivist
Irregulars: a curious fighting force in which hippy-dippy school-
teachers battle shoulder-to-shoulder with austere academic lin-
guists. There are a lot of cardigans. Someone has just pulled the
pin and lobbed a split infinitive over the barricades. Now they’re