Nobody ever went broke writing a readable guide to writing in English, especially those that rise to the ranks of standard recommendations alongside Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Both of those books endorse and exemplify the virtue of brevity, but even such short volumes take a great deal longer to read and internalize than this eminently to-the-point English style guide by the “Pope of Modern Advertising,” (and, for his part, a fan of Roman and Raphaelson’s Writing That Works) David Ogilvy, originally composed in the form of an internal memo.
Ogilvy sent it out on September 7th, 1982, directing it to everyone employed at Ogilvy & Mather, the respected ad agency he’d founded more than thirty years before. “The memo was entitled ‘How to Write,’ ” says Lists of Note, “and consisted of the following list of advice:”
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning—and then edit it.
8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.
And since we all send out more written communication today than we would have in 1982, the points on this list have only grown more advisable with time. “The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather,” Ogilvy adds. “People who think well, write well.” Amid all this practical advice, we’d do well not to forget that essential connection between word and thought. I like to quote a favorite Twitter aphorist of mine — and, per Ogilvy’s warning, I’ve checked my quotation first — on the subject: “People say they can’t draw when they mean they can’t see, and that they can’t write when they mean they can’t think.”
For more on the methods of Ogilvy the self-described “lousy copywriter” (but “good editor”), see also Lists of Note’s sister site Letters of Note, which has a 1955 letter wherein he lays out his work habits. A seemingly effective one involves “half a bottle of rum and a Handel oratorio on the gramophone.” Your mileage may vary.
When it came to giving advice to writers, Kurt Vonnegut was never dull. He once tried to warn people away from using semicolons by characterizing them as “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” And, in a master’s thesis rejected by The University of Chicago, he made the tantalizing argument that “stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.” In this brief video, Vonnegut offers eight essential tips on how to write a short story:
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things–reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them–in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Vonnegut put down his advice in the introduction to his 1999 collection of magazine stories, Bagombo Snuff Box. But for every rule (well, almost every rule) there is an exception. “The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor,” writes Vonnegut. “She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.”
Now if you want to learn to write with style, that’s another story. And Vonnegut has advice on that too here.
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Many aspiring epic novelists surely wouldn’t mind writing like Leo Tolstoy. But can you write like the writer you admire without living like the writer you admire? Biographies reveal plenty of facts about how the author of such immortal volumes as War and Peaceand Anna Karenina passed his 82 years, none more telling than that even Leo Tolstoy struggled to live like Leo Tolstoy. “I must get used to the idea, once and for all, that I am an exceptional human being,” he wrote in 1853, at age 25, underscoring that “I have not met one man who is morally as good as I am, or ready to sacrifice everything for his ideal, as I am.”
Clearly, excessive modesty didn’t count among Tolstoy’s faults. Seven years before making that declaration, he had already envisioned for himself a life of virtue and industry, laying out what he called his “rules of life,” perhaps a foreshadowing of his search for a rigorously religious life without belief in a higher being. The website Tolstoy Therapy has posted a selection of these rules, which commanded him as follows:
Wake at five o’clock
Go to bed no later than ten o’clock
Two hours permissible for sleeping during the day
Eat moderately
Avoid sweet foods
Walk for an hour every day
Visit a brothel only twice a month
Love those to whom I could be of service
Disregard all public opinion not based on reason
Only do one thing at a time
Disallow flights of imagination unless necessary
To this list of precepts drawn up at the dawn of his adult life, most of which wouldn’t seem out of place as any of our 21st-century new year’s resolutions, Tolstoy later added these:
Never to show emotion
Stop caring about other people’s opinion of myself
Do good things inconspicuously
Keep away from women
Suppress lust by working hard
Help those less fortunate
Even if you haven’t read much about Tolstoy’s life, you may sense in some of these general principles evidence of battles with particular impulses: observe, for instance, how his twice-monthly limit on brothel visits becomes the much more stringent and much less realistic forbiddance of women entirely. But perhaps his technique of working hard, however well or poorly it suppressed his lust (the man did father fourteen children, after all), benefited him in the end, given the vast and (often literally) weighty body of work he left behind.
“Between ‘rules of life’ and life itself, what a chasm!” exclaims biographer Henri Troyat in Tolstoy. But as rich with interest as we find books like that, we ultimately care about writers not because of how they live, but because of how they write. The young Tolstoy knew that, too; “the publication of Childhood and ‘The Raid’ having made him, in his own eyes, a genuine man of letters,” writes Troyat, “he soon added no less peremptory ‘Rules of Writing’ to his ‘Rules of Life’:”
When you criticize your work, always put yourself in the position of the most limited reader, who is looking only for entertainment in a book.
The most interesting books are those in which the author pretends to hide his own opinion and yet remains faithful to it.
When rereading and revising, do not think about what should be added (no matter how admirable the thoughts that come to mind) … but about how much can be taken away without distorting the overall meaning.
Then again, War and Peace has in the modern day become a byword for sheer length, and few readers not already steeped in 19th-century Russian literature would turn to Tolstoy for pure entertainment. Perhaps the writer’s life implicitly adds one caveat atop all the ever-stricter rules he made for himself while living it: nobody’s perfect.
Image by Università Reggio Calabria, released under a C BY-SA 3.0 license.
In general, the how-to book—whether on beekeeping, piano-playing, or wilderness survival—is a dubious object, always running the risk of boring readers into despairing apathy or hopelessly perplexing them with complexity. Instructional books abound, but few succeed in their mission of imparting theoretical wisdom or keen, practical skill. The best few I’ve encountered in my various roles have mostly done the former. In my days as an educator, I found abstract, discursive books like Robert Scholes’ Textual Power or poet and teacher Marie Ponsot’s lyrical Beat Not the Poor Desk infinitely more salutary than more down-to-earth books on the art of teaching. As a sometime writer of fiction, I’ve found Milan Kundera’s idiosyncratic The Art of the Novel—a book that might have been titled The Art of Kundera—a great deal more inspiring than any number of other well-meaning MFA-lite publications. And as a self-taught audio engineer, I’ve found a book called Zen and the Art of Mixing—a classic of the genre, even shorter on technical specifications than its namesake is on motorcycle maintenance—better than any other dense, diagram-filled manual.
How I wish, then, that as a onetime (longtime) grad student, I had had access to the English translation, just published this month, of Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis, a guide to the production of scholarly work worth the name by the highly celebrated Italian novelist and intellectual. Written originally in Italian in 1977, before Eco’s name was well-known for such works of fiction as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, How to Write Thesis is appropriately described by MIT Press as reading: “like a novel”: “opinionated… frequently irreverent, sometimes polemical, and often hilarious.”
For example, in the second part of his introduction, after a rather dry definition of the academic “thesis,” Eco dissuades a certain type of possible reader from his book, those students “who are forced to write a thesis so that they may graduate quickly and obtain the career advancement that originally motivated their university enrollment.” These students, he writes, some of whom “may be as old as 40” (gasp), “will ask for instructions on how to write a thesis in a month.” To them, he recommends two pieces of advice, in full knowledge that both are clearly “illegal”:
(a) Invest a reasonable amount of money in having a thesis written by a second party. (b) Copy a thesis that was written a few years prior for another institution. (It is better not to copy a book currently in print, even if it was written in a foreign language. If the professor is even minimally informed on the topic, he will be aware of the book’s existence.
Eco goes on to say that “even plagiarizing a thesis requires an intelligent research effort,” a caveat, I suppose, for those too thoughtless or lazy even to put the required effort into academic dishonesty.
Instead, he writes for “students who want to do rigorous work” and “want to write a thesis that will provide a certain intellectual satisfaction.” Eco doesn’t allow for the fact that these groups may not be mutually exclusive, but no matter. His style is loose and conversational, and the unseriousness of his dogmatic assertions belies the liberating tenor of his advice. For all of the fun Eco has discussing the whys and wherefores of academic writing, he also dispenses a wealth of practical hows, making his book a rarity among the small pool of readable How-tos. For example, Eco offers us “Four Obvious Rules for Choosing a Thesis Topic,” the very bedrock of a doctoral (or masters) project, on which said project truly stands or falls:
1. The topic should reflect your previous studies and experience. It should be related to your completed courses; your other research; and your political, cultural, or religious experience.
2. The necessary sources should be materially accessible. You should be near enough to the sources for convenient access, and you should have the permission you need to access them.
3. The necessary sources should be manageable. In other words, you should have the ability, experience, and background knowledge needed to understand the sources.
4. You should have some experience with the methodological framework that you will use in the thesis. For example, if your thesis topic requires you to analyze a Bach violin sonata, you should be versed in music theory and analysis.
Having suffered the throes of proposing, then actually writing, an academic thesis, I can say without reservation that, unlike Eco’s encouragement to plagiarism, these four rules are not only helpful, but necessary, and not nearly as obvious as they appear. Eco goes on in the following chapter, “Choosing the Topic,” to present many examples, general and specific, of how this is so.
Much of the remainder of Eco’s book—though written in as lively a style and shot through with witticisms and profundity—is gravely outdated in its minute descriptions of research methods and formatting and style guides. This is pre-internet, and technology has—sadly in many cases—made redundant much of the footwork he discusses. That said, his startling takes on such topics as “Must You Read Books?,” “Academic Humility,” “The Audience,” and “How to Write” again offer indispensable ways of thinking about scholarly work that one generally arrives at only, if at all, at the completion of a long, painful, and mostly bewildering course of writing and research.
FYI: You can download Eco’s book, How to Write a Thesis, as a free audiobook if you want to try out Audible.com’s no-risk, 30-day free trial program. Find details here.
There may be no more a macabrely misogynistic sentence in English literature than Edgar Allan Poe’s contention that “the death… of a beautiful woman” is “unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” (His perhaps ironic observation prompted Sylvia Plath to write, over a hundred years later, “The woman is perfected / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment.”) The sentence comes from Poe’s 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” and if this work were only known for its literary fetishization of what Elisabeth Bronfen calls “an aesthetically pleasing corpse”—marking deep anxieties about both “female sexuality and decay”—then it would indeed still be of interest to feminists and academics, though not perhaps to the average reader.
But Poe has much more to say that does not involve a romance with dead women. The essay delivers on its title’s promise. It is here that we find Poe’s famous theory of what good literature is and does, achieving what he calls “unity of effect.” This literary “totality” results from a collection of essential elements that the author deems indispensable in “constructing a story,” whether in poetry or prose, that produces a “vivid effect.”
To illustrate what he means, Poe walks us through an analysis of his own work, “The Raven.” We are to take for granted as readers that “The Raven” achieves its desired effect. Poe has no misgivings about that. But how does it do so? Against commonplace ideas that writers “compose by a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition,” Poe has not “the least difficulty in recalling to mind the progressive steps of any of my compositions”—steps he considers almost “mathematical.” Nor does he consider it a “breach of decorum” to pull aside the curtain and reveal his tricks. Below, in condensed form, we have listed the major points of Poe’s essay, covering the elements he considers most necessary to “effective” literary composition.
Know the ending in advance, before you begin writing.
“Nothing is more clear,” writes Poe, “than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before any thing be attempted with the pen.” Once writing commences, the author must keep the ending “constantly in view” in order to “give a plot its indispensable air of consequence” and inevitability.
Keep it short—the “single sitting” rule.
Poe contends that “if any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression.” Force the reader to take a break, and “the affairs of the world interfere” and break the spell. This “limit of a single sitting” admits of exceptions, of course. It must—or the novel would be disqualified as literature. Poe cites Robinson Crusoe as one example of a work of art “demanding of no unity.” But the single sitting rule applies to all poems, and for this reason, he writes, Milton’s Paradise Lost fails to achieve a sustained effect.
Decide on the desired effect.
The author must decide in advance “the choice of impression” he or she wishes to leave on the reader. Poe assumes here a tremendous amount about the ability of authors to manipulate readers’ emotions. He even has the audacity to claim that the design of the “The Raven” rendered the work “universally appreciable.” It may be so, but perhaps it does not universally inspire an appreciation of Beauty that “excites the sensitive soul to tears”—Poe’s desired effect for the poem.
Choose the tone of the work.
Poe claims the highest ground for his work, though it is debatable whether he was entirely serious. As “Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem” in general, and “The Raven” in particular, “Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all poetical tones.” Whatever tone one chooses, however, the technique Poe employs, and recommends, likely applies. It is that of the “refrain”—a repeated “key-note” in word, phrase, or image that sustains the mood. In “The Raven,” the word “Nevermore” performs this function, a word Poe chose for its phonetic as much as for its conceptual qualities.
Poe claims that his choice of the Raven to deliver this refrain arose from a desire to reconcile the unthinking “monotony of the exercise” with the reasoning capabilities of a human character. He at first considered putting the word in the beak of a parrot, then settled on a Raven—“the bird of ill omen”—in keeping with the melancholy tone.
Determine the theme and characterization of the work.
Here Poe makes his claim about “the death of a beautiful woman,” and adds, “the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.” He chooses these particulars to represent his theme—“the most melancholy,” Death. Contrary to the methods of many a writer, Poe moves from the abstract to the concrete, choosing characters as mouthpieces of ideas.
Establish the climax.
In “The Raven,” Poe says, he “had now to combine the two ideas, of a lover lamenting his deceased mistress and a Raven continuously repeating the word ‘Nevermore.’” In bringing them together, he composed the third-to-last stanza first, allowing it to determine the “rhythm, the metre, and the length and general arrangement” of the remainder of the poem. As in the planning stage, Poe recommends that the writing “have its beginning—at the end.”
Determine the setting.
Though this aspect of any work seems the obvious place to start, Poe holds it to the end, after he has already decided why he wants to place certain characters in place, saying certain things. Only when he has clarified his purpose and broadly sketched in advance how he intends to acheive it does he decide “to place the lover in his chamber… richly furnished.” Arriving at these details last does not mean, however, that they are afterthoughts, but that they are suggested—or inevitably follow from—the work that comes before. In the case of “The Raven,” Poe tells us that in order to carry out his literary scheme, “a close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident.”
Throughout his analysis, Poe continues to stress—with the high degree of repetition he favors in all of his writing—that he keeps “originality always in view.” But originality, for Poe, is not “a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition.” Instead, he writes, it “demands in its attainment less of invention than negation.” In other words, Poe recommends that the writer make full use of familiar conventions and forms, but varying, combining, and adapting them to suit the purpose of the work and make them his or her own.
Though some of Poe’s discussion of technique relates specifically to poetry, as his own prose fiction testifies, these steps can equally apply to the art of the short story. And though he insists that depictions of Beauty and Death—or the melancholy beauty of death—mark the highest of literary aims, one could certainly adapt his formula to less obsessively morbid themes as well.
Nearly everyone—from the most minimally educated to the most academically accomplished—has experienced at least once that panicked loss for words colloquially known as “writer’s block.” Faced with the glacial expanse of a blank page, or screen, the fingers fumble, heart races, and the brain seizes up. And, for those who write for a living, for whom writing is a defining characteristic of their very existence, it can seem like one’s very soul becomes imperiled, abandoned by the muses or whatever fickle personification of creative inspiration.
The malady is seemingly universal, even, writes The Independent, among “some of history’s most famous, and prodigiously fluent, authors,” like Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Joseph Conrad. One particularly perfectionistic strain of writer’s block—the search for le mot juste—is forever associated with Madame Bovary author Gustave Flaubert, who described the sickness to a friend as “stay[ing] a whole day with your head in your hands, trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.” Clearly, such illustrious names as the above found some sort of cure for the block, or we may not know their names at all.
Some writers deny the very existence of writer’s block. Novelist Kathy Lette belittles the notion as sounding like a “prison wing for authors who make too many puns—a punitentiary,” and she claims that “women writers don’t have time for writer’s block.” Jeffrey Archer says he has never had writer’s block, even though he named his Majorca home “Writer’s Block.” I diagnose these authors with a severe form of psychological repression, perhaps brought on by extreme and traumatic bouts of writer’s block.
From even a cursory survey of those who openly admit to the pain of running out of things to say from time to time, it seems there are as many ways to get going again as there are writers. The Independent quotes novelists like Philip Hensher, who takes “the Tube to the end of the line,” then walks back into central London—a very geographically exclusive fix, to be sure. A Flavorwire list brings us remedies from Maya Angelou, who would “write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat’” until the muse returned to save her from insanity. Neil Gaiman takes an entirely different approach—he gets up and walks away to “do other things.” Though it may seem in moments of severe writer’s block that nothing else could possibly matter, his tactic—research suggests—may be just the thing to get the creative unconscious going again.
Speaking of the unconscious, Anne Lamott recommends to her students that they commit to writing three hundred words on how much they hate writing, then “on bad days and weeks, let things go at that… Your unconscious can’t work when you are breathing down its neck. You’ll sit there going, ‘Are you done in there yet, are you done in there yet?’” Not helpful. In the videos above, see how popular best-selling novelist Dan Brown deals with a laggardly unconscious. Love, hate, or be indifferent to his work, but you must admit, his is a very novel method: Every hour, Brown gets up and does some pushups and sit-ups to “get the blood moving,” since it’s very hard to write the kind of “fast-paced plots” he does “if your blood pressure’s dropped too far.” Brown also gives his brain a daily supply of fresh blood by hanging upside down each day, either in gravity boots or, as The Telegraph video directly above details, an “inversion table.”
Strange, but no more so than many other writers’ rituals. Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth century author of Tristram Shandy, had what may be my favorite design for conquering writer’s block: he would shave his beard, change his shirt and coat, send for a “better wig,” put on a topaz ring, and dress “after his best fashion.” Mock if you must, but it seems to me that no method of combating writer’s block is too outlandish for those whose lives and livelihoods depend upon turning out the words. We may not always like what we write—some days we may positively hate it—but there may be no worse, more useless, feeling for a writer than being unable to write anything at all.
If you have your own suggestions for getting over writer’s block, please let us know in the comments below. We’d love to try them out.
Remember when television was the big gorilla poised to put an end to all reading?
Then along came the miracle of the Internet. Blogs begat blogs, and thusly did the people start to read again!
Of course, many a great newspaper and magazine fell before its mighty engine. So it goes.
So did television in the old fashioned sense. So it goes.
Funny to think that these fast-moving developments weren’t even part of the landscape in 1991, when author Kurt Vonnegut swung by his hometown of Indianapolis to appear on the local program, Across Indiana.
Host Michael Atwood pointed out the irony of a television interviewer asking a writer if television was to blame for the decline in reading and writing. After which he listened politely while his guest answered at length, comparing reading to an acquired skill on par with “ice skating or playing the French horn.”
Gee… irony elicits a more frenetic approach in the age of BuzzFeed, Twitter, and YouTube. (Nailed it!)
Irony and humanity run neck and neck in Vonnegut’s work, but his appreciation for his Hoosier upbringing was never less than sincere:
When I was born in 1922, barely a hundred years after Indiana became the 19th state in the Union, the Middle West already boasted a constellation of cities with symphony orchestras and museums and libraries, and institutions of higher learning, and schools of music and art, reminiscent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War. One could almost say that Chicago was our Vienna, Indianapolis our Prague, Cincinnati our Budapest and Cleveland our Bucharest.
To grow up in such a city, as I did, was to find cultural institutions as ordinary as police stations or fire houses. So it was reasonable for a young person to daydream of becoming some sort of artist or intellectual, if not a policeman or fireman. So I did. So did many like me.
Such provincial capitals, which is what they would have been called in Europe, were charmingly self-sufficient with respect to the fine arts. We sometimes had the director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra to supper, or writers and painters, and architects like my father, of local renown.
I studied clarinet under the first chair clarinetist of our orchestra. I remember the orchestra’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, in which the cannons’ roars were supplied by a policeman firing blank cartridges into an empty garbage can. I knew the policeman. He sometimes guarded street crossings used by students on their way to or from School 43, my school, the James Whitcomb Riley School.
Vonnegut’s views were shaped at Shortridge High School, where he numbered among the many not-yet-renowned writers honing their craft on The Daily Echo. Thought he didn’t bring it up in the video above, the Echo also yielded his nickname: Snarf.
Vonnegut agreed with interviewer Atwood that the daily practice of keeping a journal is an excellent discipline for beginning writers. He also considered journalistic assignments a great training ground. He made a point of mentioning that Mark Twain and Ring Lardner got their starts as newspaper reporters. It may be harder for aspiring writers to find paying work these days, but the Internet is replete with opportunities for those who crave a daily assignment.
It’s also overflowing with bullet pointed lists on how to become a writer, but if you’re like me, you’ll prefer to receive this advice from Vonnegut, himself, on a set festooned with farming implements, quilts, and dipped candles.
The interview continues in the remaining parts:
Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Like Vonnegut, she’s a native of Indianapolis, and her mother was the editor of the Short Ridge Daily Echo. Follow her @AyunHalliday
H.P. Lovecraft is remembered as a brilliant fantasist, a creator of a completely unique universe of horror. He’s also remembered, unfortunately, as a bigot. But the author whose head—to the chagrin of some—provided the model for the World Fantasy Award is not often remembered as a particularly good writer. Or rather, I should say, a particularly good stylist. His writing can sound stiflingly archaic, overstuffed with Victorianisms. “His prose, “writes Scott Malthouse, “can be turgid and adjectives suffocating,” and “his characters tend to be as thin as the paper they’re printed on.”
Writers love him, Malthouse argues, because he was such an original “world builder,” not because he was a fine artist. Elizabeth Bear at Tor echoes the sentiment, writing that Lovecraft’s work is “criticized for its style, for its purpleness and density and failures of structure,” yet still evokes such a potent response that “the Lovecraftian universe must be considered a collaborative effort at this point,” since so many writers have furthered his “appealingly bleak” vision. You can download a good part of his collected works in ebook and audiobook formats here.
So perhaps he isn’t such a bad writer after all? In any case, he’s certainly a very distinctive one whose style, like Joseph Conrad’s, say, or even William Faulkner’s, endears readers precisely for its feverish excesses. Lovecraft himself was very self-conscious about his craft and took writing very seriously—enough to have published a lengthy, highly detailed essay called “Literary Composition” which tackles in several paragraphs a host of issues the writer must contend with: grammar, “reading,” vocabulary, “elemental phrases,” description, narration, “fictional narration,” “unity, mass, coherence,” and “forms of composition.” We won’t recite the whole of his advice here—you can read the whole thing for yourself. But to give you some of the flavor of Lovecraft’s pedagogy, we bring you his list of twenty “types of mistakes” young writers make.
See his complete list below.
Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos.
Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep.
Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved
Ambiguous use of pronouns.
Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.”
Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs.
Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.”
Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest,”
Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise”, or “He said the earth was”
The split infinitive, as “to calmly ”
The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met”
False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.”
Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.”
Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.”
The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.”
Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me”, “Leave me take this”, “He was obsessed with the idea”, or “He is a meticulous”
Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena”, or “two stratas of clouds”.
Use of false or unauthorised words, as burglarise or supremest.
Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness.
Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its.
Most of this is solid, common sense writing advice. Some of it isn’t. As with all things Lovecraft, you would be wise to use your discretion. A full read of Lovecraft’s treatise on composition will give you some sense of how to begin writing your own Lovecraft pastiche. For even more of his advice on the writing of fiction—particularly, as he called it, “weird fiction,” see his list of five tips for horror writing, which we featured in October.
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