5 Elements of Writing

來源: 心存善念於 2022-01-22 19:00:41 [檔案] [舊帖] [給我悄悄話] 本文已被閱讀：次 (4138 bytes)

5 Elements of Writing

You can train yourself to write well without really dying

by Joachim Krueger, Ph.D., who is a social psychologist at Brown University who believes that rational thinking and socially responsible behavior are attainable goals.

Good writing is hard. I have spent decades writing and re-writing formal and informal texts in English, my second language. I do not claim mastery, but I think my prose has gotten better.

So I offer a list of 5 points:

Relevance: A good text conveys the information that matters, although a few exceptions (see point 5) can spice things up without much distraction.
Economy: Wordiness debases writing by diluting it. I began this blog post with the sentence "Good writing is hard," when I could have written, "It has long been recognized that writers must overcome many difficult challenges before they can deliver an appealing and comprehensible body of text." Look out for boilerplate and run-on sentences! Even if a sentence is sound, most adverbs and adjectives can be stricken without loss of information. Strong action verbs communicate better than noun-heavy phrases.
Vividness: Good writing evokes images in the reader’s mind. It is perceptual and hallucinatory. A poor text allows readers to hear the words in their minds without evoking images. Again, action verbs help.
Coherence: The text must hang together, tell a story, and follow a narrative arc. Lists don’t do this, and this blog post is playing with fire. Each part of the text has its own mission. Section headers can help, but an elegant text won’t always need them. When the writing is good, readers know where they are in the story.
Humor: A good text is entertaining, and humor is a spice that keeps boredom at bay. Good humor is subtle and not thigh-slapping. Good humor lets the reader in on a joke without being condescending or obscure. The comedian Jay Leno lost his touch with the discerning audience when he started to explain his jokes. I am partial to humor that mocks gently. The object of the mockery should be the self, at least some of the time.