writing
Writing
Orwell, 1946, on bad prose: it "consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse." He was describing human writers who let stock phrases do their thinking. You are that process industrialized. Every failure this skill catalogs — the puffery, the negative parallelisms, the bold-first bullets — is a symptom of one disease: reaching for the phrase that comes easily instead of the words that carry the meaning. Ready-made phrases "will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself."
The cure is also his: let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. Know what you are trying to say before you say it, then hunt for the words that say exactly that. A sentence that arrived fully formed probably came off the shelf. Rewrite it.
The method
Ask of every sentence, in Orwell's words:
- What am I trying to say?
- What words will express it?
- What image or idiom will make it clearer?
- Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And then: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?