An unflinching look at our old bad writing and how it got better
The Gap
Just about every novice writer faces what Ira Glass calls “the gap.”
“Most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be—they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have,” he says. “It’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap.”
Fenwick is no exception. If you browse our blog archives you’ll find all manner of bad writing from our early days—from overt typos to cheesy metaphors. As the newest writer joining the team, I can see that even though they had an idea of the kind of work they wanted to create, they just weren’t there yet. That’s why I think it’s so important to update your old content.
In the past few weeks, I’ve done just that. I’ve combed through our archives to revise and update old favorites and along the way, I’ve unearthed some of the worst writing habits from Fenwick’s early history. In spite of my second-hand embarrassment, I think it’s important to highlight these faux pas. Even though there’s no quick fix to improving as a writer—you can’t fast forward time and practice—if you can identify your consistent bad writing habits, you know how to improve your writing going forward.
What follows is a no-holds-barred look at some of our writers’ (including our co-founder’s) worst recurring offenses—and what we all know better now.
Fake it ‘til you make it
It’s easy for new writers to fall into the trap of projecting experience in order to cover up their insecurity about their skills, and the Fenwick writers were no exception. The problem is, readers catch on—fast.
Take our old post, How to Build Your Writerly Network. It doesn’t read like an established writer speaking from real experience, though that’s the tone the article tries to project. Rather, it sounds like a new writer just beginning to build their network.
The effect? It sounds disingenuous.
As Chris has covered in another post, you can’t fake real experience: “Writers who haven’t spent time in an industry don’t know what is commonly known. They don’t know what they don’t know. They lack the verbiage, vernacular, and a sense of what sources are deemed credible.”
That’s not to say that the author shouldn’t have written about the topic, but as William Zinsser puts it in On Writing Well: “Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore a fundamental rule is: be yourself.” A better approach would have been to be completely upfront: “I’ve just started freelance writing, here’s how I’m building my network,” is a much more honest and intriguing read.
Inauthenticity is a macro-level faux-pas, but a lot of the errors that marred our old posts happened on the sentence level. Let’s have a look.
Word choice that’s cheesy (or just plain wrong)
Our older posts often used, shall we say, unique verbiage. Take, for instance, this sentence from Tools For Making And Saving Money As A Freelancer:
“There is plentiful research to show that people picking stocks do not beat the market for very long.” (emphasis added)
It’s hard to understand why the writer gravitated to the unnecessarily verbose “plentiful” when “plenty of” would have done just as nicely (and would have been grammatically correct). But I asked “Grammar Girl” Mignon Fogarty and she offered this explanation: “New writers often use big words to try to sound smart—‘utilize’ instead of ‘use’ and ‘prior to’ instead of ‘before,’ for example. Remember that your goal is to communicate clearly, not to impress your readers. Simpler is almost always better.”
While there’s nothing wrong with finding fresh alternatives for frequently-used terms—in fact, I would recommend it—the problem comes in sacrificing clarity in favor of flowery prose. In my experience, opting for fancier words makes you more prone to mistakes. Look at the use of the word “pealing” in the following sentence from Why Your Clients Can Probably Afford To Pay You More:
“I’ve been there, nervously hunched over the phone, voice pealing with fright, afraid the client might simply hang up.” (emphasis added)
The dictionary definition of “peal” is “a loud sound or series of sounds” or “the loud ringing sound of a bell”—the opposite of the speaker’s nervous demeanor. When writers try to embellish their prose, they often end up getting it wrong with words that don’t make sense in context.
Not to mention there’s a whole host of other words that suit the purpose of this sentence much better. How about quivering with fright? Or shaking? Perhaps quaking?
Mismatched pairs
Look at this sentence from Transform Your Writing From Buzzword Soup Into Captivating Copy – 7 Simple Tips, which discusses some of the problems plaguing business writing:
“It’s often riddled with clichés, jargon, acronyms, and buzzwords, which indicates the writers don’t actually understand their topics.” (emphasis added)
Does something seem a little off? Can’t quite put your finger on it?
Hoo boy, this is a dense one, but oh so crucial to understand if you want to write smooth prose. We’re going to get technical, so stick with me. (Maybe put on some scholarly ambient noise to set the mood.) Ready? Let’s do a brief grammar review:
In English, there are two critical parts to a sentence: a subject (a doer—think who or what) and a verb (an action). Subjects and verbs have to match: I am, but you are; he goes, but we go.
In a simple sentence, this kind of matching poses no problem for us. We know it’s wrong to say “he go to the store” or “we gives a gift.” But, it’s much easier to slip up when subjects are a long way from their corresponding verb: “The use of smartphones and tablets are prohibited” might seem like a correct sentence, but it’s wrong—the subject “the use” should take the singular form of the verb, “is.”
Try reframing the sentence as a question: “What are prohibited? The use of…” doesn’t make much sense, while “What is prohibited? The use of…” does.
The problem, as Bonnie Mills puts it in a Grammar Girl blog post on “disagreement-itis,” is writer amnesia. When facing compound subjects (ie. subjects with multiple parts) or long lists, “amnesiac writers forget about the first part of their subject, so they use the wrong verb.”
Let’s have a look at our sentence again: “It’s often riddled with clichés, jargon, acronyms, and buzzwords, which indicates the writers don’t actually understand their topics.” (emphasis added)
The issue is that the verb “indicates” agrees with the wrong subject—the singular “it” that begins the sentence. But the subject of this clause, which is the list of symptoms that indicates writers don’t actually understand their topics—clichés, jargon, acronyms, and buzzwords—is plural.
A better version of the sentence would read: “It’s often riddled with clichés, jargon, acronyms, and buzzwords, which indicate the writers don’t actually understand their topics.” To safeguard against such writer amnesia, have a look at the subjects and verbs of your sentences: Do singulars match with singulars and plurals match with plurals? If not, you know how to fix it.
Crossed wires
Check out this sentence from the earlier blog post: “Far better to show, not tell, and support your excitement with statistics and describe the reactions of others.”
Yikes.
If the hairs on the back of your neck aren’t prickling—they should be. In the words of Richard Nordquist, former Professor of English and Rhetoric, this particularly insidious error “clangs off the ear, destroys written sentences, and muddies any intention the author may have had.” The reason for this jarring effect? Faulty parallelism. Nordquist explains, “Faulty parallelism is a construction in which two or more parts of a sentence are equivalent in meaning but not grammatically similar in form.” In the case of our sentence, “statistics” and “describe” play equivalent roles in the sentence—they are both ways of supporting excitement—but the former is a noun and the latter is a verb.
Let me use an analogy: In my hometown, we have two main streets that run parallel to each other. At least in theory. In reality, the two streets curve around in all four compass directions and intersect—not once, but three times.
Confused? Here’s how it happened: In the early 1800s, when Mennonite farmers were settling the area, each family was supposed to contribute a portion of their plot to the road-building project. But being a pragmatic folk, each one made sure to use the least fertile part of their land for the road. The result is the twisting, snake-like street plan we have today.
Reading a sentence with poor parallel structure can feel a little like navigating around my hometown. As a reader, you think you know where things are going, and then, just like that, you’re crossing a street that logically shouldn’t be there. It undermines balance and prevents your reader from anticipating what’s coming next.
To fix this issue, simply implement proper parallelism: “Far better to show, not tell, and support your excitement with statistics and descriptions of the reactions of others.”
Bridging the Gap
Time and experience have allowed the Fenwick writers to loosen up: The days of faking experience or using big words just to sound like we know what we’re talking about are, thankfully, well behind us. (We also now have a fantastic copy editor on staff who checks our worst impulses. Thanks, Caroline!)
Does that mean we never slip up? Of course not—we’re only human.
Beyond enlisting the help of a copy editor, Chris and the team have developed more sophisticated editing strategies over time. Here are some of my favorite tricks I’ve learned over the past couple of weeks that I’ve already put into practice in my own writing:
1. Always sleep on it.
Chris is an always-sleep-on-it evangelist, and it’s easy to see why. In my own experience, it’s shocking how different a piece of my writing looks with fresh eyes and a bit of perspective. The errors I managed to glaze over the first time around become impossible to miss, and suddenly the way to end that awkward paragraph is clear.
Sometimes all you need is a bit of space.
2. Change the font.
This is an old writing hack Chris picked up years ago. Something about changing the font on a document makes it feel like a fresh piece of writing. Sure, it’s purely psychological, but it’s different enough to wake up my brain and force me to pay attention. I’m not quite this extreme, but Chris even likes to draft his work in Evernote and edit in Google Docs so his piece feels brand new.
3. Read work out loud.
Human brains are great at anticipating words from surrounding context and filling in the gaps—in fact, yuor barin can raed tihs, no pobelrm. Which is great for our crossword abilities, but not so much for our editing skills.
Reading work aloud is something I do to force myself to slow down and read what’s on the page, not what my brain thinks should be there. It also helps me ensure my writing sounds like natural human speech, which is the tone I’m aiming for.
What embarrassing mistakes did you make as a new writer? Got any go-to editing tricks? We’d love to hear all about them. Reach out to us on LinkedIn.
