Writing Well: References
If you want to be a better writer, invest in a handful of useful reference books. Yes, some of them (big dictionaries) are expensive, but if you have a good used book store handy, you can get a nice selection for 50% off and sometimes even better bargains. As a rule of thumb, don't buy a real reference book more that ten years old (check the date on the "edition," not the "copyright"). Language changes, and nothing is more dated than an obsolete rule. Here are recommendatons for dictionaries, grammar/punctuation guides, help with the big picture (style, organization, ideas), some suggestions regarding major reference books like encyclopedias and atlases, and finally some useful Internet sites.
Dictionaries, Thesauruses, and Such
If you don't have a dictionary, invest in a decent-sized (500+ pages) hardcover less than ten years old. Paperback knockoffs of these dictionaries are a bad choice. They usually have two problems:
- They have fewer words in them.
- They fall apart if you use them.
Think about it: If you need to look up a word, what are the chances it was dropped when they reduced the hardcover MegaPub's English Dictionary from 400,000 words to 200,000 words so it would fit in your back pocket? And how many 500-page trade paperbacks have you had fall apart the first time you opened them? Now, how often do you expect to open your dictionary? Those little paperback dictionaries, which run $7 - $10, are a false economy. You can get a new Merriam-Webster Collegiate from Amazon for less than $20, and it will be obsolete (ten years from now) before it starts falling apart. If you don't have $20 right now, try a used book store, where you can get something comparable for $10.
Yes, the Merriam-Webster Collegiate is my recommendation, mainly because of bang for the buck. A comparable Oxford or American Heritage will cost you $30-40. With bargain hunting, you might score something intimidating like the Random House Unabridged, weighing in, when I bought mine, at ten pounds plus, but that's not a necessity, it's a luxury. I love it, but I don't really need it.
If you are buying the Merriam-Webster Collegiate, consider paying a few bucks extra for the one with a CD. It's handy when you are on the computer and off-line, and much faster than waiting for the Merriam-Webster site. I'm assuming you bookmarked m-w.com, incidentally.
How 'bout a thesaurus? The easy answer is "No." The thesaurus is the caffeine cap of reference books. When you use one to perk up your writing, the most likely effect is that people will wonder why your writing is so twitchy. Read around in a thesaurus to get ideas if you like. Don't "spice" your writing with unfamiliar words the thesaurus assures you are the same. No two words are the same; if they were, why have two? "Scarlet" is not "crimson," "carnelian" or even "red." "Fast" is not the same thing as "quick." Each word has its subtle differences. To this day, I can't remember if a "tourmaline" dress is blue or green. (Apparently it can be pretty much any color! Thank you, Wikipedia.) The exotic words have the extra problem of being uncommunicative for readers unfamiliar with them (exactly what color is a "ichor complexion"?); and when you use them wrongly, you run the risk of getting caught by someone who does know what they really mean ("She was jocond to see him"?).
If you are tempted by the seductive promises of the thesaurus, consider getting a Dictionary of Synonyms. It's not the same thing at all. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Synonyms includes definitions, sadly lacking in a thesaurus.
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Buy Secondhand? One reference you should grab secondhand is a dictionary of quotations. Quotations are never out-of-date, so who needs the newest edition? Look for Barlett's and the Oxford, but others are also helpful. And again, if free and on-line is your thing, check out Bartleby, where you will find not one, but three. As well as the complete King James Bible, and all of Shakespeare.... It's a treasure. |
If you just have to have a thesaurus, you'll find a free one at m-w.com and the venerable Roget's at Bartleby. [Top]
Grammar,
Punctuation
and Usage
First off, you need to remember that grammar and usage are matters of opinion. That's right; the catch is, "informed" opinion. In fact, even some punctuation rules are debatable. That doesn't mean you can do whatever you please because "it's all relative." If you need an opinion about a pain in your ear, a doctor's is likely to be more useful than an astronomer's or a cabbie's. Likewise, a grammar book has a more informed opinion about grammar than, say, my Uncle Fred.
But grammar changes, and usage is what good writers are actually doing (which is writing, not following rules). Punctuation varies depending on which authorities you listen to. For example, it causes me psychic pain to leave out the comma after "Punctuation" in my heading up there, and yet strict followers of the AP Stylebook (that bible of punctuation heretics) would respond to its presence as if it were a flatulent cat. Go figure. But we would all agree, regardless of our stylistic religions, that if I write "it's present," I better mean "it is present," or my credibility is in question.
So, what to do? Easy answer?
A Treat for If you want to enjoy reading about punctuation, get a copy of Eats, Shoots, & Leaves, by Lynn Truss. Truss is British, which means some of her comma rules are upside down and inside out, but she has a wonderful sense of humor. This playful book is about as painless a way to polish your punctuation as I can imagine. I made the mistake of loaning my copy to a writer friend. Got to get a new one now. |
Again, when buying secondhand, try to get a edition less than ten years old, and you'll be fine. A relatively new college handbook will handle the more common questions about grammar, punctuation, how to quote from books, and so forth, its rules nicely ornamented with examples. Any college handbook with the name of a publisher you recognize is likely to be good enough. If it turns out to be inadequate for your needs, then consider getting the Chicago Manual of Style, the AP Stylebook, or Words into Type. My preference is the Chicago, but that's because I'm an apostate academic.
If you are looking for something in between the professional reference and the college handbook, a real bargain is Anne Stilman's Grammatically Correct, published by Writer's Digest. It's under $20 and immensely readable. (Amazon also stocks a pocket-sized paperback for under $10.) Finally, if you need a free, on-line resource, Bartleby comes to the rescue again with the American Heritage Book of English Usage. [Top]
The Big Picture: Style and So Forth
The world of writing advice is full of windy generalizations and pontifications. And it's inhabited by witch-hunters (who would consider me literate — or illiterate — because I hypenated back there) and snake oil salesmen. One crowd is eager to tell you how wrong you are, and the other will try to convince you that he has the magic, little-effort formula for mastery of writing. Ignore them all.
If you want "home study" on good writing, consider Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg.
Wish I'd Said That! Williams covers everything from grammar to how to turn an idea about a poem into an essay. His advice is sound, cynical, and ethical. I'm prejudiced, of course, because he's a fellow apostate unimpressed by the hauls of academe. |
To improve your editing skills, study Claire Kehrwald Cook's Line by Line: How to Improve Your Own Writing. Cook takes you through the editing process with methods, rules, and tips for each step. Her audience is academic scholars, and she speaks with authority after a career of copy-editing for the Modern Language Association. Her advice is excellent; easy to understand and hard to argue with. Cook takes the useful approach of turning bad writing to good in her examples. Truth be known, most good writing is bad writing fixed.
On the AP side of the fence, have a look at Bill Walsh's The Elephants of Style and Lapsing into a Comma. Walsh is a senior copy editor for the Washington Post. The refreshing thing about his "curmudgeon's guide" is that it is open to the grim realities of change. Journalists must be, of course, but professional grammarians tend to be intractable regardless of their calling.
A favorite style book of mine is Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noel Thomas & Mark Turner. It is a bit more scholarly than some, but the authors begin from an attractive idea: "writing is an intellectual activity, not a bundle of skills." I also have enjoyed Joseph M. Williams' Style and Virginia Tufte's Artful Sentences, both of which approach the question of style on the sentence level. All three are worth a glance at least.
If you want to read about how to write better prose, find a book by a writer you respect (as opposed to one you are supposed to respect). For example, John Gardner, who taught English in upstate New York and wrote some fine novels, also wrote three books about writing fiction. I love his novels, so I enjoy reading what he has to say about writing. On the other hand, as much as I like the fiction of John Barth, I haven't much interest in what he has to say about writing. And the best advice in the world would fall on my ears like cold drizzle, if the author were Ernest Hemingway, Patricia Cornwell, Sherman Alexie, or Norman Mailer. Try Gardner's The Art of Fiction, particularly if your ultimate ambition is writing fiction.
I haven't read Stephen King's On Writing, but I have glanced through it and I don't hesitate to recommend it. I have read King's other nonfiction and most of his novels. He may not be Nobel material, but he's a good craftsman and he writes well about writing. Other writers to look into would be Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Robert Graves (The Reader Over your Shoulder) and of course George Orwell. These are all "real writers" writing about writing with a literary bias, so you may not be interested. Don't force yourself to read them. It's not a test.
Not into fiction? Find some respected writers in a field you like and read them. For example: John McPhee or Peter Mathiessen (earth sciences), Stephen Jay Gould or Loren Eisley (biology), Lewis Thomas or Richard Selzer (medicine), Jared Diamond or Barbara Tuchman (history) — any non-fiction writer who's won the National Book Award and most who've won the Pulitzer Prize are safe bets.
If you want my recommendation for the non-fiction writer writing about writing, start with William Zinsser's On Writing Well.
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I say "start" because I assume that you already have that badge of seriousness, Strunk and White. If not, get one, because without it you have no credibility. This thin book has ruled for fifty years, and for good reason. Strunk and White is The Elements of Style, a hundred pages of good, well-illustrated and precisely-written advice so fundamental that the very title is often mimicked in other disciplines (and parodied, as Walsh does, above). For example, I have a copy of The Elements of Programming Style around here somewhere, and I may have something called The Elements of Web Style ("Wired Style"?). If you have Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, don't just touch the cover reverently with clean fingertips; read it. Read it in sips and nibbles. Carry it with you on the bus or for lunchtime fare. Leave it in the bathroom. It will teach you; it still teaches me, and I am a certifiable old dog. If you want to sample before buying, The Elements of Style is available on-line at Bartleby. [Top]
Atlases, Encyclopedias, and Such
If you really need an atlas, chances are you need a new one, and you need to handle it to decide if it has what you need, so go to Amazon after you decide which one will do. Political boundaries and country names change faster than fashions, and the word "atlas" covers an amazing multitude of very different collections of information. My favorite atlases are Goode's, now published by Rand McNally, and the Dorling Kindersley World Atlas. But my bias is toward topographical and data plot maps.
My parents got us an Encyclopedia Brittancia because they believed it was necessary to our education. It wasn't. Those of us who loved books loved it, but we would have headed for the library if we didn't have it. Those of us who didn't love books had no more use for it than for a boat oar in Arizona.
But it was a treasure room I loved deeply. Today, the Internet has replaced that two-shelf wonderland for inquiring kids. As an adult, my encyclopedia needs fall into two areas — relieving brain cramps and getting quick facts. Was the Appian Way in Italy or Greece? What about the Pantheon? When did Millard Fillmore die? What's the formula for ammonia? Between Wikipedia and Google, I don't need an EB for any of that.
If you covet an encyclopedia, definitely haunt the used book stores. Even the shelf-cracking EB turns up at big discounts, and the formula for ammonia doesn't change with passing years. If you want an encyclopedia for your kids, to turn them on to written research, look for two things: size and pictures. Size, because we can't predict what they might find interesting, and pictures because they are eye candy with a purpose. Don't worry about "accuracy"; that's an adult issue.
"Don't worry about accuracy"!!! Nope. The most respectable encyclopedias are as marbled with fake facts as a good steak with fat. Experts argue, even about facts, and you are as likely to get false information from the stuffy EB as from the community-based Wikipedia. Sad, perhaps, but true and confirmed by research.
So that means you can't trust anything? No, it doesn't mean any such thing. It means you have to trust somebody. You are trusting me right now... or not.
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Come to Think of It, |
Credibility is not infallibility, remember. Just because a "fact" is in an encyclopedia doesn't make it right. This year's racism may be last year's science; Google Shockley if you don't know what I mean, or read Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. You are the decider, and if your job is to persuade someone else, being right is less persuasive than appearing to be right. That, too, is life. [Top]
What About the Internet?
Three sites are extremely valuable: The first is Google, but you know that. The second you may not have discovered: Wikipedia. Google will help you find things you need; Wikipedia is a non-traditional encyclopedia of community-created information. Another grand collection, this time of experts, is Bartelby.com. Here you will find online references (including Strunk and White) like dictionaries and usage guides, free encyclopedias, books of quotations, the Bible, Gray's Anatomy, and links to entire collections of famous authors.
You will be warned at one time or another that the 'net is a rotten place to do research because everybody from crank to expert is represented. In fact, let's get it over with: Consider yourself warned. It's true enough, what we say about Internet research, but your job as a thoughtful reader is sort out fact from factoid, expert from con. It no different from traditional research. The fact that Adolf Hitler's book is in a library doesn't mean he isn't a crank.
The real problem the Internet presents the researcher is not sorting the information out, but being buried in it. If you are going to use Google for research, learn how to use it effectively, or you will waste enormous amounts of time. For starters, find out how quotations marks and plus and minus signs can help out.
A proper essay would now summarize my grab bag of handy references and send you on your way with an encouraging word. It would tell you, for example, that you will be a better writer, perhaps even a better person, for owning the recommended tools. And you will, surely. So, there you are. Have fun, and good luck.
About Being Good
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