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Effective WritingA Short Introduction

Tony Murfin BEng MSc MA

Creative Wrench

tony@murfin.me.uk

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Introduction

The English Language

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English

The English language is

rather like a monsteraccordion, stretchable at the

whim of the editor,

compressible ad lib.

Robert William Burchfield CNZM CBE, scholar, writer, and lexicographer.

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English as a Foreign Language

Is not a barrier to the very highest level of

achievement:

Joseph Conrad

Vladimir Nabokov

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ALL Writing is Creative

You must engage and embrace

the creative parts of your brain

in order to write!

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The Neuroscience of Writing!

The temporal lobes are necessary for

MEANING.

The limbic system is the seat of emotion anddrive andaspects of the feeling of being

inspired (Flaherty 2004).

The cerebral cortex controls the ABILITY to

write

Literally using DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE

BRAIN

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Exercise

What is WRITING?

How do we all understand and discus, say -

Aristotle?

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Some problems with English

English Departments!

Incredible flexibility

NO right and wrong: No Academie Franaise But pedantry and inflexibility abound!

USA and UK: Two countries divided by acommon language

The only solution is CONSISTENCY

Technological constraints! (pic)

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Video: Martin Amis

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What do these signs say?

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????

http://www.plexoft.com/cgi-bin/thorn.cgi

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How to Write

The Creative Process

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What is NOT in this lecture

Essay structure

Study skills

Research methods Plagiarism issues

Time management

Etc. etc. etc. See the resource section and speak to your

study skills advisors!

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What IS in this lecture

How to WRITE:- The discipline of communicating the

product of the intellect in the (English)language.

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Some advice on writing

Read it aloud to yourself because that's the only way to be

sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK

You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar

book, and a grip on reality. (Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the

garden or behind the fridge).

ask a friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone

[not] someone with whom you have a romantic

relationship, unless you want to break up.

A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go

for a long walk.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one

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Some advice on writing (2)

Do it every day. Make a habit of putting yourobservations into words and gradually this will become

instinct. (You need to write every day to get the rubbish

out of your system (T

edH

ughes)):Y

ou do not learn towrite except by writing.

Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being awriter's a good idea. .

Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more.

What is left often springs into life. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it

down.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one

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Helen Simpson

The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the

wall in front of my desk saying "Faire et setaire" (Flaubert), which I translate for myself

as "Shut up and get on with it."

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The First Steps

READ. THINK.

READ some more. THINK some more.

Organize your thoughts before you start to

write: how can you begin to write if you dont

know what you have to say?

Can you summarize the premise of youressay or paper in a SINGLE PARAGRAPH?

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Write!

Exercise (10 minutes)

Write on the subject given FREELY

WITHOUT EDITING

LEAVE MARGINS AND SPACES

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Write! (2)

The purpose is to generate text based on

the reseach and knowledge you now have- But NOT to produce finished copy-

A FIRST DRAFT in the sense that

Hemingway described it

The firstdraft of anything is sh*t

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Edit

This is CRITICAL

Convert draft to product (copy)

Read it critically! Are ideas connected? Do

they FLOW? Do they express what you

intended?

Be ruthless kill your darlings and CUT,

CUT, CUT.

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Everybody needs to edit or be

edited!

Even Jane Austen

The idea of prose flowing effortlessly from a

well of inspiration is a MYTH.

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http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/

manuscripts/blpers/1.html

Jane Austens draft of

Persuasion.

This is why you must

leave room for editing!

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The objective is to

Be consistent

Have the right level of formality

Express ideas precisely Be concise

Be objective.

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Proofread!

Carefully. This is one of the hardest things to do withyour own work.

What are you BLIND to? What mistakes do you

repeat? Proof for spelling, grammar, repetition redundancy.

Do it again after any revisions new errorsALWAYS creep in.

Do NOT rely on Spellchecker! Look out for malapropisms!

Check PUNCTUATION.

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Modern malapropisms

A decapitated coffee, please!

"Well, that was a cliff-dweller."Wes Westrum, about a close baseball game.

More subtle ones like foregoing or forgoing or

even there/their or sight/site (homonyms).

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children

learning?

They misunderestimated me.

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Exercise

In pairs: correct the handout text.

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How to Write

Writing Well

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How do you write well?

Readwell!

no advice will help more than to read goodauthors. Newspapers, unfortunately, are notgenerally written in the good English, if someeditorials are excepted. Darwin is good, thoughnot so precise in his use of words as Spencer.Thackeray uses English marvelously. Dickens isinclined to be careless. Robert Louis Stevenson isfamous for the care he took in his writing. Mark

Twains use of English is excellent.

Zeisberg, F.C., in Perry (1941), Chemical Engineers Handbook,2ndEdn., McGraw-Hill.

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What is good writing?

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What is good writing?

Our science, which we loved above everything, had

brought us together. It appeared to us as a flowering

garden. In this garden there were well-worn paths

where one might look around at leisure and enjoy one-self without effort, especially at the side of a congenial

companion. But we also liked to seek out hidden trails

and discovered many an unexpected view which was

pleasing to the eyes: and when the one pointed it out

to the other, and we admired it together, our joy was

complete.

David Hilbert, memorial address forHermann Minkowski.

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What is bad writing?

Is this bad?

The move from a structuralist account in which capital isunderstood to structure social relations in relativelyhomologous ways to a view of hegemony in which powerrelations are subject to repetition, convergence, andrearticulation brought the question of temporality into thethinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of

Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities astheoretical objects to one in which the insights into the

contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewedconception of hegemony as bound up with thecontingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation ofpower.

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More bad writing

From the Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest (1995 to 1998).

Stephen T. Tyman Ricoeur and the Problem of Evil, in The Philosophy of PaulRicoeur, edited, it says, by Lewis Edwin Hahn (Open Court, 1995):

With the last gasp of Romanticism, the quelling of itsflorid uprising against the vapid formalism of one strainof the Enlightenment, the dimming of its yearning for theimagined grandeur of the archaic, and the dashing of itstoo sanguine hopes for a revitalized, fulfilled humanity,the horror of its more lasting, more Gothic legacy hassettled in, distributed and diffused enough, to be sure,

that lugubriousness is recognizable only as languor, oras a certain sardonic laconicism disguising itself in a newsanctification of the destructive instincts, a new geniusfor displacing cultural reifications in the interminable shellgame of the analysis of the human psyche, wherenothing remains sacred.

http://www.denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm

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Beware!

Good or bad writing can be specific to

Culture

Genre Discipline

Publication

Individual

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Questions and Workshop

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Resources

See H/O