Hurry: The beginning of the recallment procedure to your vehicle control mechanism must be done with haste or else vehicle crash can occur.

The following is an actual car recall letter from the 80s. The late, great Professors Frank Kinahan and Michael Williams gave it to me during their amazing class "The Little Red Schoolhouse," their method of improving style and clarity. Obviously this letter's the Goofus version. The Gallant goes something like this: "You need to get to a car mechanic to fix two problems. If you don't, you could crash and die."

A defect which involves the possible failure of a frame support plate may exist on your vehicle. This plate (front suspension pivot bar support plate) connects a portion of the front suspension to the vehicle frame, and its failure could affect vehicle directional control, particularly during heavy brake application. In addition, your vehicle may require adjustment service to the hood secondary catch system. The secondary catch may be misaligned, so that the hood may not be adequately restrained to prevent hood fly-up in the event the primary catch is inadvertently left unengaged. Sudden hood fly-up beyond the secondary catch while driving could impair driver visibility. In certain circumstances, occurrence of either of the above conditions could result in vehicle crash without prior warning.

And we wonder why General Motors is going out of business...

The *new, improved* parts of a sentence.

Back in your younger years, someone undoubtedly misled you by telling you that a sentence had to have a subject and a verb. Well, that person is right, but the term "subject" is confusing - the other definitions of the word are very passive: people are subject to violence, and people take a course in a particular subject. In this last example, the word subject isn't a subject, it's an object. Confusing, huh?

Instead of thinking about a sentence having a subject and a verb, try to think of it having a "character" and an "action." The star of the sentence, the character, is the thing that's DOING the action.

Consider this sentence:

The problem with that line of thinking, and in most philosophies involving laissez-faire economics, is that it is neglectful of human dignity.

What is the subject of the sentence? And what's that subject doing? The answer is that there are a couple subjects, woven within each other - it's a needlessly complex sentence. Is the "problem" the subject? Is the "line of thinking" the subject? How about laissez-faire economics, is that the subject? And each of these subjects are *abstract concepts,* not a simple person, place or thing. Some of the nouns are actually verbs turned into nouns (called a nominalization, if you want to get technical). "Thinking" is normally a verb, but in this case it's turned into a noun.

And that line of thinking is just sitting there - it's ISing. Who's neglecting human dignity? You see, the reader is forced to do some very hard work with this sentence. First, they'll have to imagine an abstract concept (a line of thinking) and then generalize that abstraction, and then it just sits there. It doesn't neglect, it IS neglectful. Of course it's neglectful, lines of thinking haven't helped anyone since the beginning of time.

And look at the distance between the subject and verb. From the problem to the "is" is quite a distance. What are the odds the reader will have to double back and make sure he or she has understood? Quite high.

Let's revise that sentence:

"In using laissez faire economics, the government has neglected basic human dignity."

Now, the truth of this sentence may not be proven, but it makes its point much better and faster, and has more information in fewer words. Did the writer mean the government? We don't know - it was ambiguous. He could have meant academia: "by perpetuating laissez-faire economics, Universities fail to teach their students basic human dignity."

You see, when we revised the sentence, both times, we included a character and an action. Yes, sometimes the character must be an inanimate object or some institutional body, but the AGENT OF CHANGE is the star of the sentence.

When writing a sentence, strive to make agent of change the main character of the sentence.

On Jargon

Suppose you're a healer or wizard in feudal times. You've discovered this magical potion called “aspirin,” made from the bark of the white willow tree. People flock to you, paying you thousands of gold ducats to use your miracle cure. Then like a moron, you decide to make your recipe for “aspirin” public. You have no secret anymore. Poof. The market disappears in puff of dragon smoke – everyone's out grabbing their own white willow trees. Everyone suddenly has the ability to stop fever and pain and you, my dear wizard, are out of a job. While everyone is healthy and headache free, you have paid for your candor with your livelihood.

Witness this hard water softener named Calgon. For those without Flash, the commercial went like this: When asked how he got his shirts so clean and white, this hoary Chinese launderer replied “Ancient Chinese Secret.” His assimilated wife, after calling her husband “some hotshot,” spills the beans. Loudly and within earshot of western roundeye customer, she tasks her husband with buying more Calgon. The justifiably angry colonialist whitebread occidental customer growls at the wizard of white: “Ancient Chinese Secret, huh?” The launderer goes out of business and has to run back to running opium dens, but that's a chapter for another commercial. You see, rather than communicate the recipe for white shirt, this caricature preferred to use jargon.

Jargon is the equivalent of misdirection or legerdemain - language used to confuse by dazzling. By confusing your clients, competitors and employers with magic and hoodoo and voodoo, you think you're making yourself indispensible, but instead you're breaching trust. The IT department tells you: "Oh, your hard drive needs to be defragmented because it's got bad sectors and trouble in the partitioning with--” Oh, just shut up and take my money, techie - until you discover he's full of crap and you get rid of the swindler. Jargon is only a temporary solution, at best.

Writing teachers use jargon too. But it's as flimsy and needless as magic. “Don't split an infinitive!” they'll tell you, lest your mother break her back or something. “For GOD's sake, stay away from that superlative before you modify it!” as if you remember what an infinitive or superlative is. As if you care. By confusing you with rules of grammar, by making you diagram and partition and conjugate and decline, they have dazzled you with a kind of illusion – that writing is hard, and that you should leave it to the professionals.

But writing isn't that hard. Don't let the practitioners of writing-jargon scare you away from writing.

The Dow of Pooh

The Dow of Pooh

Chapter 2: A picture is worth a thousand words, but a story is worth a thousand pictures -
in which you learn to captivate with the art of a good sentence.

Many of my business clients are worried about their grammar, and they hand me emails marked redder than blood as their managers marked their prose to hell. The last angry red mark is usually something like “I don't understand this,” and sometimes in some rather strong language So my clients ask me, “grammatically, what's wrong with this?” Often, the answer is “nothing.” Technically, the sentences are often fine but completely incomprehensible. My clients get caught up in the details of how to write. “I'm worried about the subjunctive.” Or “should I have split the infinitive? I don't remember.” The grammar isn't the problem. I want you to let go of the technical exigencies of the English language – we're not linguists, we're trying to get things done. Stop thinking of grammar as a subject, a predicate, a direct object, a subjunctive whosimiwhatsis followed by an infinitive that you don't split. Think of your writing as a story, a story consisting of a setting, a character and an action.

I'm a playwright, a screenwriter and a business writing coach and a business writing instructor at NYU. You may not see the overlap, because writing drama or comedy and writing business are two very different activities. One requires that you say what you mean, and one requires that you say precisely what you don't. However, I'm not going to talk about the difference between the disciplines, rather the thing they have in common: story. All writing needs a story. I'll say it again: all writing needs a story. I don't care if you're writing a three panel comic strip about a beagle and a bald kid or you're writing about the necessity mark-to-market valuation of assets; good writing always has a story.

But when you look for “storytelling” in your job description, it seems to be missing. You say “I'm not here to tell stories, I'm here to state the facts, justify my actions and not get fired.” However, from instructions on how to hunt for wooly mammoth to the Bible to the best Annual Reports, information is best communicated through story. I'm not asking you to turn your 10-Ks into a fable about a moose, I'm asking that you consider every sentence of what you write as a story in itself, and every sentence part of a larger story. Every sentence needs a story. I'll say it again: actually, no I won't. But I will ask you consider how a sentence can be a story.

What is a story? A story is a process of thought that leads one person to imagine what another person is thinking. So what does a story do? It focuses one person into thinking like the other person by engaging the imagination. And how does a story work? We already know – stories are in our bones, our DNA, our blood. Pick a story you love. Think about it. What's the first thing you think of?

“Here he is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.” - Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne

“The sacred soil of Ilios is rent with shaft and pit...” The Iliad, Homer

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Star Wars, George Lucas.

What is the first thing you think of when you think of a story? The first thing is where and when. Where are we starting? For Winnie the Pooh, we're starting “here.” For the Iliad, “the soil of Ilios” and of course we know where Star Wars starts. Stories need context, and the context that most grabs the imagination is the setting: the time and place. Every time you indulge in a memory of your childhood, what gets you started? Place and time. Every sentence should start with context, a way for people to place the story. And there's no better context than place. Orient your reader first. The setting might be the discussion of earnings, or it may be a galaxy far, far away, but align your readers to the where before moving on to the next part of the story.

What is the next part of the story? Every story has two things in common: people and action. People doing. It's that simple. In a sentence, people act. Remember that sentence: “in a sentence, people act.” Consider that sentence. The context, the where is “in a sentence.” The next step in any story is the who: “people.”

Human beings are social animals; we couldn't survive without other people. To us, people are the most important things on the planet. And yet we constantly forget to include them in our sentences. Too frequently we'll start with an abstract concept that seems to rise ex-nihlo, or out of nothing. “Customer service is a top priority at CompanyCo,” is not a powerful story. The star of that sentence, the one who's out there doing stuff (in this case, not much - 'is') is customer service. In the movies, I've never seen Customer Service is never played by Harrison Ford. In your childhood, do you remember customer service ever coming to your rescue? Did customer service ever buy you ice cream? “At CompanyCo, we value our customers,” is a much better story.. We start with a setting and then comes the who. And next, we come to the meat of the sentence – the action.

The point of every story is the action. And it's the last thing people remember. In a PowerPoint presentation, the last slide is generally “Next Steps,” or the action you want the group to take. When you read correspondence from a colleague the one thing you want to understand is “what do you want me to do about it?” And that's what you remember, the action, the last portion of the email. When your colleague closes the email, the last thing you want him or her to read is what they're supposed to do. And so it is with every sentence, the meat comes after the salad. Where, who and action.

So a sentence is a story, and each story consists of “where,” “who” and “do.” It's that simple. Setting, character, action. See? When you cast your stories with humans they're more interesting. When they do stuff, we follow them. Try to give every sentence some human interest. Or at least give every sentence a more interesting subject than “Customer Service.”

The Stakes

In screenwriting, when we submit a script that people won't read, it's accompanied by something called a “logline,” or a one-to-two sentence summary of the entire two-hour picture. You have to distill every action, motion and character into two (preferably one) sentences. And every screenwriting textbook will tell you to give the buyer a setting, a character, an action... and then something very important – the stakes. Stakes are a reason to care – in screenwriting stakes are life and death. In business, stakes are time and money. When you write to a customer, a colleague or manager always keep in mind “so what? What if I don't listen to you?” We'll talk about the So What in the next chapter and how to get people to listen and hang on your every word.

Punch Your High School English Teachers in the Face -or- BAD RULES

Three rules you can throw out the window:

1) A preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with. Says who? Excuse me, “says whom?” Winston Churchill used to make fun of this rule when he said “this is the sort of trouble up with which I will not put.” If you need to dangle a preposition to make your sentence more comprehensible, so be it.

2) You're not allowed to ever split an infinitive. For some reason, you can't put words between to and the verb when using the infinitive form. Why? I have no clue. Some of my favorite phrases are rife with split infinitives. Any Star Trek fans out there? “To boldly go where no man has gone before” sounds better than “To go boldly where no man has gone before.” It's not so bold after the infinitive.

3) Never, ever modify a superlative. This rule certainly doesn't apply in the US, where the people elected to form a more perfect union. I do wish people would follow one element of this rule, though. Whenever I hear someone say “somewhat” or “very” unique, I break out in spots. Unique means “one.” You can't be somewhat singular or very singular any more than you can be a little pregnant or slightly dead.

Welcomez to Write Goodly

My business clients ask me to do one thing “make me write good.”

“Well,” I say. And I pause and wait for them to ask the inevitable “well, what?” I say “make me write well.”

And then the client says “but I asked you first. What am I paying you for?” And I say “for what are you paying?”

And the client says “don't you know?” And we go along like that until I either get punched in the face, or they write me a check. To me, there's no more beautiful piece of writing than a check. There should be a poem written about it, but that poem will never be as beautiful as that check. Unfortunately, after they write me the check, I'll look at them straight in the eye and tell them “you can already write well.”

I know, I should have waited to cash the check, but I have to sound all mystical and sensei-like, that way they get the full Mr. Myagi wax-on-wax-off spirit of Zen writing. I'm a sage, a mystic. I am the master. But I'm also right – they do know how to write, because they know how to read.

Welcome to WriteGoodly - an unorthodox guide to writing without fear.