You may have been taught at school that you shouldn’t use a preposition to end a sentence. This is a hangover from Latin and Greek – sentences in the two languages never ended with prepositions.

Years ago I worked in the public relations department of Britain’s Science and Engineering Research Council and was taken to task by my boss for ending a sentence with a preposition. He told me it was; “Something, up with which, I will not put” – a quote from Winston Churchill.*

But that was then, and this is now. The grammar police won’t agree with me, but I’d argue this is a rule you can comfortably ignore for everyday writing, business writing, journalism and all types of online communications.

In practical everyday writing there will be many cases when it simply doesn’t make sense to contort your sentences to avoid ending with a proposition. Your writing will be clearer and easier to understand.

And you’ll be in great company. Most newspaper style guides allow it, most popular authors and the overwhelming majority of modern literary authors simply sidestep the rule.

*Churchill was on my side in this. I suspect my boss didn’t realise the quote was said as a joke.

Further reading:
Better writing: Rhythm
Better writing: Companies are singular
Better writing: The inverted pyramid
Better writing: Keep it simple
Better writing: And
Better writing: Go easy on the adjectives
Better writing: Capital letters

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There’s a lot of talk and writing online about the New Zealand government’s super city plan for Auckland.

The correct style for super city is two lower case words. The term is not a name, at least not yet. It is a description. Capitals are only used for proper names, so there shouldn’t be any confusion or question over the term.

Nor is it one word. Over the past twenty years or so there’s been something of a fashion to run words together and separate the component words with a capital letter. If a company or organisation wishes to do that with its name, or the name of a product, it has every right to do so.

But there’s no grammatical or logical reason to make a single word out of super city. Would you write Auckland is a BigCity? Of course not.

Fairfax’s Stuff.co.nz web site is confused about this. At the time of writing the newspaper company’s site has an Auckland Super City page which offers every permutation: one word, two words, upper case lower case. The New Zealand Herald is just as confused as this search shows: “supercity” Search Results. In fact it adds a hitherto unseen variation: Supercity, all one word with a single capital.

For clarification and background you may like to read my previous article about capital letters.

Short sentences are usually, but not always, best. Newspaper journalists are taught to only communicate one single thought in a sentence. That way the meaning is more likely to be clear to the reader.

The Economist Style Guide makes a joke of this in its guide to punctuation:

Use plenty. They keep sentences short. This helps the reader.

Much as I love short sentences, using too many of them makes text boring and difficult to read. They can also be uneconomical. As Harold Evans points out in Newsman’s English:

Often it is wasteful to introduce a subject and predicate for each idea. The subordinate clause in a complex sentence can state relations more precisely and more economically than can a strong of simple sentences or compound sentences joined by and, but, so, etc.

There’s another reason to use complex sentences in your writing. They add rhythm. Use too many short sentences and your copy will have a staccato rhythm that will annoy and distract readers. Use too many long sentences and your writing will lack pace, you may even lull your readers to sleep.

A similar logic can be applied to paragraphs. View them as bundles of closely related thoughts.

There’s no hard and fast rule about the best length for paragraphs. It’s a good idea to minimize the number of one sentence paragraphs you write. As with sentences, vary the pace. Too many consecutive short paragraphs is annoying. Too many long ones is hard work for the reader. Both approaches are difficult to read.

Above all else use paragraphs to make your writing easier to read.

This is part of a series of Better Writing columns. Read the others:

• Better writing: Companies are singular
• Better writing: The inverted pyramid
• Better writing: Keep it simple
• Better writing: And
• Better writing: Go easy on the adjectives
• Better writing: Capital letters

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• Oh, Canadian spellings (rebecca-rosenblum.blogspot.com)

Short snappy pieces work best online for a number of reasons.

First, people are less prepared to read long pieces online than short articles. I wrote about this previously in Why people read less online than with print.

Second, people read online material about 25 percent slower than print. Jakob Nielsen explains why in In defence of print. Nielsen’s article was written in 1996, but things haven’t changed substantially.

Third,  people get distracted easily online. There are advertisements and links to other web sites as well as bleeping notification of incoming emails, tweets and instant messages. If you write a brief article there’s a much better chance readers will get to the end before skipping off elsewhere.

Fourth, skilled writers aim for brevity because good, vigourous English is concise. Your goal should be to get your message to your reader as swiftly and as accurately as possible. Get on. Say what needs to be said. Get off. Leave the fancy, flowery stuff to poets and fiction writers.

Related articles:

• Better writing: Companies are singular
• Better writing: The inverted pyramid
• Better writing: Keep it simple
• Better writing: And
• Better writing: Go easy on the adjectives
• Better writing: Capital letters

Write mainly with nouns and verbs. Only use adjectives if they help make your meaning more precise.

In his book Daily Mirror Style, Keith Waterhouse describes the journalist’s view of adjectives. He says:

Adjectives should not be allowed in newspapers unless they have something to say.

People often think adjectives add colour to their writing. They do. But colourful writing isn’t necessarily easier to understand. In volume one of Editing and Writing, another newspaper journalist Harold Evans says adjectives give writing a superficial glitter.

He goes on to say:

Every adjective should be examined to see: is it needed to define the subject or is it there for emphasis?

Evans says “over-emphasis destroys credibility”.

Take care when using adjectives for emphasis. For example, the word very often adds nothing to a phrase. It can usually be left out without changing the meaning. The same usually applies to really, actually, rather and quite.

In practice many adjectives have no substance. You can removed most from your sentences. You won’t lose much, but you will gain clarity.

On a personal note, I’ve been paid to write by the word for many years so my copy is often loaded with lucrative adjectives – but my writing would certainly better without them.

For the record:

Nouns are used to name people, places, things and ideas. Verbs are doing words. They tell you what is going on. We say Adjectives modify nouns by telling you what kind it is, how many there are and which is the one being talked about. Adverbs do the same job for verbs.

Further reading:
Better writing: Rhythm
Better writing: Companies are singular
Better writing: The inverted pyramid
Better writing: Keep it simple
Better writing: And
Better writing: Capital letters

Because it’s more direct and easier to understand, the active voice is preferable to the passive voice.

With the active voice a subject (noun) acts (verb) on an object (noun). In the passive voice the object is acted on by the subject.

For example:

Active: Andy kicked the ball

Passive: The ball was kicked by Andy.

The active voice makes for tighter writing and easier reading. It is more personal and less formal. You’ll notice in the example that the passive version uses six words while the active phrase required only four and has simpler grammar. It’s both economical and clear.

Typically readers find phrases written in the active voice easier to understand as they involve fewer stages – or as someone once said “fewer mental hoops to jump through”. This becomes important in more complex sentences and longer pieces of text.

The active voice also reads as if the writer is more confident about the facts. In contrast, phrases and sentences written in the passive voice often appear to be tentative or uncertain. You’ll often find bureaucrats and corporate managers hiding behind the passive voice’s ambiguities.

For example, in the phrase; “the claims have been analysed”, it’s not clear who did the analysis. On the other hand; “We analysed the claims” is pretty clear.

Things get worse when the writer resorts to using the word ‘it’ rather than ‘I’ or ‘we’:

In the sentence “It was decided no claims would be payable” the author is deliberately hiding behind the ‘it’ implying that authority comes from on high rather than identifying the person who did the deciding.

There may be times when you need to use the passive voice. We’ll look at them in another post.

Earlier articles:

Better writing: Companies are singular

Better writing: And

Better writing: The inverted pyramid

Better writing: Keep it simple

Image via Wikipedia

Newspaper journalists are taught to write using the inverted pyramid structure.

It isn’t always appropriate, but the inverted pyramid has worked well for news stories since the days reporters telegraphed their dispatches to their editors. Today it works well for online writing.

The structure is similar to the classic essay structure you were taught — or should have been taught — at school.

Its most basic format goes something like this:

• Introduction — say what the piece is about; Answer questions like who, what, where and when. You can also explain why at this point, although that can wait until later.
• Then — expand, amplify;
• Keep doing this until you’ve told the whole story. Make the most important points first then add more and more detail in each additional paragraph.

Traditional newspaper editors often cut a story from the bottom if it needs to fill a specific space on a printed page. The inverted pyramid structure, with each paragraph being progressively less important, means editors remove the least crucial information first.

In principle, a news story written using the inverted pyramid structure can be cut at the end of any paragraph, even the first paragraph, and still be a self-contained story. In the online world this means search engines pay more attention to the most important words – which helps people find your writing. Those opening paragraphs also make neat summaries for listings and similar online uses.

So, to recap, the most important information goes in the first paragraph and each extra paragraph of subsidiary information carries progressively less weight. That’s where the inverted pyramid name comes from: the foundation sits at the top, the less important details are at the bottom.

At school we were taught never to start sentences with “And”.

And yet newspaper journalists do it all the time. It’s one of the first so-called writing rules professional writers learn to break.

There’s nothing wrong with using “And” to begin a sentence or a paragraph. In fact, it can be a great way to smooth the flow of a series of short sentences that would otherwise appear too staccato for comfortable reading.

However, it works best if you only break this rule in moderation. Overusing “And” at the start of sentences quickly makes your text boring.

As Keith Waterhouse points out in the excellent Daily Mirror Style, if you write too many sentences starting with the word, your prose will read like the New English Bible.

I consciously limit my use of sentences beginning with “And”. As a rule of thumb I aim for only one “And” sentence start in a short piece. For longer stories, you can get away with using it a few times. But control any urge to sprinkle sentences starting with “And” through your copy.

Other conjunctions

The school rule didn’t just apply to “And”, starting sentences with other conjunctions was equally forbidden. As an aside, conjunctions are ‘joining’ words used to string phrases together – usually, but not always, to build more complex sentences.

There are plenty of alternative conjunctions to call on at the start of your sentences:

• “But” is a great way to start a sentence that disagrees with the previous one.
• “Yet” is a less-frequently used alternative.
• “Or” is a great word for helping text flow.
• Some people don’t like sentences to start with “However”. I would regard that as another rule worth breaking.
• “Although” is a possibility. In practice it can be better to shorten the word to “Though” at the start of a sentence.

More ideas

Michelle Pierce covered this subject rather well in Three Grammar Rules You Can (And Should) Break for Copyblogger.

Better writing

This is the second in a series of articles aimed at helping you to improve your writing. The material is based on my 30-plus years experience as an editor and journalist working on newspapers and magazines. If you could use my skills to help communicate your message, please visit my website: billbennett.co.nz