Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

by Roy Peter Clark

Good readers may struggle with a difficult text, but struggle is not the goal of reading. The goal is fluency. Meaning flows to the good reader. In the same way, writing should flow from the good writer, at least as an ideal.

imagine the act of writing less as a special talent and more as a purposeful craft.

I once learned that only three behaviors set literate people apart. The first two are obvious: reading and writing; but the third surprised me: talking about how reading and writing work.

Remember, these are tools, not rules.

Do not try to apply these tools all at once.

You will become handy with these tools over time.

You already use many of these tools without knowing it.

Begin sentences with subjects and verbs.

Make meaning early, then let weaker elements branch to the right.

A writer composes a sentence with subject and verb at the beginning, followed by other subordinate elements, creating what scholars call a right-branching sentence.

Think of that main clause as the locomotive that pulls all the cars that follow.

If the writer wants to create suspense, or build tension, or make the reader wait and wonder, or join a journey of discovery, or hold on for dear life, he can save subject and verb of the main clause until later. As I just did.

Place strong words at the beginning and at the end.

Putting strong stuff at the beginning and end helps writers hide weaker stuff in the middle.

put your best stuff near the beginning and at the end; hide weaker stuff in the middle.

What applies to the sentence also applies to the paragraph,

George Orwell, who wrote of verbs: “Never use the passive where you can use the active.”

Tense defines action within time—when the verb happens—the present, past, or future.

Voice defines the relationship between subject and verb—who does what.

• If the subject performs the action of the verb, we cal...

• If the subject receives the action of the verb, we call...

• A verb that is neither active nor passive is a linking verb, a fo...

While Fleming uses the past tense to narrate his adventure, Gall prefers the present. This strategy immerses readers in the immediacy of experience, as if we were sitting—right now—beside the poor woman in her grief.

That’s the writing tool: use passive verbs to call attention to the receiver of the action.

Passive verbs emphasize the receiver, the victim.

The verb to be links word and ideas.

At their best, adverbs spice up a verb or adjective. At their worst, they express a meaning already contained in it:

Look also for weak verb-adverb combinations that you can revise with stronger verbs: “She went quickly down the stairs” can become “She dashed down the stairs.” “He listened surreptitiously” can become “He eavesdropped.” Give yourself a choice.

Prefer the simple present or past.

An inflection is an element we add to a word to change its meaning. For example, we add -s or -es to a noun to indicate the plural. Add -s or -ed to a verb, and we distinguish present action from the past. Add -ing to a verb, and it takes on a progressive sense—a happening,

Fear not the long sentence.

Write what you fear. Until the writer tries to master the long sentence, she is no writer at all, for while length makes a bad sentence worse, it can make a good sentence better.

It helps if subject and verb of the main clause come early in the sentence.

Use the long sentence to describe something long. Let form follow function.

It helps if the long sentence is written in chro...

Use the long sentence in variation with sentences of short...

Use the long sentence as a list or catalog of product...

Long sentences need more editing than short ones. Make every word count. Even. In....

Establish a pattern, then give it a twist.

To help readers, we punctuate for two reasons: 1. To set the pace of reading. 2. To divide words, phrases, and ideas into convenient groupings.

You will punctuate with power and purpose when you begin to consider pace and space.

If a period is a stop sign, then what kind of traffic flow is created by other marks? The comma is a speed bump; the semicolon is what a driver education teacher calls a “rolling stop”; the parenthetical expression is a detour; the colon is a flashing yellow light that announces something important up ahead; the dash is a tree branch in the road.

More muscular than the comma, the semicolon is most useful for dividing and organizing big chunks of information.

Parentheses introduce a play within a play.

But the dash has two brilliant uses: a pair of dashes can set off an idea contained within a sentence, and a dash near the end can deliver a punch line.

That leaves the colon, and here’s what it does: it announces a word, phrase, or clause the way a trumpet flourish in a Shakespeare play sounds the arrival of the royal procession.

Cut big, then small. Prune the big limbs, then shake out the dead leaves.

Begin by cutting the big stuff. Donald Murray taught me that brevity comes from selection, not compression, a lesson that requires lifting blocks from the work.

Whatever comes out of it must come out block by block and not sentence by sentence.” Perkins reduced one four-page passage about Wolfe’s uncle to six words: “Henry, the oldest, was now thirty.”

If your goal is to achieve precision and concision, begin by pruning the big limbs.