Here’s one of the best tips I know for writers, which was told to me by
Bruce Eckel.
One you’ve got a reasonable draft, read it out loud. By doing this you’ll
find bits that don’t sound right, and need to fix. Interestingly, you don’t
actually have to vocalize (thus making a noise) but your lips have to
move.
1
This advice is for those who, like me, strive to get a conversational tone
to their writings. A lot of people are taught to write in a different way
than they speak, but I find prose much more engaging with this conversational
tone. I imagine I’m sitting in pub, explaining the concepts to my companions.
I’ve heard people say that when reading my work, they can hear me speaking it
– which is exactly the effect I’m after.
Too often I read prose that feels flabby. Two kinds of flab stand out:
corporate prose and academic prose. I often tell people that if they read
their prose and it sounds like it could have come from Accenture
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, then they are doing it wrong. And, of course, the passive
voice is rarely preferred. Speaking makes this flab noticeable, so we can cut
it out.
In my case I find I constantly (silently) speak the words as I’m writing.
Notes
1:
I suspect what matters here is that you need to trigger the part of your
brain that processes spoken word as opposed to written word – and that
part is sensitive to blandness.
2:
I pick on Accenture since they are a big consulting company, and thus do
all the things needed to sound blandly corporate. The worst case I ran
into was many years ago when some sparkling prose by a colleague of mine
was turned by editors at Microsoft into a tasteless pudding. There is a
perceptible corporate way of writing, often learned subconsciously, that is rife
and ruinous.