Say What You Mean and Mean What You Say
Precision and Prescription and Using Language Effectively
Welcome to an article that was originally scheduled for March. Please take a moment to close your eyes and join me in envisioning the screaming emoji. If emojis aren’t your bag you could picture the Munch painting instead. I used up all my available words on the long title and Shelf Life is over now, thank you for reading today. I appreciate you.
Just kidding, I have more. There are always more words.
Today’s article is about using precision language—the importance of doing so in your writing, and also the importance of knowing when it’s important to be precise in language use and when it doesn’t matter. In that vein, I will also touch on prescriptive language rules, which are a thing I think about quite a lot as a writer and especially as an editor and a socially conscious human being, or at least someone who tries to be socially conscious. Finally I’ll go over how to make sure you, as a writer, can use your revision time effectively to ensure you’re saying what you mean.
Today’s article is brought to you by the letters M and H, who flagged this topic as one of especial interest to themself like eight months ago. Friend, I finally did your thing.
As an editor, knowing the right words for things is part of my job. And knowing how to spell them is also part of my job. Never tell anyone this, but words with multiple double letters in them mess me up. I can’t spell committee without assistance. Usually I know how to spell words, even complicated words. I can never spell bureau or gauge on the first try. Well usually I can’t, I did this time. Weird.
I notice that people are really self conscious about their spelling and grammar when they talk with me or especially write to me (via e-mail, text message, etc) and will sometimes apologize for any errors I may see or hear. Believe it or not, even though I am an editor, I somehow manage to refrain from editing my friends’ casual communications. I would like to refer to a general life policy that I often cite when a man on the internet is trying to bait me into insulting him:
If you are good at something, never do it for free.
I actually have my own variation on this adage, which I will share here as I feel it serves me well and you might find a use for it in your own life:
If you are good at something, never do it for the wrong reason.
Use your skills and abilities for good and not for evil. I do things I’m good at for free all the time. I won’t say writing Shelf Life is one of those things, because I can’t say I’m good at it; but lots of other stuff. I help friends and family members with resumes. I make little gifts for the people I care about. I’m good at those things and I do them for free. An example of doing the things you’re good at for a good reason, whether you get paid for it or not.
Note that good does not equate to lawful nor evil to chaotic. I’m self-identified as chaotic good on the alignment chart template. Upper right corner, baby.
I have one hourly rate for all things so when people want me to do something for them it’s either that rate or its free because I care about them. There is no in between. Do not tell me I should open an Etsy shop selling the little gifts I make for the people I care about. Nobody wants a $500 gardening apron.
Unless I have been asked (and agreed) to review or edit someone’s writing, whether in a paid or unpaid capacity, I am simply not going to critique or correct that writing. I am not going to interrupt my friends to tell them they omitted an important comma or spelled a word wrong. For one thing, that’s not a great way to keep having friends. And for another, trying to police people’s spelling, grammar, usage, and mechanics in that kind of casual setting is racist, classist, ethnocentric, and ableist.
How is helping someone understand proper English racist? For starters, the erroneous belief that “proper English” is a thing that exists is a big red flag that someone has a racist or ethnocentric understanding of language.
There are more than 150 dialects of English and none of them are the one “proper” English nor are any of them more or less “proper” than any other. General American English is proper English (as are its regional variations like New York City and Mid Atlantic). British English is proper English (as are its regional variations like Glaswegian, Kentish, or South-Ulster). African American Vernacular English is proper English. Indian English, Pennsylvania Dutch English, Philippine English, Kenyan English, Uglish, Cajun Vernacular English, Jamaican Standard English, and Bajan English are all proper English.
Unless you know all of these dialects thoroughly you can’t really glance at a sentence with grammar that “sounds wrong” to you and declare that it is wrong based on your unilateral decision that one of those Englishes is the “proper” one and if the sentence you just read does not conform then the writer is using improper English.
It’s also classist and ableist to criticize others’ use of language in a social setting, even if everyone present has agreed to use your one and only preferred English for all conversation. Not everyone had or has access to the same education level and scope. Not everyone has the same facility with learning languages.
It’s fine. The important thing is understanding what is being said and being understood when you write or speak. That’s what matters. It’s not wrong to ask for clarification when you didn’t understand an unfamiliar idiom or word use or pronunciation but you don’t need to be Hermione sounding out leviOOOsa for Ron. Most of the time nothing will explode if somebody said a word differently than you think they should have.
Hey did you see what I did there? Did you see my shortcut? Anyway, the rest of the article is about shortcuts.
When you’re writing something for submission and, hopefully, publication, you will have to pick a mainstream English and do your best to adhere to its rules and regulations. Your beta readers and editors can help you with that as you polish up your revision to begin submitting. But I encounter many writers who iron out all of the grammar, punctuation, spelling, mechanics, and usage issues and believe that’s all one must do, as a writer, to be universally understood.
That’s not all. That’s not even the beginning.
I’ll get to the beginning in a minute. The beginning comes after this other stuff. This is the pre-beginning, the prologue (delete your prologue, I said what I said). Important information: What follows is not a process you should undertake while you are drafting. Do not stop vomiting up your first pass to think about this stuff. This is solidly in revision territory. It’s not even close to the writing/revising DMZ. This is a process you begin when drafting is over.
Does DMZ mean anything to you? Some readers will immediately think of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the border between North Korea (the DPRK) and South Korea (the ROK). My granddad served in Korea, as did my former in-laws and my stepbrother; so that’s what I was personally thinking of. Other readers probably thought of a demilitarized zone in network and information security, meaning a perimeter network that runs between a local area network (LAN) and the internet at large. Still other readers may not have made any association of meaning to the initialism DMZ and may have been confused and even navigated away to Google what I meant (come back!). And still other readers might have thought I mistyped DMX.
Hey, does DMX mean anything to you? Is it a language for working with Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services or a Ruff Ryder?
And so on. I hope you take my point.
When you’ve finished drafting, and you’ve taken a revision pass or two to refine your big-ticket items like plot, story, character, and setting issues, it’s time to sit down and tackle your line edit. You can do this on your own if you think you have the facility for it or you can hire an editor to assist. Line editing is sometimes used synonymously with developmental editing and sometimes with copyediting but it’s really neither of those things (it’s closest to developmental editing and sometimes done as part of the developmental editing process). Most editors who can do one can do the other two, the skillsets needed for the tasks overlap, but they are a bit different.
When you’re ready to attack your line edit you are going to begin at the beginning. This is the beginning of part one chapter one because you deleted your prologue. Or if you didn’t delete your prologue then you start at your prologue. Do yourself a favor and delete that prologue. Get started in three easy steps:
Pick up your (literal or figurative) red pen.
Put down your (literal or figurative) red pen.
(Chiwetel Ejiofor voice) Forget everything you think you know.
As writers, when we’re vomiting words out of our head and onto paper, we take a lot of short cuts. We have to. The brain ideates faster it verbalizes. No matter how fast you verbalize I suspect this is universally or almost universally true. I’m told I verbalize very fast and altogether too much but my brain generates content much faster when it’s going than I can adequately keep up with.
When you’re capturing your ideas and committing them to paper, you arrange them into parts and chapters and scenes and paragraphs and sentences (and hopefully not prologues). You need to get down all the important ideas and when you’re doing that you take shortcuts. You might not have time to describe the atmosphere of a speakeasy in the best possible way before you move on to the next thing so you mention a chanteuse on the small stage crooning “Ain’t Misbehavin” and move on. Or perhaps you only have enough time to note that your hero cracks open a Heineken before your brain is pushing you toward the next important action or dialogue.
So what’s wrong with a chanteuse on the small stage crooning “Ain’t Misbehavin” or a hero cracking open a Heineken? When you write either of these things you take a shortcut.
The line edit is the threshing floor. This is where we separate what nourishes the reader (germ and bran) from what is or might be indigestible (chaff). This is the stage where you need to look at each line of your text and, not to hearken back to Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter again—I don’t know why I do it so often—
“Of each particular thing ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature?”
To successfully line edit your own text, you need to divest yourself (as much as you can) of your mental baggage. Try to strip away the associations that your mind makes automatically and ask yourself:
What am I trying to say with this sentence? And
What am I actually saying with this sentence if I examine it without personal bias? And
If there’s a gap, how can I close it to make sure my sentence says what I want to convey?
Easy as pie, right? Is pie easy? Eating pie is easy sometimes, other times it’s like falling apart and hard to eat. Making a pie never easy. Many American speakers of English will understand the idiom easy as pie. Will all of them? What are you trying to say when you say something is easy as pie? Are you trying to say “this is easy”? Is this idiom showing up in dialogue? Probably legit—well, unless your character is in a period piece in the 19th century. Back then the idiom was “nice as pie” or “polite as pie.” Pie had nothing to do with ease until the 20th century. I have no idea what happened to make pie easier. Pie is still really hard to make.
What do you mean to convey when you say your hero cracked open a Heineken? Again, many or most American speakers of English will understand that this character is opening a beer with the intent to drink it. Perhaps in your mind’s eye you saw that Heineken can with its red star in his hand, but why is that what you saw? What does Heineken mean to you?
Are you trying to convey that this is a salt-of-the-earth guy who chooses a cheap, unpretentious beer? Or maybe you’re trying to show the reader that he has somewhat elevated taste in beer, so he reached for something better than a Miller High Life but nothing so fancy as a Delirium Tremens? Readers are going to break both ways. Some readers will break a third way, having no value judgment associated with Heineken, and they’ll take no additional meaning from this behind the fact that the gentleman is drinking a beer. Is this like a Corona in the Fast and the Furious franchise, someone’s signature beverage that he will always be seen drinking?
Your line edit is the opportunity to ask yourself what information you were trying to give the reader. If you truly have no deeper thoughts about the symbolism of Heineken, why did you include a brand name at all? Sometimes a beer is just a beer.
Tom cracked open a cold beer.
Did you mean to convey that this is a guy who just wants a basic, everyday beer?
“Whatever’s on tap is fine. I’m not particular,” Tom said.
Did you mean to tell us that Tom has somewhat discerning if not high-end taste in beer?
“None of that pisswater. A real brew.”
Is this Tom’s signature beverage that he reaches for every time?
“My usual,” said Tom, collapsing onto his favorite barstool.
These examples are all unmistakable and do not rely on your reader having exactly the same understanding of “Heineken” as you. But neither do they beat your reader over the head with a patronizing over-explanation to make sure they grasp exactly what you are trying to say. You don’t need to go overboard:
Tom ordered a Heineken, which had been his favorite beer ever since his college days at the University of Puerto Rico San Juan, where everybody preferred it to the local brews and left the Medalla for the tourists.
In my household, we have a Fast-and-Furious situation—you can have any beer you want as long as you want a Heineken. Did you know that this Dutch beer is ubiquitous in Puerto Rico? Now you know.
I’m already working on Thursday’s article which is a publishing industry piece about the long tail, one of my favorite topics that I hope you will find interesting. In the mean time: Stay cool, mask up out of an abundance of caution, drink water, and delete your prologue.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.