Smart Moves for Writing with Style and Clarity
Powerful writers focus on techniques, not on grammar rules
If your goal were to become a great competitor in a sport, would you train only by studying the rules of the game? Would you ignore working on the techniques that would allow you to play at a higher level? That would be like a football player who studies the 225+ pages of the NFL rulebook but ignores practice on the field.
Yet that is the way most people, including authors of writing books, approach writing. They focus on the rules of commonly accepted usage — grammar, punctuation, spelling, mechanics — while ignoring the techniques that propel prose forward with clarity, style and impact. These people are grammar geeks or word referees, not writers.
Avoiding usage errors is crucial, of course. Errors will always undermine your credibility and sometimes your meaning, no matter how good your ideas are. But you should strive for more. Avoiding every possible usage mistake only makes your writing "correct," not good or even clear.
I don’t believe any writer should aspire to such a low bar. Writers want their words to stand out in a crowd.
The content on this website targets writing techniques that will make your words as good as they can be in any kind of content. These include sound, word order, modifiers and the nucleus of the sentence.
Along the way we will also be looking at some grammatical principles that help writers to recognize the chunks of sentence and paragraph structure that they can manage for maximum impact. These principles also help to explain the language concepts that underlie many rules — but some rules will forever seem silly. Ω