During the first week of May, I invited writers to join me for two free online Writer’s Diet Clinics, in which we discussed how to cook up delicious, nourishing prose for your readers to savor!

If you missed this event, you can register below for the free 25-minute Writer’s Diet Tutorial video, recorded during the live clinic on May 8. In the tutorial, you will learn about the online Writer’s Diet Test and my premium Writer’s Diet PLUS tool for WriteSPACE members.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

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In the first hour of each session, Helen guided participants through a brief Writer’s Diet tutorial to introduce her free online Writer's Diet diagnostic tool and its younger, more sophisticated sibling, the Writer’s Diet app for MS Word. (Some seasoned WD users could opt to spend that time doing a 25-minute pomodoro instead). In the second hour, Helen ran a live writing clinic to help the writers make sense of their Writer’s Diet test results.

The Writer’s Diet is an excellent diagnostic tool; I use it regularly for my own writing. You can paste in a text sample of anywhere from 100 to 1000 words to get a diagnosis, which is split into different categories. If you get a diagnosis of ‘Heart Attack’ or similar, the results will light up with rainbow colours, indicating you have many editing options available. In the case of this tool, the more colour you see, the more your verbal arteries are being clogged (metaphorically speaking, of course).

I love that you can filter by specific categories with the test. You click on each box, and it will give you the diagnosis just for that category. Helen offered some golden advice for this test: Take it with a little pinch of salt. Remember that it’s an algorithm, and you are the style expert of your own work. It’s easy to assume that you must eliminate all of those coloured problem words—which would be difficult and unnecessary. You don’t have to remove them all, but it does teach you about your default word selection. I tend to towards ‘misty’ with be-words, something that I always check for! Using a lot of be-words can mean too many passive verb constructions. So when I revise, I remove ‘is’ and introduce active and robust verbs to drive my writing forward.

If you have yet to take the test, I hope you’ll enjoy exploring its many insights. And don’t forget to watch Helen’s tutorial via the green link above. A big thanks to Helen for hosting these two wonderful sessions. I look forward to seeing you all at the next WriteSPACE special event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the recording of the Writer’s Diet Tutorial in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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If you subscribed to #AcWriMoments — the 30-day series of daily writing prompts that I co-curated last month with Margy Thomas— you may recognize this image, which I’ve based on the gorgeous photograph of a yellow weaverbird building its nest provided by Steven Pinker as part of his Day 15 prompt, “Linger over good writing.”

Lingering over good writing (and encouraging other writers to do the same) is pretty much what I do for a living — so what better way to illustrate the technique than by lingering over Steve’s own #AcWriMoments contribution?

Taking a page from my own Day 26 prompt, “Write in color,” I’ve used colored pencils to spotlight some of the stylistic features in Steve’s work that I find worth savoring.

Enjoy!

The first paragraph

The starting point for becoming a good writer is to be a good reader. Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

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Steve’s opening paragraph (like the sentence I am writing right now) makes two potentially risky grammatical moves: the first sentence contains the bland be-verb phrase “is to be” (highlighted yellow), and we find multiple -ing words (highlighted blue) across the two sentences. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with either choice. However, as a general rule, be-verbs lack the kinetic energy of more active, vivid verbs, while the suffix -ing can signal the presence of either a verb, noun, or adjective, depending on context; so unless you’re in full control of your syntax, a surfeit of -ings can end up messing with your reader’s brain!

Needless to say, Steven Pinker is in full control of his syntax and style. The is to be phrase in the first sentence functions as a kind of syntactical fulcrum, balancing the phrases a good writer and a good reader (highlighted in pink), while the second sentence uses the repeated -ings to good effect and leaves us in no doubt of Steve’s facility with active verbs (highlighted in orange): acquire, spot, savor, reverse-engineer.

Take a moment, too, to spot and savor the poetry in this passage: the alliteration of spotting and savoring; the assonance and consonance of reverse-engineering examples.

The second paragraph

Much advice on style is stern and censorious. A recent bestseller advocated “zero tolerance” for errors and brandished the words horror, satanic, ghastly, and plummeting standards on its first page. The classic style manuals, written by starchy Englishmen and rock-ribbed Yankees, try to take all the fun out of writing, grimly adjuring the writer to avoid offbeat words, figures of speech, and playful alliteration. A famous piece of advice from this school crosses the line from the grim to the infanticidal:

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—wholeheartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

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Moving a bit more quickly now, let’s ride the wave of these four splendid sentences, which roll us inexorably toward that famous “murder your darlings” quote by Arthur Quiller-Couch, a starchy Englishman if ever there was one. To fully appreciate their tidal flow — surging from 8 words to 22 and then 34 before ebbing back to 17 — I recommend that you read the whole paragraph out loud.

Here I’ve highlighted the verbs in orange, the adjectives and adverbs in yellow, the nouns in turquoise, and the colorful quotations from Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation) and Quiller-Couch (On Style, 1914) in purple.

You can see at a glance how carefully Steve has chosen and balanced every word and phrase — even (or especially?) the ones borrowed from other writers as negative examples.

The third paragraph

An aspiring writer could be forgiven for thinking that learning to write is like negotiating an obstacle course in boot camp, with a sergeant barking at you for every errant footfall. Why not think of writing as a form of pleasurable mastery instead, like cooking or photography? Perfecting the craft is a lifelong calling, and mistakes are part of the game.

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Now the floodgates have opened, and the metaphors (highlighted in turquoise) come pouring in thick and fast. We’re carried through the bleak dystopian world of the first sentence, where learning to write resembles a particularly nasty kind of boot camp, to the utopian promise of the second, which offers us a vision of writing as “a form of pleasurable mastery instead, like cooking or photography.” By the final sentence, the word writing has disappeared, transmuted into a craft, a calling, and a game. (The maroon highlighting tracks the journey of writing from learning to doing to perfecting; the orange highlighting illuminates the key phrase at the heart of the paragraph).

Note the quickening rhythm as we’re drawn through the interminable obstacle course of the first sentence (30 words) and the questioning possibilities of the second (16 words) to the punchy promise of the third (15 words). A parallel shift in tone — from negative to hopeful to positive — can be tracked through the transition from third person (“an aspiring writer”) to second person (“barking at you”). By the time we reach the end of the passage, we know that the author isn’t just talking about writing; he’s talking to us.

The list

Though the quest for improvement may be informed by lessons and honed by practice, it must first be kindled by a delight in the best work of the masters and a desire to approach their excellence. Reverse-engineering good prose is the key to developing a writerly ear. Stylish writers, you’ll find, typically share a number of practices, including:

• an insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary;

• an attention to the readers’ vantage point and the target of their gaze;

• the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs;

• the use of parallel syntax;

• the occasional planned surprise;

• the presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement;

• the use of meter and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood.

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Good writing, Steve suggests here, is “kindled by delight.” In that spirit, I couldn’t resist using a rainbow of colors to highlight all the items on his list of stylish practices, as his own writing exemplifies every single one of them.

Thank you, Steve, for the examples and inspiration!

If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend that you to read Steven Pinker’s book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, from which his #AcWriMoments prompt was adapted.

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

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Have you fallen into a writing rut? Lost your way in the wordsmith woods?

On December 12, I presented my final WriteSPACE Special Event of 2022, Writing Wizardry. Participants accompanied me on a tour of some tricky syntactical terrain, and I taught them a couple of magic spells for getting their wordcraft back on track.

This event was offered in two live one-hour Zoom sessions.

Part I: Zombie Nouns and Somnambulant Verbs

We explored how zombie nouns (aka nominalizations) and sleepwalking verbs (aka statives) can suck the lifeblood from your sentences and paralyze your prose. Writers can rescue their readers from the Zombie Apocalypse by replacing or supplementing abstract language with concrete nouns, active verbs, and straight-shooting syntax.

Part II: From Scary to Stylish

Attendees tried out my special wizard-themed Writer's Diet test and learned how they can fine-tune this playful diagnostic tool to suit their own disciplinary conventions and personal style. I offered them an exclusive taste of four different versions of my witchy Writer's Diet brew: the paper-and-pencil version in the book; the free online test; the premium Writer's Diet Plus; and the downloadable MS Word app.

Below is WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ first-person account of the live event.

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Amy: I thoroughly enjoyed these two wordcraft workshops. Helen set the scene with the story of a magical realm—aka the brain. As the benevolent ruler of your realm, you act as its custodian and must organise emissaries (words) to travel beyond it and communicate your ideas. Your emissaries should be well-prepared and fit for the task. Zombie-like or sleep-walking ambassadors cannot perform at their best and may make your ideas sluggish and confusing.

Through storytelling, Helen clearly explained why nominalisations and somnambulant verbs cause so much damage in academic writing. I greatly appreciated the call to double-check my usage of them.

Helen explained her inspiration for her amazing TedEd video about Zombie nouns (watch it here!), which made me ponder the power of personification. I love the idea of animating abstract concepts by giving them voice, actions, or personality. For example, rather than talking about evolution abstractly as a cornerstone concept of biology, I tried to personify it into a character: Evolution is rather slovenly, fond of recycling used parts and procrastinating until the last minute. A terrible planner, Evolution will only patch together a new species once an ice age has already hit.

After watching the TedEd video on Zombie nouns and reading Chapter Two of Helen’s book The Writer’s Diet, why not try this creative exercise yourself: Identify a recurring nominalisation in your writing and turn it into a character. Which active verbs can you pair with this zombie noun to make it more concrete and active?

Helen reminded us that, at their best, abstractions can communicate complex ideas. It’s not necessary to cut them all out. Be selective! You can use zombie nouns as keywords, but make sure you surround them with concrete nouns and active verbs to cushion them in clarity.

Another key insight from these workshops was Helen’s commentary on be-verbs. Iterations of the verb to be are stative verbs (and therefore static verbs!); they express a state but don’t take the reader anywhere new, nor do they propel your sentences forward. You can use The Writer’s Diet online test to highlight be-verbs in your writing. If you use be-verbs often, seek active or interesting verbs instead (e.g. She was looking at becomes She scrutinised). In our Q&A discussions, we realised that active verbs are nearly always a good idea, no matter the topic or discipline.

Helen’s final piece of advice for using the online tool was to exercise your own judgement. If the test warns you away from some beloved or necessary terms, you don’t need to jettison them all. Simply be aware of how you frame these words—The Writer’s Diet is an algorithm and doesn’t have a brain, but you do!

A big thank you to Helen for her wordcraft wizardry and tips and tricks. I’m looking forward to seeing you all again at the next WriteSPACE Special Event!

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A recording of this two-part WriteSPACE Special Event is now available in the WriteSPACE Library.

Not a member? Register here to receive an email with the video link.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources.

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Last week, I received an email from John in North Carolina with the subject line "Love the tool, hate the metaphor":

• Dear Professor Sword,

  I enjoy reading your work and love using the Writer's Diet tool. However, I did want to share my extreme hesitation to use this with my classes. The idea of lean vs. flabby prose promotes a fat-phobic environment. I try to cultivate a place where writers of all sizes feel comfortable, including mentioning in class that the writer's diet is unnecessarily fattist. Have you ever considered updating the image with something more affirming or neutral?

I replied as I usually do, thanking John for taking the time to write and offering a few comments and suggestions:

1. The phrase "flabby or fit" is meant to refer to muscles, not to body types, and the overall message is a positive, health-focused one: If you want to develop strong muscles, it's best to eat a healthy diet and exercise regularly; likewise, if you want to develop strong sentences, you need build them up with good, nutritious words (not empty calories/clutter) and put them through a vigorous workout.

2. If, despite this explanation, you and your students still disapprove of the Diet and Fitness metaphor, you can use the blue Settings wheel to change the theme: for example, to Clear Skies ("cloudy or clear?"), Solid Ground ("swampy or solid?"), or Clean House ("cluttered or clear"?).  

3. Ideally, the online Writer's Diet test should be used as a supplement to the book, not as a stand-alone tool.  At the very least, I would encourage you and your students to spend some time reading my free online User Guide, which explains the key principles behind the test and offers lots of handy hints for getting the most from the tool.

4. Members of my WriteSPACE virtual writing community get access to a premium version of the Writer's Diet test that produces a customized Action Plan for every sample submitted -- using their preferred theme, of course!  You can try out the Writer's Diet Plus tool by using the discount code WRITERSDIET to get your first month of membership for free.  

But John's question got me thinking. What other metaphors for writing and editing do writers frequently employ, and which of these, like the Writer's Diet, might be open to ontological critique?  

• Cognitive load:  If you attended my WriteSPACE Special Event last week with psycholinguist Steven Pinker, you'll have heard us talk about cognitive load, a phrase used by psychologists to describe the amount of working memory required by the brain to complete a given task. Long, difficult sentences -- those filled with abstract language, disciplinary jargon, parenthetical phrases, subordinate clauses, and the like -- place a heavy cognitive load on our readers, thereby sapping their mental energy and reducing their comprehension. 

• Left-branching vs. right-branching sentences:  In an illuminating blog post titled How to Write a More Compelling Sentence, Inger Mewburn (aka the Thesis Whisperer) explains the difference between what linguists call "right-branching" versus "left-branching" sentences: right-branchers start with a subject-verb-object cluster and then add supplementary information, whereas left-branchers pile on all the extras before we even know what the sentence is about. Steven Pinker offers this example of a left-branching sentence, the subject of which, policymakers, does not appear until more than halfway through: "Because most existing studies have examined only a single stage of the supply chain, for example, productivity at the farm, or efficiency of agricultural markets, in isolation from the rest of the supply chain, policymakers have been unable to assess how problems identified at a single stage of the supply chain compare and interact with problems in the rest of the supply chain."  (Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century). 

• The Lard Factor: In his book Revising Prose, Richard Lanham encourages writers to calculate the Lard Factor of an edited piece of prose by subtracting the number of words in the edited sentence from the number of words in the original, then dividing the difference by the original.  For example, if we were to trim the 63-word behemoth quoted above down to 43 words, the Lard Factor (or percentage of excess words eliminated) would be 32%. 

Viewed through a certain kind of critical lens, all of these metaphors are problematic. Cognitive load suggests that light is good, heavy is bad.  The branching sentences metaphor depicts right as good and left as bad (a sinister sign of an implicit bias against left-handed people?) Lanham's Lard Factor exercise labels lean as good and fatty as bad (another "fattist" metaphor?) 

Yet each of these metaphors also reflects a physical reality.  Heavy loads are harder to lift than light ones; the English-speaking brain favors sentences that read, like words on the page, from left to right; lean meat is healthier to eat than fatty meat (unless you're a vegetarian, in which case you probably find the entire Lard Factor metaphor deeply unappealing).

Metaphors can shape us or empower us, lift us up or let us down.  Arthur Quiller-Couch infamously urged writers to murder your darlings -- that is, to commit infanticide against your most cherished sentences.  But we don't need to succumb to that kind of self-punitive advice; nor should we confuse a healthy diet of well-chosen words with an anxiety-inducing starvation diet.  Editing can be a joyful act, with affirmational metaphors to match.

That woman about to be crushed by weighty words?  Take another look.  Maybe that falling boulder is a beachball filled with air, and she's playing beach volleyball!    

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Do you use digital tools to improve your writing, or do your digital tools use you? How often do you stop to think about why, how, and when popular editing tools such as Grammarly should be trusted -- or not? If you're a teacher, supervisor, or manager, do you actively encourage your students and/or employees to interrogate the algorithms and assumptions behind such tools?

All of these questions, and more, were addressed during my lively conversation with Dr. Evija Trofimova, creator and curator of the playful Digital Writing Tools resource site, on April 13.

In the first hour of this two-hour event, Evija and I discussed the affordances, flaws, and redeeming features of various digital writing and editing tools, and Evija gave us a guided tour of her charming-yet-critical, stylish-yet-serious website. In the second hour, Evija and I facilitated a hands-on workshop focusing on the pros and cons of five well-known algorithmic tools: Microsoft Editor, Grammarly, ProWritingAid, the Hemingway App, and my very own Writer's Diet test. (We skipped Ginger, which now sits mostly behind a not-very-friendly paywall).

In the second half of the session, we had an opportunity to move into break-out rooms and explore the free version of each writing tools to test their idiosyncrasies, functionality, and usefulness. Our aim was to find out which features worked, which were limiting, which were surprising, and what changed in the results. We then regrouped to share our experiences and what we had discovered.

Some participants noted that the tools can increase curiosity about language and that some surface-level grammatical corrections can be helpful. Other participants pointed to lesser-known features such as “inclusiveness,” which may register different conventions when filters were changed from formal to casual. One group stressed that these are awareness-raising tools, not didactic “answers,” so it’s important to issue a warning to students about the pitfalls of relying on them solely as ‘correction’ tools. A few people mentioned that usability relies on who is using a tool and for what purposes: for example, a naive student using it for a surface level scan as opposed to a professional copy editor revising a monograph. Comparing the tools brought into relief the sensitivity, scope and utility of each tool - for example, one tool might pick up a certain issue, whereas another did not register it at all. We also considered developer changes over time, the impact of “software rot,” and the differences between free, basic, and premium versions. 

A few participants mentioned that users need to be judicious in accepting changes, remaining aware of what the tool can do and how to use it. (No tool is a cure-all!). Also, some tools (such as ProWritingAid) have a huge range of options which might be useful for some writers but overwhelming for others. Although these tools identify problem areas and flag issues, the degree to which each tool actually helps writers put to work the results and statistics generated was challenged; writers need to learn to integrate and improve their expression as part of their writing process when not using the tool. Several teachers who took part in the discussion highlighted the importance of using these tools critically rather than encouraging students to take up the corrections indiscriminately. When used well, these tools can be invaluable in building confidence as well as criticality. 

You may wish to have a play with the free versions of these tools, which you can access using the links above. In several cases, it could be worth your while to download a free app (e.g. the Writer's Diet add-in for MS Word), sign up for a free trial to test a more advanced version of the tool (e.g. ProWritingAid's Microsoft integration), or check whether your university or company has an institutional subscription (e.g. for Grammarly).

Participants also recommended the following tools:

Perfect English Grammar (Grammar checker)

PerfectIt - (paid Editing software)

Readability Statistics (part of Microsoft Word package)

A video of my conversation with Evija is now available in the WriteSPACE Library.

Not a member yet? Register here to receive an email with the video link.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources.

Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters (USD $5/month or $50/year).

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year).

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