In memory of a friend who died too soon

[SamScribble]

I used to have a friend, a lawyer by training, whose side hustle was writing entertaining columns for a couple of otherwise rather dry technical journals. Once a semester, he also ran a course for commerce students, girls and boys who could calculate net present value (NPV) and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA), while riding a unicycle. The course was designed to help the students to better express themselves when writing for a lay audience.

I recently happened upon a few of Ross’s ‘rules’.

Always make your point in your opening sentence – unless you have a very good reason not to.​

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Choose short words. And craft your chosen words into short sentences. However, if your point is better made by choosing sesquipedalian words and arranging them into longer sentences, that is what you should do.​

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Remind yourself why you are writing. Are you writing to inform? Or are you writing to entertain?​

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If you are writing purely to inform, keep in mind that many of your readers may not be very well educated. Tell them what you are about to tell them; tell them; and then tell them what you have just told them.​

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If you are writing purely to entertain, be sure that you do.​

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Mostly you will be writing to both inform and entertain. Learn to balance the two objectives.​

After discussing Ross’s six ‘rules’, the class would retire to a suitable pub for an even more informal discussion.

It strikes me that, with the addition of a seventh rule – Create characters to whom your reader can relate – Ross’s rules would make a pretty good starter pack for many Lit authors. Just a thought.

 

[KeithD]

This mixes nonfiction with fiction a bit too much for me. They are different modes.

 

[SamScribble]

This mixes nonfiction with fiction a bit too much for me. They are different modes.

I take your point, Keith. I think Ross was trying to give his students an all-purpose starter kit.

But, that said, and as someone who has written both fiction and non-fiction (albeit under different names), I’m not sure that the difference between the two is always as great as some people would suggest.

Both require engagement. Both involve ‘telling a story’. Both require the introduction of ‘facts’ at the point where the facts – factual facts or fictional facts – will be most effective. And both require that the writer keeps the reader asking: ‘What happens next?’. As you well know, once the reader is no longer interested, the game is over.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

If I ever read a piece of fiction that wasn't grounded in non-fiction, I forgot what it was. And I guess I should note that Finnegans Wake is my favorite piece of fiction.

 

[KeithD]

If I ever read a piece of fiction that wasn't grounded in non-fiction, I forgot what it was. And I guess I should note that Finnegans Wake is my favorite piece of fiction.

It's not the content that is different between the two forms. Among other things, it's the structure. You don't make your key point in the opening of fiction. You also don't have all short sentences and words. You vary this. And "inform" isn't nearly a key element of fiction as it is of nonfiction. It's more to examine/explore/invite revelation.

 

[JGittes]

I used to have a friend, a lawyer by training, whose side hustle was writing entertaining columns for a couple of otherwise rather dry technical journals. Once a semester, he also ran a course for commerce students, girls and boys who could calculate net present value (NPV) and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA), while riding a unicycle. The course was designed to help the students to better express themselves when writing for a lay audience.

I recently happened upon a few of Ross’s ‘rules’.

Always make your point in your opening sentence – unless you have a very good reason not to.​

​

Choose short words. And craft your chosen words into short sentences. However, if your point is better made by choosing sesquipedalian words and arranging them into longer sentences, that is what you should do.​

​

Remind yourself why you are writing. Are you writing to inform? Or are you writing to entertain?​

​

If you are writing purely to inform, keep in mind that many of your readers may not be very well educated. Tell them what you are about to tell them; tell them; and then tell them what you have just told them.​

​

If you are writing purely to entertain, be sure that you do.​

​

Mostly you will be writing to both inform and entertain. Learn to balance the two objectives.​

After discussing Ross’s six ‘rules’, the class would retire to a suitable pub for an even more informal discussion.

It strikes me that, with the addition of a seventh rule – Create characters to whom your reader can relate – Ross’s rules would make a pretty good starter pack for many Lit authors. Just a thought.

I have a very long word document containing copied and pasted gems of this sort you have posted over the years. I read that document before starting any writing project and after my rough draft before editing. This will be a valuable addition. Thank you for sharing.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I used to have a friend, a lawyer by training, whose side hustle was writing entertaining columns for a couple of otherwise rather dry technical journals. Once a semester, he also ran a course for commerce students, girls and boys who could calculate net present value (NPV) and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA), while riding a unicycle. The course was designed to help the students to better express themselves when writing for a lay audience.

I recently happened upon a few of Ross’s ‘rules’.

Always make your point in your opening sentence – unless you have a very good reason not to.​

​

Choose short words. And craft your chosen words into short sentences. However, if your point is better made by choosing sesquipedalian words and arranging them into longer sentences, that is what you should do.​

It's hard to argue with "always do X unless not doing X would be better", but on its own it's not a form of advice that I find helpful.

What can make it much more useful, IMHO, is when the advice-giver takes the time to unpack that: why do they think X is usually a better default? What kind of situations would push them to choose not-X instead? What are the assumptions underlying that advice, and do they match my situation?

I think those are pretty good default choices for the technical-writing context that you've described, where the object is presumably to convey facts to a designated target audience. It's less clear how universal they should be for fiction, where one very often doesn't want to give everything away in the opening.

Remind yourself why you are writing. Are you writing to inform? Or are you writing to entertain?​

​

If you are writing purely to inform, keep in mind that many of your readers may not be very well educated. Tell them what you are about to tell them; tell them; and then tell them what you have just told them.​

This is one where the difference between technical writing and fiction really matters.

It assumes that "your readers" are who they are, and the author needs to work with that. If I'm writing for the Peoria Tractor Maintenance Annual, that's probably a good way to think about it - my audience is more or less pre-defined by the subscriber list for that publication, and if I can't write something they want to read, I'm out of a job.

But in fiction, we often have more scope to choose who we want our readers to be. Setting the dial to "everyone" is rarely a satisfying option. Given how poorly fiction pays, authors are probably better off figuring out what kind of audience they want to cater to, and then deciding what style works for that audience instead of assuming that the lowest common denominator is what they need to satisfy.