Chapter Five

Personality

Be Lively, Unpredictable, Playful, and Genuine

When you think of Chris Rock presiding over the Academy Awards, what traits come to mind? Energy? Clever wit? Humor? Unpredictability?

If you’re talkin’ personality, that man’s got it.

Now, when you think of someone writing with personality, what traits come to mind? I would argue some of the same. Whether conveyed in person or in writing, personality is associated with, among other traits, liveliness, unpredictability, and humor.

The writer, however, faces certain challenges that the oral communicator does not. Unlike Chris Rock before a live audience and a camera, the writer cannot rely on inflection, expression, gestures, body language, and flamboyant costumes to make a vivid impression. The writer must convey the traits of personality as features of written language.

Writing with personality and style can be achieved by learning the techniques I’ve presented in the first four chapters of this book. Here are some of the key concepts:

• Make every word count. Rather than “The fact that you are reading this book is an indication that you have an interest in writing,” write “Your reading this book indicates an interest in writing.”
• Use natural language. Rather than “A strong union affords strength and protection; a weak alliance engenders vulnerability,” write “United we stand; divided we fall.”
• Use words and images that appeal to the five senses. Rather than “They spat into the water behind the riverboat, feeling their oats,” write, as Rita Dove does in her poem “The Event,” “They spat where the wheel / churned mud and moonlight, / they called to the tarantulas down among the bananas to come out and dance.”
• Use action verbs to invigorate your writing. Rather than “Make a revision in this sentence,” write “Revise this sentence.”
• Use variety and rhythm to make your sentences memorable. To keep it interesting, mix it up.

Of the various techniques relating to sentence structure discussed in chapter four, these five are particularly useful for making a vivid impression on your reader:

1. Follow a long sentence with a short, snappy one. This long-short combination creates emphasis and makes you sound decisive.

2. Punctuate your beat. To bring a sentence to a dramatic halt, use punctuation. Particularly useful are the dash and the colon.

3. Use occasional sentence fragments. The reason: They change the pace. You also can use a sentence fragment after a complete sentence. Like an afterthought. Be careful, though. Not to overuse this device. It can become. Distracting.

4. Invert usual word order. Particularly useful is inversion, a technique called anastrophe by classical rhetoricians. Without its inverted structure, for example, the sentence you just read would sound like this: “Inversion, a technique called anastrophe by classical rhetoricians, is particularly useful.”

5. Use parallel structure. Rather than “You better work hard on your writing if you want to please your reader,” write “The harder you work on your writing, the more likely you will please your reader,” or write, as lexicographer Samuel Johnson did (and as I quoted him in chapter four), “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”

But remember that style, in its deeper meaning, goes beyond technique. There is an intangible quality to style that has to do with the way language conveys the writer’s personality, self, values, and character. To explore style in this deeper sense, I’m now going to build on the keys and techniques discussed so far.

Add Color and Unpredictability with Figurative Language

Perhaps more than any other aspect of writing, expressing your thoughts in figurative language draws on your creativity and imagination. There is no easy formula to help you create a good metaphor. Making an apt comparison is more the work of the unconscious than the conscious mind. It has more to do with an image or idea coming to you than you searching it out. Perhaps the best advice is to be open to that part of yourself that you associate with reverie and dreams. As Donald Hall advises in Writing Well, “Try to activate the daydreaming mind.” Let your thoughts wander.

To do so requires nonrational thinking, a particular type of inventiveness based on playfulness and imagination, a willingness to wander beyond conventional boundaries. It was for this reason that Aristotle declared, “By far the greatest thing is to be master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others. It is a sign of genius, for a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of similarity among dissimilars.” Whether you want to add a light touch, illuminate a complex situation with clarity, or cap off a description with a memorable image, offer a comparison.

Express your originality by making unlikely comparisons.

Sometimes the best way to make your point is to say what you don’t mean—or rather, to say what you mean but to say it nonliterally and unconventionally, in a way that surprises and delights your reader.

Imagine, for example, you are a writer and humorist named Garrison Keillor and you are describing a newly elected governor of Minnesota in his days as a professional wrestler. You want to capture the essence of this peculiar type of entertainer in all his garish glory. How do you go about it?

First, you come up with some colorful and vivid details. Then, to cap off your description, you conclude with an unanticipated comparison: “You see him cavorting around the ring, 6 feet 4 inches, 225 pounds, with a fringe of peroxided hair, wearing sort of tie-dyed tights, a man in a grotesque cartoon body. … He’s got a mustache and long, dangling earrings. He looks like a CPA at Mardi Gras.” It’s that last twist—an image that is at once outlandish and apt—that renders your description memorable.

To take another example, let’s say you are a newspaper columnist named James Lileks and you want to give your readers a feeling for the ludicrously oversized dimensions of the governor’s vehicle of choice, the Lincoln Navigator. Rather than offer an objective, point-by-point inventory of features, you stretch things a bit to capture the spirit of both the vehicle and its owner:

Well, you get the idea. Outlandish comparisons are fun. But they can be more than entertaining. Comparisons—whether they are analogies, metaphors, or similes—can lead to a deeper, more profound understanding than can literal description and objective detail.

Be the person who first thinks to question someone’s intelligence by saying, “He’s a few sandwiches short of a picnic.” Rather than “Duplication of effort was the reason for the cost overrun,” write “Duplication of effort was the cost overrun culprit.” Rather than “The practice may not be illegal, but it isn’t ethical,” write “The practice may not be illegal, but it doesn’t pass the smell test.” And rather than “I like e-mail because it’s efficient and direct,” write, as a student in one of my classes did, “I like e-mail because it’s efficient and direct. No receptionist, no voice mail, no elevator music.” Do as F. Scott Fitzgerald does when he makes that imaginative leap in describing Jay Gatsby’s mansion in The Great Gatsby as a place where music was heard “through the summer nights” and where “men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

When the time seems right—when you really want to drive home your point—abandon the realm of rational thought. Give in to your creativity and playfulness. Appeal to your reader’s imagination.

Use analogies to clarify or reinforce your meaning.

When you offer a comparison or analogy, you help your reader understand your meaning on a different—sometimes simpler, sometimes more profound—level. Rather than “This manual is poorly written,” write “Following these instructions is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with three pieces missing.” Rather than “Our sales representatives have trouble setting up an unfamiliar display unit,” write, as a student in one of my classes did:

Use analogy to help your reader grasp a complex idea, particularly when the concept is abstract or technical. Indeed, one measure of a technical writer’s effectiveness is the extent to which he or she is able to make complex ideas comprehensible to the nonspecialist. In an article that appeared in the May 6, 1999, Minneapolis Star Tribune, for example, John Mather, senior astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, described how the Hubble Space Telescope is changing the way scientists think about cosmology and the evolution of the galaxies. With Hubble orbiting above the obscuring effects of the Earth’s atmosphere, he explained, astronomers can look back in time to when galaxies were forming. Said Mather:

In a follow-up article that appeared a few weeks later, Robert Kirshner of Harvard University was quoted as saying that scientists “used to disagree by a factor of two concerning the age of the universe.” That was a huge gap, he explained, like “arguing about having one foot or two.” But now the range of difference has been narrowed to a mere 10 percent, which is more “like a difference of one toe. This is good to plus or minus one piggy.”

Creativity and playfulness of this sort come as a relief to your readers, especially when the information being conveyed is complex or difficult to understand.

As another example, compare—as Lynn Quitman Troyka does in the Simon & Schuster Handbook for Writers—two descriptions of the common wart. The first is from a medical encyclopedia, the second from Lewis Thomas, a physician and author known for his ability to render technical information in a colorful, accessible style:

Although the first description provides specific and objective information, the second creates a better feeling for the unusual features of these curious afflictions.

If you are a technical writer, your foremost concerns are clarity, precision, and accuracy. But don’t be so bound by the demands of objectively perceived, precisely rendered detail that you neglect a powerful tool of communication: your imagination. Rather than “Combining atoms from different molecules is difficult because of nearly intractable differences in their physical properties,” consider writing “Combining atoms from different molecules is like mixing vinegar and oil.” Use imaginative analogies to help your reader get the point.

The creative writer likewise can put analogy to good use. In Memoirs of a Geisha, for example, Arthur Golden uses unadorned comparisons, often to the natural world, to convey the nuances of complex human emotions, as when his narrator observes:

Later, in describing a turning point in her troubled relationship with her rival and nemesis Hatsumomo, the narrator says:

Choose between simile and metaphor depending on the desired effect.

Use similes (or comparisons using like or as) for a more conscious, calculated effect (“He works like a horse”); use metaphors (or comparisons not using like or as) for a more insistent, surprising effect (“He is a horse”). Compare, for example, “When I came home to my family after my freshman year, I felt like a stranger in a small town” with “When I came home to my family after my freshman year, I was a stranger in a small town.”

Come back to your metaphors.

As every good essayist and storyteller knows, returning to an earlier metaphor enhances coherence. Like the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock, which appears early on and again at the end of The Great Gatsby, a reappearing metaphor conveys structure and craft. It provides a frame that leaves your reader (or listener) with a satisfying sense of order and completion.

Use personification to add life to your writing.

Personification is figurative language that ascribes human attributes to inanimate objects, ideas, abstractions, and animals, as you do when you get fed up with your programmed grammar checker and yell, “I’m sick of my computer scolding me for using the passive voice!” Just as personification brings inanimate objects to life, it can add life to your writing.

Rather than “After the trees drop their leaves in the fall, the intricate design of their branches gives them a new look,” write “After the trees drop their leaves in the fall, their branches speak a new language.” Rather than “As I listened to the sounds of the wilderness, I realized I myself was making noise,” write “As I listened to the sounds of the wilderness, I realized the wilderness was listening to me.”

In chapter three I advised you to make your sentences tell stories. As you look for characters that you might depict as performing actions, don’t limit yourself to people. Use your imagination and you’ll find that any object or any thing will serve quite well. So let the blizzard attack, the house shudder, the walls groan, the pines claw at the windowpanes, and the old oak rocker cry for a place in the living room, right over there by the warm caress of the fire.

Now you give it a try. I’ll begin a sentence listing personified objects and you continue the series. Don’t work too hard at it. Just use your imagination and see where it takes you: “So get up from your desk and let the computer hum its joyless tune, the lonely chair beg for a companion, the unopened mail …”

Do five or ten of these exercises a day and you’ll get the hang of it in no time.

Evaluate your similes and metaphors on the basis of their aptness, novelty, and simplicity.

Good metaphors and similes have three qualities: aptness, novelty, and simplicity. Some of the most enduring metaphors in the English language are the most natural and unaffected. Consider, for example, Shakespeare’s metaphor “All the world’s a stage,” or these similes (metaphors that use like or as): “O my love’s like a red, red rose” (Robert Burns), “My heart is like a singing bird” (Christina Rossetti), and “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (William Wordsworth).

Consider this metaphor: “The state is at a crossroads.” It was written by a budget analyst in the Minnesota State Department of Finance. Although the comparison with a crossroads is familiar—so familiar, in fact, it could be considered a cliché—the writer puts it to good use: to emphasize the need to choose between a policy based on lower spending and one based on higher taxes.

Consider a bad metaphor: “We want to hire only the best applicants, so we are cherry picking the cream of the crop.” That was written by a personnel manager of a trucking firm. Consider this series of terrible metaphors: “Given our employees’ tendency to fly off the handle, we must nip their outbursts in the bud before they run rampant.” That was written by me. I present it here to illustrate how a rotten metaphor can be made even worse by mixing images. And as William Safire advises, “Take the bull by the hand, and don’t mix metaphors.”

Just for the fun of it, here are a few similes that are so bad they’re good. They were posted on the Internet under the title “Winners of the Worst Analogies Ever Written in a High School Essay.” Among the best of the worst were these:

My favorite is this one: “Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.” Now that’s what you might call an explosive simile.

Not to ride a gift horse until you make it puke, but usually the metaphors that flop are the ones that are overdone, contrived, outlandish, or simply inappropriate to the subject or context. There is a critical difference between a metaphor that makes a gentle turn in the road and one that reaches out a giant hand and slaps you in the face. (Ouch!)

Your reader knows at a glance if your metaphor works or fails, if it succeeds in clarifying and reinforcing your message or if it detracts from it. Be creative, but not contrived. Rather than “At last week’s meeting I felt as if everyone turned against me the way the populace stormed the Bastille during the French Revolution,” write “At last week’s meeting I felt like a dartboard.” The point is, be imaginative, be creative, be daring—but don’t overdo it. Use metaphors that reinforce or clarify your meaning but that don’t distract from your message or intrude on the flow of your development. Show restraint, even as you exercise your imagination. Too many metaphors, even good metaphors, will work against you. As Donald Hall observes, “The liveliest prose moves from analogy to analogy without strain. It takes practice to learn how to invent, and practice to learn when to stop inventing.” Know when enough is enough. A little metaphor goes a long way.

Prefer the unexpected to the familiar and the clichéd.

If it sounds familiar and commonplace to you, it probably sounds familiar and commonplace to your reader. Search for the new, the unusual, the unanticipated, the unpredictable. Find words that have retained their freshness, words like conifer, conjure, succulent, and sapsucker, rather than words like tree, predict, juicy, and bird.

The person who first looked out the window and exclaimed, “Look! It’s raining cats and dogs!” introduced a wonderful figure of speech into the English language. (Some sources claim that the phrase describes an actual event that occurred when the family pets, kept atop a thatched roof, had difficulty maintaining their footing in a heavy rain.) Whatever its origins, the image of animals tumbling pell-mell from the sky to capture the feeling of a downpour was unexpected. It was a brilliant metaphor (a figure of speech containing an implied comparison)—when it was used for the first time. But now, after millions of repetitions, this imaginative comparison has become a cliché.

Not that familiar, common expressions are necessarily a poor choice. Clichés offer the advantage of being easily comprehended. They link your thoughts to readily accessible images, sometimes quite colorfully (“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” and “Nothing ventured, nothing gained”). But after repeated use, these expressions fail to awaken and surprise. They’re like tarnished gems that over time have lost their luster.

Of more consequence to the writer seeking authentic expression, clichés can trivialize complex thought and suppress genuine emotion. They offer a facile connection between meaning and words, a connection that cheapens the writer’s relationship to language.

For these reasons, use clichés sparingly. Resist the temptation to settle for the familiar and the commonplace. Rather than attach your thoughts and feelings to ready-made images, travel the opposite direction: Reach deep within yourself. Explore the nuances and subtlety of what you find there, or as Donald Hall says, “Push yourself to discover the true specifics of your feeling.”

If you approach writing as an occasion to discover truth, and you think of word choice as a search for true expression, you’ll find that clichés generally stand in your way. It’s not that they’re false, but that they’re generic. Try to grasp the particular before the universal. Seek to understand the enormity of a single fact. As the poet Walt Whitman advised, look for truth in a blade of grass.

Be Playful

Use humor to have fun with your reader. Like figurative language and analogy, humor is a powerful tool for connecting with your reader. Humor allows you to reveal the creative, playful, imaginative side of your personality in a way that your reader is likely to find appealing. Humor works on many levels. It:

• Appeals to your audience’s intelligence. Humor, by its nature, operates on multiple levels. As a result, it calls for your reader to be alert. This heightened state of attention is what every writer hopes to elicit from every reader. Think of the best teachers you have known. Did any of them not use humor?
• Alleviates boredom. Humor makes monotonous tasks less arduous. Whether reconciling budget figures or stacking sandbags, people usually find that a little levity lightens the load.
• Reveals your human side. Humor exposes your vulnerability. When you make an attempt at being humorous, you let down your defenses. You take a risk, especially if the humor is self-deprecating. When you attempt humor, you are asking for your audience’s acknowledgment and approval.
• Signifies your membership in, or allegiance to, a group. Laughter emphasizes commonality. It reinforces bonds. Frequent laughter is a sign of a closely knit group.

Certain types of humor seem to work better than others. Of the following common types of humor, the first two are the riskiest.

As a rule, avoid involved narrative jokes ending with a punch line.

Few people can tell such jokes well, and the time and space they require may try your reader’s patience. A poorly told joke, whether delivered orally or in writing, is awkward for both teller and audience.

Use puns or plays on words only when appropriate.

Some people love them; others hate them. The British, for example, consider a good pun a sign of intelligence; Americans tend to groan. Like Samuel Johnson, I find them punishing.

Use wit (from the Old English witan, “to know”).

John Locke defined this all-inclusive type of humor as “The assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety.” The effect is a comic twist or surprise, as when Dorothy Parker said, “I can’t write five words but that I change seven,” or when Peter De Vries said, “I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.”

Use irony to point out the disparity between what is real and what is perceived.

Sometimes called “Socratic irony” because Socrates liked to play dumb when asking his students hard questions, irony is the use of words to express something other than their literal meaning. Rather than open an article about life in a northern climate by writing “Contending with snow can make your commute to and from work unpleasant,” write “There’s nothing like a blizzard to add a little excitement to your morning commute.”

Irony often involves saying the opposite of what you actually mean, as when you say “Nice job,” in response to someone messing up. Of the two common types of irony, understatement (as in “This assignment required more than a minute”) generally is perceived as more subtle than overstatement (as in “This assignment took forever”).

Use understatement (or meiosis) for a more refined style of humor.

Rather than “This is costing us millions,” write “This is costing us more than a Happy Meal at McDonald’s.” Rather than “I can’t believe they canned me on my birthday!” write “Getting fired on your birthday is not the present one normally hopes for.”

Use overstatement (exaggeration or hyperbole) for a more outlandish style of humor.

If the governor of your state accuses you of ripping him off for writing an unauthorized story about his days as a pro wrestler, rather than respond by saying, “You might have a point,” respond the way Garrison Keillor did to Jesse Ventura. Call him a “GREAT BIG HONKING BULLET-HEADED SHOVEL-FACED MUTHA WHO TALKS IN A STEROID GROWL AND DOESN’T STOP.” That will get his attention.

Use self-deprecating humor.

In the spirit of fair play, rather than describe yourself as “a tall, handsome intellectual type with glasses and a way with words,” describe yourself as Keillor did, as “a tired old hack with a gecko face and thinning hair and a body like a six-foot stack of marshmallows.” (Just don’t get into any wrestling matches with large people who don’t care for your sense of humor. You might get your marshmallows toasted.)

Making a joke at your own expense is one of the safest types of humor. The only possible problem is overdoing it to the point that you portray yourself as a buffoon.

Despite the risk of being misunderstood or having your attempts at humor fail, consider using humor when the time seems right. Look for details and situations that reveal the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous elements of daily life and our earthly existence. Humor reminds us of what we have in common as human beings. It makes us feel close when we otherwise might feel distant.

Be Genuine

In addition to the three traits I have been discussing—liveliness, unpredictability, and humor—there is a fourth trait of personality: sincerity. To care about your subject, to be committed to your craft, to be genuine in your expression—these are the deeper, less immediately visible attributes of writing with personality. The other traits may please your reader for the short-term, but without sincerity, your writing will seem superficial.

Value substance over style.

Style without substance accomplishes little. Kurt Vonnegut had this point in mind when he declared in an essay on style, which appeared in Palm Sunday, “Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.” To the writer committed to developing a “winning literary style,” Vonnegut offers this advice: “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.”

Taking as his premise the point that “your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head,” Vonnegut urges writers to follow this simple rule of style: “If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate my subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.”

Take a definite stand.

To make a definite impression, take a definite stand. Be decisive. Assume a position and defend it. Write with a discernible voice, tone, or point of view. (I discuss the implications of point of view in chapter seven.) When you speak at full volume, people are more inclined to perceive you as confident and self-assured, two traits commonly associated with personality. Whatever you think about Chris Rock, for example, you wouldn’t accuse him of lacking personality.

Approach writing as self-revelation and style as self-realization.

When you write, you reveal who you are to your readers. You let them in on your secrets, your perceptions, your values, your ways of thinking, and your habits of speech. As E.B. White reminds us, writing is not just communication, but “communication through revelation—it is the Self escaping into the open.” If you are honest and courageous, you write about the things that matter most to you. At its best, your writing gives your reader a sense of who you are, a feeling for the person behind the words.

Writing is also a journey, an opportunity for self-exploration, for you, the writer. As you experiment with language, as you study and practice techniques of style, trying out various expressions and constructions, learning to adapt them to your own purposes, and figuring out which ones work for you and which ones don’t, you discover who you are. More than that, you are led to ask, Who would I like to be? What persona or symbolic representation of myself would I like to create and present to the world—and perhaps someday, in real life, come to be? Just as writing is self-revelation, developing style is a creative process of self-realization.

Avoid a bureaucratic style.

To write in a bureaucratic style is to write without sincerity and commitment. The word bureaucracy comes from the Old French burel, the name of a woolen cloth used to cover desks, which became known as bureaux. In time, the word bureaux was associated with the office, then with the occupants of the office. Add -cracy (from the Greek kratos meaning power), and you’ve got bureaucracy.

Bureaucratese is writing characterized by general inscrutability, lifelessness, and lack of humanity. More specifically, its traits include:

• Overuse of the passive voice. Sentences in which the subject is acted upon, as in “The report was written by me,” or “A new method for effecting the dephosphorization of taconite pellets was developed by the University of Minnesota”
• Excessive use of nominalizations. Nouns created from verbs, such as contribution, recommendation, and consideration, as in make a contribution, offer a recommendation, or take into consideration, rather than contribute, recommend, and consider
• Long compound noun phrases. Series of nouns used as adjectives, such as an acquisition candidate identification process rather than a process for identifying candidates for acquisition
• Long and unnecessarily complex sentences. As in “Although preliminary proposals must be processed through the Office of Research Administration (ORA) prior to submission to the sponsoring agency to ensure that University and agency requirements have been considered, and that proper University endorsement is affixed, the requirement to complete the BA Form 23 (‘Application for External Research or Training Support’) is not necessary in these instances.”

Not only does bureaucratic writing fail to convey commitment, but it also fails to take into account the advice about listening to language I presented in chapter four. Bureaucratese is language without music.

This superficial approach to language may explain why on-the-job writing often seems so lifeless and dry, as though it were written by a machine rather than a human being. When people write on the job, perhaps they assume that they must use someone else’s language, that being a professional requires them to resort to a kind of high-blown, unnatural language that is supposed to establish their prowess and their intelligence by its very obscurity and detachment. Maybe business writers believe they are responsible to some higher authority that requires them to write “It is my recommendation that we take action at the earliest possible time” rather than “I think we should act immediately.” People who write this way fail to realize a simple truth about most on-the-job writing: The reader wants to hear a human voice, not some abstract construct of how business writing is supposed to sound.

If you want to connect with your reader, you should avoid language that seems stilted or unnecessarily formal in favor of language that sounds natural and genuine to your ear. As I said in chapter two, unless you have a good reason for choosing a fancy word, use a plain one. Think of writing as a personal transaction between you and your reader. The words are the medium, nothing more than the means of creating a relationship between you and your audience. The real subject is you—your thoughts, ideas, and values.

Consider this sentence: “I deem it advisable that you and I should continue to interface in positive ways on this matter until such time as a solution can be found.” Admittedly, that’s an extreme example of puffed-up, overdone, fancy language, but I would wager that you’ve probably come across something like it. (You even may have written something like it—not to point any fingers.)

Does the language in that sentence give you a sense of the person behind the words? Perhaps more to the point, are you comfortable with that person? Would you enjoy spending time with that person?

Compare this version of the sentence: “I am eager to continue working with you to solve this problem.” Do you hear how this more natural language makes a better impression? A person who uses this kind of language seems more genuine and easier to be with, a more pleasant companion than someone who puffs up his or her thoughts with phony, inflated language.

Perhaps the best way to avoid bureaucratic writing is simply to use natural language. Without sacrificing precision and clarity, try to capture the flow and rhythm of natural speech. Although some audiences and situations do require a more formal style, don’t be more formal than the occasion requires, and, in any case, remember that formality does not require awkwardness. (I discuss the need to maintain a consistent level of formality in chapter seven.) As Patricia Westheimer advises in The Executive Style Book, in all but the most formal writing, “Write the way you speak—conversationally and naturally.”

So the next time you find yourself struggling over whether to use the word commence or begin, remember the golden rule as it applies to writing: “Write unto others as you would have them write unto you.”

Don’t hide behind your words.

Your goal as a writer is to connect with your reader, not to create distance through artificial-sounding language. At its best, your writing should convey a sense of your individuality, your humanity, your warmth. Communication goes deeper than language. It goes to the heart of human interaction. To write with a sense of humanity is to recognize writing as a personal transaction between writer and reader. Your reader should never be allowed to forget that behind your words, behind this artifice of language, is a real person, an authentic human being. As William Zinsser points out in Writing with a Word Processor, “Readers identify first with the person who is writing, not with what the person is writing about. … We may think we are responding to the writer’s ‘style’; actually we are responding to his personality as he expresses it in words.”

The secret to connecting with your reader is to be yourself. It may take confidence, even courage, to reveal who you are, but your reader wants to know. Don’t hide behind your words.

Be a complete person.

There are times, of course, when you must show restraint. In many types of professional, technical, scientific, and academic writing, you, the author, are not the focus of attention. But when the time is right, when you are permitted a broader range of expression, seize the opportunity. Invite your reader to share your company—to think with you, to laugh with you, to enter your imaginative world. Reveal not only your thoughts but your feelings. Share your inner self, your insights, your humor. Be playful. Have fun with your reader. Write with heart. Bare your soul.

Chapter Five Exercises

Be Lively, Unpredictable, Playful, and Genuine

1. Review the techniques presented in this chapter. With those techniques in mind, read five books, noting passages when you are surprised or delighted by unexpected language, humor, thought, or plot.

Add Color and Unpredictability with Figurative Language

2. The next time you’re searching for a good comparison, think about it as you go to sleep, leave a notepad beside your bed, and write down the first thing that comes to mind when you wake up.

3. Express your originality by making unlikely comparisons.

Write down (or type) the next five metaphors, similes, and analogies you encounter in your reading. Rank them from most obvious to most original. Play around with them to see if you can make them more original.

4. Use analogies to clarify or reinforce your meaning.

Complete the following sentence: “May in Minnesota was contrary, sometimes hot enough to ________________________, sometimes as cold as ____________________.”

5. Choose between simile and metaphor depending on the desired effect.

Which version of the following figure of speech do you prefer, “He’s as annoying as a thorn in my side” or “He’s a thorn in my side?" Why?

6. Come back to your metaphors.

a. Imagine writing a novel about a good, decent young black man living in Alabama in the 1930s who is falsely accused of rape by a white woman, found guilty, and sentenced to death despite a passionate defense by his white attorney, also a man of principle and character.

Now imagine writing a novel about a tormented adolescent boy who has a little sister he adores who is “roller-skate skinny” and a little brother who, before he died of leukemia, wrote poems in green ink all over his fielder’s mitt so that he would have something to read when nobody was up at bat, and imagine that tormented adolescent dreaming of standing in a field of rye next to “some crazy cliff” and catching the little kids playing in the field before they went over the edge.

Think of good titles for both novels.

b. Take something you’ve written, long or short—a novel, screenplay, play, or nonfiction book, or an article, essay, paper, short story, or poem. Reread it, think about what you were trying to convey, and create a metaphor that somehow evokes its essence, tone, or message.

7. Use personification to add life to your writing.

Fill in the blanks.

As I suggested when I discussed personification, see where your imagination takes you as you get up from your desk. Let the computer hum its joyless tune, the lonely chair beg for a companion, the unopened mail cry out for attention, the dirty dishes drown in their sorrow, the coffeepot ____________________, the unfolded laundry ____________________, the unwashed windows ____________________, the unpaid bills ____________________, the unwalked dog ____________________, the …

8. Evaluate your similes and metaphors on the basis of their aptness, novelty, and simplicity.

Which one of the three comparisons below do you think works best? Why?

a. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

b. His rhythms, the way his wit kissed a phrase and sent it dancing—these warmed her like summer.

c. Surface style can be put on, like a suit of clothes, to achieve a particular effect.

9. Prefer the unexpected to the familiar and the clichéd.

Read something by you or someone else, and stop when you come to the first metaphor, simile, or analogy. If it’s original and good, rewrite it as something ordinary and predictable. If it’s familiar and clichéd, rewrite it as something brilliant and unforgettable.

Be Playful

10. Some people are naturally funny and some people are not. I’m not sure it’s possible to learn how to be funny, but I do think it’s possible to develop your nonserious side. Maybe it’s more a question of giving yourself permission to see the lighter side of things, to release or liberate your irreverent side and let it develop itself. To be playful is to take a step back, to look beyond the immediate goal, problem, or task at hand and see the humor. So look for the whimsical, look for the offbeat, look beyond the literal.

And read funny writers. Find a favorite.

Be Genuine

11. In the first edition of this book I talked about how style can be approached on two levels: surface style and deep style. Surface style, as I wrote in that edition, has to do with technique. It’s acquired by deliberate study and practice. It can be put on, like a suit of clothes, to achieve a particular effect.

Much of this book has to do with developing your surface style. But when I advise you to be genuine, I’m urging you to go deeper. Deep style has to do with who you are, both as a writer and a person. It results from genuine self-exploration, self-discovery, and self-revelation. Deep style is developed over time, sometimes over a lifetime.

Chapter Five Exercise Answers

Be Lively, Unpredictable, Playful, and Genuine

1. Do you find any correlation between the techniques in this chapter and the unexpected twists and turns you noted in your reading?

Add Color and Unpredictability with Figurative Language

2. Go to sleep with your notepad beside you again, but this time think of a good metaphor as you drift off. Record your first thought when you wake up in the morning.

3. Express your originality by making unlikely comparisons.

Now that you have played around with five comparisons that you found in your reading, create one of your own that is as unlikely, novel, and apt as that brilliant metaphor that has now become a cliché, “It’s raining cats and dogs.”

4. Use analogies to clarify or reinforce your meaning.

Here’s how Faith Sullivan wrote that sentence in Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse: “May in Minnesota was contrary, sometimes hot enough to fry eggs on a tin roof, sometimes as cold as Jesse James’s heart.”

5. Choose between simile and metaphor depending on the desired effect.

Look over your list you worked with or created in exercise 1. Change each metaphor to a simile by adding like or as; change each simile to a metaphor by removing like or as. Which version works better?

6. Come back to your metaphors.

a. Harper Lee and J.D. Salinger came up with To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye.

b. Work the metaphor you created into one of the first paragraphs, chapters, or scenes of something you’ve written. Then return to it, explicitly or obliquely, near the end of your piece.

7. Use personification to add life to your writing.

Continue looking for opportunities to add life to your metaphors, your similes, and your writing with personification.

8. Evaluate your similes and metaphors on the basis of their aptness, novelty, and simplicity.

In addition to aptness, novelty, and simplicity, your assessment of figurative language also depends on context. Here’s how F. Scott Fitzgerald prefaced one of those three sentences in The Great Gatsby: “There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights.” Which sentence is Fitzgerald’s? You might think it was sentence b (which was written by Faith Sullivan), but it was sentence a.

Do you agree that the context enriches the simile in sentence a? Likewise, does Sullivan’s simile in exercise 4 above work better if you know that the Jesse James gang had a famous shoot-out while robbing a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1876, thereby linking the comparison to Minnesota history?

9. Prefer the unexpected to the familiar and the clichéd.

In your reading, don’t overlook figurative language that is so common that we tend to think of it as literal language, such as the leg of a table, the back of a chair, or the spine of a book.

Be Playful

10. For both Faith Sullivan and her character Nell, that favorite writer is P.G. Wodehouse. Here’s how portrays Nell thinking of the writer who becomes her soul mate:

Note the figurative language in Sullivan’s passage, as well as the rhythm of her sentence structures (as I discussed in chapter four). Write your own version of Sullivan’s passage, imitating its stylistic features point by point.

Be Genuine

11. Use your writing to explore who you are, what you want to say, how you want to say it, and how you want to be remembered. Be honest, with yourself and your reader. Use language that reflects your values and beliefs and worldview. As you edit, delete whatever seems false. Beneath your attempts at stylistic effect—whether it be liveliness, unpredictability, or humor—lies your bedrock commitment to your craft and yourself.