Miller writes:
Ernest Hemingway worked at the Kansas City Star for less than seven months—between graduating from high school in 1917 and driving a World War I ambulance in 1918—but the job launched him as a professional writer, and he knew how much he owed to the newspaper’s style guide.The Star's style guide offered some excellent tips to good writing, tips that every student would be wise to keep in mind when they write for their classes (unless they have ChatGPT do their writing for them!). Here's Miller:
“Those were the best rules that I ever learned for the business of writing,” he said in 1940. “I’ve never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides by them.”Style guides provide publications with standards of grammar and usage. They often correct common blunders, such as mistaking “who” for “whom.” They also settle disputable questions: Is it “French fries” or “french fries”?
[The guide's] opening instructions are both excellent advice for writers and a good introduction to Hemingway’s technique: “Use short sentences. Use short paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."Reading this about short paragraphs elicited an "amen" from me. Wading through a four page paper in which there are a mere two or three paragraph breaks is quite tedious.
Miller adds that,
Some of the Star’s edicts are broad and familiar: “Don’t split infinitives.” Others are precise: “Be careful of the word ‘only.’ ‘He only had $10,’ means he alone was the possessor of such wealth.’ ‘He had only $10,’ means the ten was all the cash he possessed.”Writing well is a skill that every student should seek to master. Good writing comes in handy in all sorts of professions, and, fairly or not, it's a reflection upon one's education and one's intelligence.
I was reading an online article the other day in which the writer several times mentioned "political comedy." It wasn't until the second time she used this odd expression that I realized she meant "political comity." It was funny, but it made me wonder whether the writer might actually be a junior high school student.
Failure to achieve subject/verb agreement or using "there" for "their" are distressingly common, as is the declaration by a writer or speaker that "they could care less" when they obviously mean that "they could not care less." Or the surprisingly common blunder of stating that someone is taking something "for granite" when they clearly mean "for granted."
Sloppy writing, poor grammar and spelling and garbled syntax is sometimes amusing, but it makes the writer appear inept, careless, or worse, intellectually inferior, and no one should want to be seen as any of those.
