I've been at The New Yorker blog reading the many reminiscences of Elmore Leonard, who died earlier this week. One, by Joan Acocella, includes a link to a Times piece Leonard once wrote on his ten rules for writing. I'm not going to copy them down but the Times's headline caught the essence: "Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle." One way to define "hooptedoodle" might be "the parts you, the author, are most proud of." I suspect the readers of freshman themes would be deprived of some snarky pleasures if their students listened to Leonard on hooptedoodle. When you have a draft, read it over, and get rid of the parts you think are the very best. Leonard's version is, "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."
Leonard is preaching from the same Scripture as George Orwell, who in "Politics and the English Language" set out six rules for writers that I will copy.
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (Possibly the last word in this rule should have been cut?)
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Have you ever noticed the degree to which you are inundated with writing that offends against all these rules, except possibly the last? At work, for example, it seems that anyone who has attained a certain altitude on the organizational chart, and therefore writes things that others have to read, is forbidden the utility of words of one syllable. Thus where I work we do not plan, we are "planful," and the plans we lay are "strategic," presumably to distinguish them from some other kind.
