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The Economist reads | How to write

What to read to become a better writer

Five texts that explain how to write simply and well

A group of young women working on a script in Greenwich Village, New York City, June 1954.

image: getty images

Sep 9th 2022

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This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions.

Editor’s update: The Economist has published a revised version of its style guide.

The first words are the hardest. For many of us writing is a slog. Words drip with difficulty onto the page—and frequently they seem to be the wrong ones, in the wrong order. Yet few pause to ask why writing is hard, why what we write may be bad, or even what is meant by “bad”. Fortunately for anyone seeking to become a better writer, the works recommended here provide enlightenment and reassurance. Yes, writing is hard. But if you can first grasp the origins and qualities of bad writing, you may learn to diagnose and cure problems in your own prose (keeping things simple helps a lot). Similarly heartening is the observation that most first drafts are second-rate, so becoming a skilled rewriter is the thing. These five works are excellent sources of insight and inspiration.

Politics and the English Language. By George Orwell. Available on the Orwell Foundation’s website

Starting with Orwell’s essay may seem as clichéd as the hackneyed phrases he derides in it. Published in 1946, this polemic against poor and perfidious writing will be familiar to many. But its advice on how to write is as apposite now as then. (Besides, it is short and free.) Orwell analyses the unoriginal, “dying” metaphors that still haunt the prose of academics, politicians, professionals and hacks. He lambasts the “meaningless words” and “pretentious diction” of his day; many of the horrors he cites remain common. To save writers from regurgitating these, Orwell proposes six now-canonical rules. The first five boil down to: prefer short, everyday words and the active voice, cut unneeded words and strive for fresh imagery. The sixth—“break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous”—displays the difficulty of pinning down something as protean as language. But this has not stopped others trying.

Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. By Joseph M. Williams and Joseph Bizup. Pearson Education; 246 pages; $66.65 and £43.99

In “Style”, Joseph Williams, who taught English at the University of Chicago, instructs writers on how to revise their scribblings into something clearer, more concise and coherent. (Aptly for a text about rewriting, it is the latest in a long line of reworkings of Williams’s teachings on the subject, which appeared under various titles.) Unlike Orwell, who devised high-level rules for writers to wield by instinct, Williams proposes nuanced “principles” and shows how to apply them. Whereas, for instance, Orwell exhorted writers to “never use the passive where you can use the active”, Williams explains how passives can sometimes help create a sense of flow. This forms part of his coverage of “cohesion” and “coherence”, which could upend the way you write. Insightful, too, is Williams’s guidance on pruning prose and on the ills and virtues of nominalisations—nouns formed from verbs (as “nominalisation” is from “nominalise”), which often send sentences awry. Such technical details, summary sections and practice exercises make “Style” the most textbook-like work on this list. It may also be the most useful.

Explore more Summer reads:

Where are the world’s best non-native English speakers? This index held some surprises.

Rapid progress in ai is generating fear and excitement. Two experts argue the world needs an international agency to govern it, in a guest essay for By Invitation.

We went to the school where Russia’s state-television journalists are trained. They are being taught to fight a holy war.

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. By William Zinsser. HarperCollins; 321 pages; $17.99 and £13.99

Less overtly practical than “Style” but far more fun to read is “On Writing Well”. William Zinsser, who was an American journalist and teacher, is a witty commentator on the writer’s craft with a talent for aphorisms (eg, “the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components”). He embraces slippery subjects like “rhythm” and “voice” that tend to defy rules or principles. But he purveys practical wisdom, too, diagnosing stylistic blunders, exploring genres from memoir to business writing, and analysing passages from well-known works and his own journalism. Zinsser is always encouraging. Introducing a marked-up extract from drafts of “On Writing Well”, a spider’s web of self-edits, he counsels: “Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair.” Zinsser also gives fellow writers much to emulate. His paragraph-ending sentences are a marvel.

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. By Steven Pinker. Penguin; 368 pages; and $18 and £10.99

An expert on words and brains, Steven Pinker wants to help writers write better by getting them into the minds of their readers. The celebrated psycholinguist argues that “the curse of knowledge” is the biggest cause of bad writing: like children, writers forget that others often do not know what they know. Bad writers tend to dwell on irrelevant points and make logical connections that are logical only to them. Their prose—the type beloved of academics, bureaucrats and businessfolk—abounds in abstract nouns and luxuriates in long sentences. By contrast, good writing (“classic style”, in Mr Pinker’s phrase) assembles concrete words into straightforward sentences that readers find simple to grasp. Why should this be so? Using striking and funny examples, Mr Pinker shows how working memory, which stores syntactic constructions until they are complete, is easily swamped. In closing, he joins the battle over English usage, as our full review of “The Sense of Style” describes.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. Merriam-Webster; 989 pages; $29.95

Every writer needs a reference book to look up troublesome issues of grammar and usage; no one has memorised them all. The quality of such books has improved in recent years, but one from the 1990s has earned its keep since then. Merriam-Webster (mwdeu) is America’s best-known dictionary publisher. This guide contains not exactly definitions, though, but mini-essays: on individual words (can “data” be singular?), confusingly similar ones (such as “comprise” and “compose”) and grammatical conundrums (such as the split infinitive, dangling modifiers and so on).

What distinguishes mwdeu is its relentless empiricism. Where a debatable claim about correct usage is made, it surveys the history of other guides and their recommendations, as well as going to Merriam-Webster’s huge bank of citations from literature, non-fiction and journalism. In many cases, a proposed rule (such as the ban on split infinitives) is shown to be baseless. But in other cases, the guide is conservative. On the “comma fault” (joining two independent clauses with nothing more than a comma), mwdeu finds it in some great authors’ literary work, but warns readers that “you probably should not try the device unless you are very sure of what you want it to accomplish.” Good sense all round.■

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The Economist offers its own advice on writing in “Writing With Style”, our revised in-house style guide, published in 2023; in the Johnson column on language; and in Economist Education’s course on business writing.

Free tools can help. To discover whether your writing is “lean” or in “heart attack” territory, try The Writer’s Diet. This website tests how bloated passages are by adjectives, prepositions and so on. Or paste your prose into the oed Text Visualiser, from Oxford University Press, to uncover the origins of your words. Many of English’s most concrete and vivid words derive from Anglo-Saxon. These tend also to be short and punchy—echoing Winston Churchill, The Economist once argued (entirely in monosyllables) that “short words are best”.

This article appeared in the The Economist reads section of the print edition under the headline "What to read to become a better writer"

The future of war: A special report

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It is easy to be swept up in news about the economy, especially these days. In 2020 the world saw the biggest economic contraction since the Great Depression; today we are dealing with the highest inflation since the 1980s. People rarely have time to think about the very biggest questions in economics. Why did the industrial revolution begin in the 18th century—and why in western Europe? Why do so many countries remain poor when some are fabulously rich? And what is work like today compared with the past? All the issues improve your understanding of the news. For the answers, you need to turn to economic history. Here are resources to help you understand why we are where we are.

The Worldly Philosophers. By Robert Heilbroner. Touchstone; 368 pages; $19 Simon & Schuster;

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There are charming streets, shops, history, and so much to do in this little downtown in New Jersey.

What town in New Jersey is one of the most enchanted in the country? Hint: stroll along the grounds of a popular University.

What town in New Jersey is one of the most enchanted in the country?

It's Princeton, NJ. New Jersey residents enjoy taking a weekend trip to Princeton for the shopping and the history.

Thanks to onlyinyourstate.com, Nassau Street is the heart of Princeton, close to Princeton University, shopping, and dining.

Princeton University

Along Nassau street, stop into a coffee shop and a bookstore. Labyrinth Bookstore is a community bookstore in the heart of Princeton that has new, used, and rare books. You might be able to find that special book you're looking for at this bookstore.

Another cute area that I heard about, I was never there is Palmer Square. From the pictures I see, it's so charming with shops and dining. It almost looks like something you see in a storybook.

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It’s Purim

It’s carnaval

It’s 40 days (quarentene) before Easter

It’s the Jesus walk

Connect to source

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An impish grin spreads across Blankfein's face. Call him a fat cat who mocks the public. Call him wicked. Call him what you will. He is, he says, just a banker "doing God's work"

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Rooster (Corinthian plate, ca. 550 BC)

Where are chickens from?

Long ago, lots of wild chickens lived in India and East Asia (China, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam). That’s where people first domesticated (tamed) chickens, maybe around 7000 BC.

Recent genetic evidence shows that people tamed chickens in two different places: China and India. Probably the people in each place didn’t know that the other ones were also taming chickens. By about 5000 BC, people in China were certainly keeping chickens, and by 3000 BC people in India and probably Vietnam also had domesticated chickens.

In West Asia, people didn’t really keep chickens for their eggs and meat until sometime after 1000 BC, in the Iron Age. To the Persians, the rooster crowing at dawn heralded the return of light conquering darkness. (This lends a new meaning to Peter’s betrayal of Jesus “before the cock crows.”)

Chickens reach Europe

When chickens finally reached Europe, sometime between 1000 and 550 BC, they and their eggs were an exciting new food; Greeks sometimes called chickens “the Persian bird.” Greeks and Romans often sacrificed chickens to their gods. Socrates, for example, asked his friends to sacrifice a cock to the god Asclepius for him as he was dying just after 400 BC. But even then, Greeks may have been using chickens more for cockfighting than for eating.

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@f1vo or sk8

Economic Hardship employment authorization is permission granted to F-1 students by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to work off-campus on the basis of “severe economic hardship due to unforeseen circumstances beyond the student's control” [8CFR 214.2(f)(9)(ii)(c)].

Eligibility Requirements

To be eligible for Economic Hardship employment authorization, you must document that:

You have been in valid F-1 status for at least one academic year (two semesters). 

You are experiencing economic hardship based on unforeseen circumstances (see below) that arose after you obtained F-1 status. 

You are currently in good academic standing and are carrying a full course load. 

Part-time Canadian border commuter students are not eligible for Economic Hardship work authorization. 

Employment opportunities on campus are unavailable or insufficient. 

Acceptance of employment will not interfere with your full-time study.

Defining “Unforeseen Circumstances”

Loss of financial aid or on-campus employment resulting from circumstances beyond the student’s control 

Substantial fluctuations in the exchange rate or value of home country’s currency 

Unexpected changes in the financial condition of the student’s financial sponsor 

Unexpected medical bills 

Other substantial and unexpected expenses

Application Process

1. Requesting the Economic Hardship I-20

To apply for Economic Hardship you submit the following to ISS:

Update your emergency contact, local address, permanent address, and phone number in the Student HUB Center

Instructions on how to update your HUB information can be found hereDownload pdf(529 KB).

Personal statement describing the unforeseen hardship situation; address the letter to the USCIS;

Describe the facts that led to the problem, explain the difficult situation that could not be avoided and how you are not at fault, and present a reasonable plan that is short-term and designed to get you out of financial and academic trouble.

Include a statement about how this employment will not impact ability to maintain a full course load in the future. If you have experience managing course work and on-campus employment mention that.

Elaborate on why other on-campus jobs are not available

If choosing a start date earlier than the published processing times, indicate that you accept a change in authorization dates due to adjudication. 

Evidence / documentation of your economic hardship. Examples of such evidence include: 

Copies of past and present currency exchange charts showing the devaluation of your country's currency

Proof (signed letters, affidavits, bank statements) of unexpected changes in the financial situation of your sponsor 

Copies of medical bills or other substantial and unexpected expenses 

A letter from your department verifying that your assistantship has been unexpectedly terminated 

Documentation of your current expenses. For example: 

Proof of tuition bill payment 

Apartment lease or cost of living on campus 

Utility bills 

Any other significant expenses (books, medical expenses, etc.) 

Completed Form G-1145 (E-Notification of Application/Petition Acceptance)

Requested employment start and end date. This information can be sent via e-mail to the ISS Advisor assisting you with your Economic Hardship application.

When your application is complete, ISS will enter your Economic Hardship application into the SEVIS system, and produce a new I-20 with the Economic Hardship recommendation.

2. Applying with USCIS

ISS recommends that you submit the following documents to the USCIS:

Original Form I‑765. 

Don't forget to sign and include all seven pages! 

Be sure to also carefully review the USCIS instructions

Form G-1145

Application fee of $410.

This should be a check (from a U.S. bank) or a U.S. money order payable to the “U.S. Department of Homeland Security”. 

Write the 11-digit number from your I-94 on your check or money order. 

Don’t forget to sign and date the check.

Click here to download the pdf(95 KB) to see an example check.

If you intend to file for a Fee Waiver (Form I-912), then we recommend that you carefully review the eligibility requirements found on the USCIS website. If you request a fee waiver and are denied, you will be required to submit a new application with the appropriate fee. This will add significant processing time to your application. 

Photocopy of pages 1 and 2 of your new Economic Hardship endorsement I‑20

Don’t forget to sign and date the Student Attestation section of your I-20. If you forget, USCIS will return your OPT application to you.

Photocopies of all previous I-20s. Do not send originals!

Your cover letter explaining your situation (as described above). 

Letter of support from ISS. Your ISS advisor will provide this letter after you submit a complete application to ISS.

Documentation of the unforeseen change in your financial circumstances. 

Two (2) identical natural color photographs of yourself, taken within 30 days of your application and not previously used for another purpose.

Please review the specifications for the photos.  

If your photos do not meet USCIS requirements exactly, your EAD card will not be issued.

In pencil, write your name and I-94 number lightly on the back of each photo.

Photos can be taken at most drug stores (Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid) or at the UB Law Library, 211 O’Brian Hall (Tel. 645-2204).

Photocopy of your current, valid passport(biographic and photo pages) and U.S. visa stamp in your passport. If your passport has expired, please go to ISS, Talbert Hall 210 for advice.  

Canadian citizens do not have visa stamps.

Photocopy of the front and back of your newest I-94 Card OR print-out of electronic I-94 (available on CBP's website).

Where do I send my Economic Hardship application?

Visit the USCIS I-765 Direct Filing Address for the current lockbox mailing address. Be sure to click on "Foreign Students".

You should use a reliable, express delivery service��(e.g. UPS, FedEx) to mail your application. Utilizing an express delivery service will enable you to track your application and its delivery. Please save your receipt.

How long will processing at the USCIS take?

Processing time at the USCIS is estimated to be 90-120 days. However, processing times vary widely, depending on the time of year and workload at the Service Center to which you send your application.

You cannot begin employment until you have received your Employment Authorization Document (EAD) from the USCIS and the “start date” printed on the EAD card is effective. 

3. After USCIS Approval

If your application is approved, you will receive an Employment Authorization Document (“EAD card”) from the USCIS Service Center.

You must submit a copy of your EAD card to ISS on UB Global using the "Document Upload" e-form.

Important Reminders

Economic Hardship Employment Authorization is limited to 20 hours per week when school is in session and 40 hours per week during school breaks. 

Economic Hardship employment authorization is normally issued for one year. You may submit a request to the USCIS for renewal of work authorization by following the same procedures outlined above. The earliest you may request a renewal is 180 days before your current EAD expires. Please remember to send a copy of your current EAD along with the other documents listed above to the USCIS. 

Employment authorization is automatically terminated when you graduate, transfer to another university or violate your F-1 status in any way (e.g. not registering as a full-time student).

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I take my hat off to you! (Clothes idioms, Part 1)

On July 13, 2022 By Kate Woodford

English has a number of really useful, current idioms and phrases that feature items of clothes. This week we’ll start by looking at idioms with the word ‘hat’ and we’ll work our way down the body to ‘shirt’ idioms. In Part 2, we’ll consider idioms containing words for clothes that cover the bottom half of the body.

Starting at the head, let’s look at four nice ‘hat’ idioms. People sometimes describe their role or responsibilities in a situation by saying they are wearing their teacher’s/journalist’s/lawyer’s, etc. hat:

Of course, I was wearing my lawyer’s hat at the meeting. With my parent’s hat on, I might have said something different.

If you say you take your hat off to someone, or tip your hat to someone, you mean you admire and respect them, usually because they do something difficult:

I take my hat off to teachers – teaching is such a demanding job.

I tip my hat to anyone prepared to take on the big companies.

If you do something at the drop of a hat, you do it immediately, without any hesitation:

If we needed help, she’d be round here at the drop of a hat.

Someone who throws or tosses their hat into the ring announces that they are going to compete, especially in an election:

In all, 15 candidates have thrown their hat into the ring to run for the presidency.

The bonnet – an old-fashioned style of hat – features in one useful idiom. If you have a bee in your bonnet, you keep talking about something, especially something that annoys or worries you: She’s got a real bee in her bonnet about people who change their names.

Moving down the body, someone who would give you the shirt off their back is extremely kind and generous and would do anything to help you:

He’s such a nice guy – he’d give you the shirt off his back.

Someone who tells a person who is getting angry to keep their shirt on is telling them informally to stop being angry:

All right, mate, keep your shirt on! I didn’t mean to push you.

Focusing now on the parts of a shirt (the sleeve and the cuff), someone who shows their emotions a lot may be said to wear their heart on their sleeve:

You know what Jamie’s like – he wears his heart on his sleeve.

Meanwhile, someone who has something up their sleeve has a secret plan:

Who knows what she has up her sleeve.

I’m sure he has a few tricks up his sleeve.

If you roll up your sleeves, you prepare to work hard:

We need someone who’ll roll up their sleeves and get on with the job.

Finally, if you speak off the cuff, you say something without having prepared or thought about your words first:

I just said a few words off the cuff.

It was an off-the-cuff remark.

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PPFR - Present Progressive for Future Reference

Using the present continuous to talk about the future

The present continuous is used to talk about arrangements for events at a time later than now. There is a suggestion that more than one person is aware of the event, and that some preparation has already happened. e.g.

I'm meeting Jim at the airport = Jim and I have discussed this.

I am leaving tomorrow. = I've already bought my train ticket.

We're having a staff meeting next Monday = all members of staff have been told about it.

Examples

Is she seeing him tomorrow?

He isn't working next week.

They aren't leaving until the end of next year.

We are staying with friends when we get to Boston.

Note: In the first example, "seeing" is used in a continuous form because it means "meeting".Be careful: The simple present is used when a future event is part of a programme or time-table.

Notice the difference between:

a. We're having a staff meeting next Monday = just that once b. We have a staff meeting every Monday

Test your knowledge

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A succinct but not flaccid examination of English pronunciation Why the wild variations in how we spell and speak?

JAMES HARBECK

MAY 2, 2022

Let me be succinct.

OK, I'm "succinct." Now how do you say me?

I did a little poll about this on Twitter and the results were interesting. Of 416 respondents, 55% said they pronounce it like "sus-sinct" (or "suh-sinct"), and 40% said they pronounce it like "suck-sinct." But what was even more interesting was that many of the respondents, however they said it, were shocked that anyone would pronounce it the other way.

A few respondents also pointed out rather primly that we always say cc before i or e as "ks" (except in Italian loans like focaccia, Latin words like Staphylococci, and of course soccer), so, clearly, "sussinct" is not asseptable and anyone saying it that way must be doing it unsussessfully by assident.

But there are three problems with that line of reasoning.

First, the "sussinct" pronunciation is enshrined by such authorities as Merriam-Webster as one of two acceptable ways of saying the word.

Second, English loves weird little exceptions — or, more to the point, English-speaking people expect weird little exceptions (like the spellings of weird and people), so English just keeps getting them.

And third, there are other exceptions to the cc = "ks" rule.

The most prominent exception is flaccid, for which authoritative dictionaries (Merriam-Webster, Oxford, etc.) give "fla-sid" as the first pronunciation, before "flak-sid." Not that everyone agrees! Debate is so heated across the "flaxid"/"flassid" divide that Bryan Garner, in Garner's Modern English Usage, calls the word "skunked" and implies you're better off not saying it at all.

There are also other exceptions to the cc = "ks" rule that you may hear from time to time. In at least some circles, some people pronounce eccentricity without the "k" sound. Other words that have lost the "k" for some speakers include successful, accelerate, accessible, and accessory — and Merriam-Webster has even added a "k"-less pronunciation as optional for accessory, though not for the others.

OK, but why? Again, there are a few possible reasons, and probably all of them are in play here.

First, there's economy of effort. If we can get away with less physical exertion while speaking without becoming incomprehensible or being condemned as ignorant louts, we often will. A word like succinct requires quite a bit of exercise from your tongue: from "s" to "ks" to "nct," it alternates tongue-tip touches with rolls forward from the back, like a break dancer doing a caterpillar. Changing "ks" to "s" cuts the effort nearly in half.

Even a word like flaccid or accessory is just that little bit easier without having to touch the back of the tongue to the roof of the mouth for a "k."

Economy of effort doesn't by itself account for the change, though, because there are many other words where we could drop the "k" but don't — vaccination, for instance, has no real risk of being mistaken for something else if it's said as "vassination," unlike a word such as succeed, which will sound like secede if it loses its "k." But it's easy to see why, when we're given the option of dropping the "k," many of us take it.

Second, there's analogy. Our pronunciation of a word is influenced by other words that it seems like, and we don't always keep an eye on the spelling or etymology. Flaccid, which seems to have been the first of these cc words to lose its "k" (authors were already inveighing against this "error" in the 1800s), is rather like acid and placid, especially if you don't always remember how many c's it has: you'll find it written as flacid in various texts from the 1700s to today. Similarly, accessory has more in common, sound-wise, with assess than with access because of its second-syllable stress, and neither of those words seems to have more in common than the other with accessory, meaning-wise. Analogy and resemblance may not have as much of an influence on succinct, but if you're used to hearing "flassid" and "assessory" you have some precedent for it.

Third, there's social pressure. If our friends do it, we often do it too. Yes, yes, if your friends all jumped off a cliff, you might think twice about it, but on the other hand you might assume they know something you don't. And when it comes to English pronunciation, where we have all learned that we will always be wrong at random times for no good reason, and where saying a word differently seldom leads to actual death or injury (except to our pride), if our friends are saying a word a particular way, we'll likely assume it must be right, even if (or especially if) it's weird and unexpected. That doesn't account for the start of a variant pronunciation, but it can certainly help it.

True, social pressure also accounts for why we keep saying a word the "correct" way, but it also sometimes helps the "correct" way to change. Take the suffix -ing for example. It's a little easier to say "in" than "ing" in many contexts, and by the early 1700s, the pronunciation of -ing was well established as "-in" even for high-status speakers such as poets and the nobility; saying saying as "say-ing" rather than "say-in" would have been an overpronunciation, uneducated, like saying "cup board" rather than "cubbard" for cupboard. But then something happened: some schoolteachers and people who wrote grammar books decided that this was lazy and incorrect and that -ing should be said the way it's spelled. And, faced with hearing it one way from their peers (or from the peers of the realm) and another way from their teachers, speakers went with whoever was most likely to punish them for saying it "wrong" — or they alternated depending on who they most needed to impress. So for the past couple of centuries, it has once again been "correct" to say "say-ing" and "incorrect" to say "say-in"… which means that if we want to sound like schoolteachers, we say "say-ing," but if we want to sound like down-home, unpretentious folks, we say "say-in."

So, there it is. If you want to show your knowledge and not sound ignorant, you should always pronounce things the way they're spelled, except for all the exceptions (like cupboard and knowledge), which you should not pronounce the way they're spelled lest you sound ignorant. So… which should it be, "suh-sinct" or "suck-sinct"?

It may come down to personal taste — perhaps "suh-sinct" sounds a little, uh, flaccid to you. Perhaps, with Charles Harrington Elster in his unabashedly opinionated Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, you declare "it will be a cold day in orthoepic hell" before you utter such a "slovenly" mispronunciation. Or on the other hand, perhaps, like one commenter at Throw Grammar from the Train, you've "always pronounced succinct as 'sussinct' and will say that aurally it exemplifies its definition better than its traditional pronunciation."

To be as succinct as possible: You might as well think of who you most want to impress (or least want to offend) and find out how they say it.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article implied one pronunciation of "flaccid" is more accepted by Merriam-Webster than the other. It has since been corrected. We regret the error.

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