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ESSENTIALS
THIRD EDITION
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the wouldn’t-be-without-it
guide to writing well
Mem Fox
Lyn Wilkinson
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To our much-loved students, with thanks
First edition published 1993 (reprinted 10 times)
Second edition published 2009 (reprinted 4 times)
This edition published 2015 by
MACMILLAN EDUCATION AUSTRALIA PTY LTD
15–19 Claremont Street, South Yarra 3141
Visit our website at www.macmillan.com.au
Associated companies and representatives
throughout the world.
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for the memories
Copyright © Mem Fox and Lyn Wilkinson 1993, 2009, 2015
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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All rights reserved.
Except under the conditions described in the
Copyright Act 1968 of Australia (the Act) and subsequent amendments,
no part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
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Educational institutions copying any part of this book
for educational purposes under the Act must be covered by a
Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) licence for educational institutions
and must have given a remuneration notice to CAL.
Licence restrictions must be adhered to. For detail s of the CAL licence contact:
Copyright Agency Limited, Level 15, 233 Castlereagh Street, Sydney, NSW 2000.
Telephone: (02) 9394 7600. Facsimile: (02) 9394 7601. Email: [email protected]
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National Library of Australia
cataloguing in publication data
Author:
Fox, Mem, 1946–
Title:
English Essentials: The wouldn’t-be-without-it guide to writing well / Mem Fox and Lyn
Wilkinson
Edition:
3rd edition
ISBN:
9781458653413 (paperback)
Notes:
Includes index
Target Audience:
For secondary school students
Subjects: English language—Writing—Juvenile literature
English language—Rhetoric—Juvenile literature
English language—Usage—Juvenile literature
Creative writing—Juvenile literature
Other authors/contributors:
Wilkinson, Lyn
Dewey number:
428
Publisher: Emma Cooper
Project editor: Barbara Delissen
Illustrator: Nik Scott
Cover and text designer: Dimitrios Frangoulis
Permissions clearance: Vanessa Roberts
Typeset in 9.5/14 Merriweather
Cover image: Shutterstock/Nagib
Printed in Malaysia
While every care has been taken to trace and acknowledge copyright, the publishers tender their
apologies for any accidental infringement where copyright has proved untraceable. They would be
pleased to come to a suitable arrangement with the rightful owner in each case.
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Contents
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Introductionvi
PART I: Writing with style and effect 1
Elements of effective writing 2
Getting started 3
Drafting 4
The nitty-gritty of rewriting 29
Hints for writing essays
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PART III: Writing correctly
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Language and its conventions SA
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Our changing language Conventions in language 7
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Basic terms 33
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Some parts of speech Singular and plural 63
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Nouns and pronouns 67
Nouns—various types Pronouns—number and person 9
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PART II: The essay
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Adjectives and adverbs Adjectives—degrees of comparison
Adverbs—degrees of comparison
What not to do
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ivContents
10 Verbs 75
Conjugating verbs
Active and passive voice
Problematic irregular verbs
Auxiliary verbs
The subjunctive mood
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11 So what’s a sentence, anyway?
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12 Three big problems in sentences
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The run-on sentence Agreement in a sentence Problematic pronouns 83
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Three basic elements
Clauses in a sentence
Is the sentence correct?
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Full stop and comma Semicolon and colon Dash Apostrophe Question mark and exclamation mark Quotation marks A note on punctuating conjunctive adverbs
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Indirect speech Direct speech 106
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14 Punctuating speech 15 The apostrophe of possession How to get it right Hard-to-recognise possessives 16 Getting spelling right About spelling Spelling rules and generalisations Multisensory skill Helpful hints for hopeless spellers Ask others to help you
In summary
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Contents
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17 Proofreading with care 134
Why proofreading is important Procedure—what to check The final result Practice passages 134
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19 Is it this or is it that? 153
20 The effective writing checklist 156
PART IV: In conclusion GE
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18 The writer as a speaker 21 Writers and the writing process The last word
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Index
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The extremes of writers Writers as readers Misconceptions about the writing process How to be successful
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Introduction
Books like this are often boring. We hope this one isn’t. We wrote it in
particular for students at high school and university to help them with
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formal types of writing, but we hope that teachers and those fascinating
people known as ‘the man and woman in the street’ will also find it
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lively, useful and accessible.
The first and second editions became hilariously out of date all too
quickly due to the rapid changes in technology that have happened
since we wrote the first draft back in 1992. At that time many writers
and students were really cutting and pasting—with scissors and sticky
tape! It’s hard to believe, we know.
We’ve had a lot of fun and a few headaches putting together this
third edition. There are many subtle changes that drag it kicking
and screaming into the age of technology. We hope you’ll enjoy the
hundreds of refreshing hints and pieces of advice that we’ve provided
and that you’ll use them to write more effectively than ever.
Our goals haven’t been grand. For instance, we haven’t aimed
to cover every single complexity in the English language. Fusspot
grammarians will groan and tut-tut over some of the things we’ve
said, and complain bitterly over what we haven’t said, but they will
have to remember we are writing for you, not for them. We’ve tried
to keep the book simple and uncluttered by discussing only the most
useful guidelines and the most common mistakes. And for your sake
and ours, we’ve kept the style informal.
May every success be yours!
Mem Fox and Lyn Wilkinson
Adelaide
2015
vi
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PART I
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Writing with
style and effect
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1
Elements of
effective writing
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This chapter focuses on the many different factors that make writing
effective—all writing, not just ‘creative’ writing. ‘Creative writing’ is
a misleading term since all writing is creative, including every word in
this obviously non-fiction book. We will be placing furious quotation
marks around ‘creative’ as an indication of our irritation.
Another reason for distrusting the term ‘creative’ is its negative
connotations. ‘Creative writing’ sets up an erroneous picture of wishywashy writers waiting for the muse to inspire them, wafting without
reflection from one self-indulgent paragraph to the next, writing
pieces that drip with sickly purple prose. We will be using the term
‘creative’ from time to time but merely to differentiate two kinds of
writing, each of which is as demanding and as difficult as the other.
Truly creative writing is always well crafted and drafted.
In the rest of this chapter the repeated term ‘good’ writing means
‘effective’ writing. There are many aspects of writing that make it
effective.
First, what is good writing not? Good writing is not showing off your
vocabulary. Good writing is not being so clever that no one understands
what you’re trying to say. Good writing is not writing a piece longer
than anyone else’s; length often has less to do with being effective and
more to do with not knowing when to stop. Good writing is not pleasing
only yourself, unless you will be the only reader of what you write, as
in a journal, for example. Good writing is not writing so you end up
sounding a hundred years older than you really are.
We could go on. But let’s be positive rather than negative and look
at what good writing is.
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Part I Writing with style and effect
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Good writing keeps the reader in mind
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If you were to be the only reader of your writing, life would be simple.
As a writer, it’s easy for you to understand what you are trying to say.
You know what you are talking about, no matter how you write it down.
There are no confusions in your own mind, no questions needing
answers, no lapses of interest in the subject, no details needing to be
elaborated, no tedious sections needing to be cut. You would never
have to redraft since you could rest assured that you had written
essentially matchless prose. However, when you know that someone
other than your own uncritical self will be reading your writing, your
problems begin.
There’s no reason to assume that other readers will be uncritically
interested in what you have to say. None of us is God’s gift to writing.
This means you have to take many things into consideration, and one
of the best ways of doing this is to ask yourself questions such as:
% Who are my readers? Some of the important aspects you need to
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bear in mind are age, education, social status, values, politics,
ethnic background, gender and religion.
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How can I capture their attention and keep it?
What do they already know?
What might they not understand?
How or where might they be confused?
What effect am I trying to achieve?
Don’t believe the myth that writing to satisfy yourself is good
enough. It isn’t, unless you’re the sole audience for that writing.
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Chapter 1 Elements of effective writing
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Remember, your readers are pleading for attention with every word you
write. It helps to imagine that they’re hard to please and cantankerous.
Cajole them into paying attention to your message. Imagine them
sitting beside you as you write, groaning with boredom, or moaning,
‘I don’t get it. Whaddya mean?’ If you listen to your readers as you
write, and care about their imagined reactions, your writing will
rapidly improve. We’ve imagined you sitting beside us and deliberately
decided to use contractions (isn’t, don’t, we’ve). Although they’re
seldom found in academic texts, they reduce the distance between the
writer and the reader and help to create the feeling that we’re having a
fireside chat with you.
Good writing has the lightness of speech
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That’s not to say that good writing is merely speech written down. It
isn’t. Written English is far more complex and clearly organised than
spoken English. The two are very different indeed. However, good
writing has the cadences, the rhythms and the lightness associated with
speech. The tone of a piece of writing may force an alteration in the
lightness; for example, a brave writer would say Before she went to
bed …, whereas a timid writer, not daring to be light-handed, would
prefer Before retiring to her nocturnal resting place …
Referring to the work of authors who have written regarding this topic …
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There’s absolutely nothing wrong with ‘who have written on this
topic’. It’s clear, it’s effective, and it has the lightness of speech.
Good writing is clear writing
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Good writing—effective writing—is first and foremost writing that
makes its message clear. If you can’t understand something you’ve
read in a novel, newspaper, letter, story, article, journal, government
form, advertisement, essay, recipe book or instruction manual, don’t
necessarily blame yourself. It might be the writer!
Of course, when you’re grappling with ‘difficult’ novelists, poets
or playwrights, or coming to grips with brand-new concepts in
academic articles, you will be well aware that a cursory first reading
isn’t sufficient for an educated appreciation of the material you’re
reading. In those cases, don’t blame the writers for being obtuse:
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Part I Writing with style and effect
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they’re inviting you to take part in a game and you have to work out the
rules before you can play. However, most of us are neither writers of
difficult literary works, nor creators of ground-breaking
Aim first
knowledge (who should, anyway, be writing as clearly as
and always
possible), so we have no excuse not be clear.
to express,
Frequently, the opposite of good writing is finalnot impress.
year-at-school writing. In the panic to impress,
students begin to develop an amazing style, full of long words,
pompous sentence structures and fatuous padding. It isn’t necessary
to use long words like ‘fatuous’ instead of short ones, nor is it
necessary to write complex sentences instead of snappy ones. Aim
first and always to express, not impress. Inappropriately long words and
convoluted sentence structures interfere with getting the meaning
across. Avoid them. Be brave. Turn over a new page in your writing
life. Short sentences scattered among long sentences come as a relief
to any reader. It’s certainly acceptable to use long words or complex
sentences whenever they’re appropriate, but bear in mind their length
alone does not make them impressive. And pretending to be clever
doesn’t fool anyone in the end. Really impressive writers are those
who write simply and clearly, and get their meaning across without
unnecessary clutter.
Good writing manages to capture hearts and
minds early in a piece
This is true of both fiction and non-fiction. There are many techniques
used in writing to capture the reader’s attention. For example, effective
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Chapter 1 Elements of effective writing
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non-fiction writing is carefully set out, with headings and perhaps dot
points or diagrams, to help get the writer’s message across.
Let’s focus on a phenomenon that’s particularly important in
winning readers’ hearts and minds. It’s called ‘the lead’. Because
readers of any writing (fiction or non-fiction) have limited patience
and attention spans, the first sentence—or sentences—has to act as
bait to hook them in. As a general rule, therefore, long, complicated
sentences are not a good idea; for example:
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As she rounded the final corner, sweating slightly in the warmth of the
late afternoon sun, her feet dragging, wondering how it would feel to
return after all these years, fearing the worst about what the family
would choose to remember, and noticing with deep disgust that the old
house with the pepper tree had been replaced by a set of cheaply built
apartments, Corrie slowed her pace, putting off the inevitable for yet
another moment.
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Leads are usually more effective if they are more easily understood,
which is why shorter sentences are generally (but not always)
preferable; for example, Corrie slowed her pace. (You wouldn’t have
noticed at the time, but we deliberately started this non-fiction text
with two very short sentences: Books like this are often boring. We
hope this one isn’t.)
Of course, there’s no rule about leads having to be
Tease your
short. Many successful leads are long, but the risks in
readers into
continuing
a long lead are that readers may lose interest and that
to read your
confusion may occur. Regardless of length, the main goal
piece.
of a lead is to make readers want to continue reading. So,
in ‘creative’ writing don’t give away too much in your
first sentence or two. Tease your readers into continuing to read your
piece. Make them wonder what the lead is actually leading to. A lead
such as My birthday had arrived at last! may have the effect of turning
a reader away. ‘Who wants to know about a boring old birthday,
anyway?’ the reader might ask. But if the lead tantalises readers into
asking ‘What happens next?’ the bait has worked and they will be
hooked.
Although the lead is obviously the first thing a reader will read, it
may not be the first thing a writer writes. It’s quite possible to write
the lead last. Start with a temporary lead that sets you in the right
direction—a lead that serves its purpose, at a pinch. Then, when you’re
redrafting and have the rest of your piece as you want it, go back and
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rewrite the lead until you’re satisfied that it’s right for what follows.
In non-fiction, the lead might state your premise, your reason for
writing; or you might set the focus by describing the scene of your field
work, taking the reader to the place; or you might start with a snappy
quote. Don’t fall into the easy trap of thinking that non-fiction has
to mean ‘boring’. The best non-fiction is riveting and is brilliantly
written.
Good writing flows smoothly from
paragraph to paragraph
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When you have written a (temporary) lead, the next problem is
ensuring smoothness in the rest of your piece. Huge bunches of
text without breaks are daunting for any reader, so it’s visually and
psychologically important to divide your thoughts into clearly defined
sections. This can be done in two ways: either by an indentation at the
start of each new thought—the method we are using in this book—or
by having no indentation and instead leaving a line between each
chunk of text.
The chunk of text known as the paragraph is a series of sentences,
all of which relate to a single point you want to make. This means
that some paragraphs might be longer than usual and others shorter.
Paragraphs are roughly a hundred words, but that’s an average only
and no word counting should occur unless you find you have written
a paragraph that’s a page long. A short, one-sentence (or even
one-word) paragraph can be electrifying, but paragraphs are more
often three or four sentences bunched together around one idea.
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It’s considered courteous for the writer to try to vary the length of
those sentences to assist understanding and prevent reader fatigue.
In non-fiction it is critical that the most important idea you want to
convey is in the first sentence of the paragraph, not the last. Less
experienced writers sometimes write several points about the main
idea before finally revealing it in the final sentence of the paragraph.
Wrong! Help your idea by putting it up front before you flesh it out.
Regardless of whether you are writing ‘creative writing’ or nonfiction, you need to carefully connect one paragraph to the next so that
readers don’t become fatigued and confused. It isn’t
wildly difficult to connect paragraphs if you think of
It isn’t
them as pieces in a game of dominoes whose endings
wildly difficult
and beginnings have to match, or as individual
to connect
paragraphs if
pieces in a jigsaw, all of which have to fit together to
you think of
complete the large puzzle that is your piece. The first
them as pieces
sentence in any paragraph is like a jigsaw piece that
in a game of
has to ease snugly—it mustn’t be forced—out of the
dominoes.
final sentence in the previous paragraph. The two
sentences can’t be completely unconnected, for the
sake of the flow of your writing.
‘Flow’ is important as an aid to the reader. It’s not something that
‘someone out there’ has recommended for no good reason. In trying to
achieve a smooth flow between paragraphs it might help to regard your
readers as being a little bit fragile and therefore needing to be gently
helped across the bumpy roads of your thoughts, without being jarred
in the process.
Sometimes you will need to indicate that it’s not a bump but rather
a change of direction. Especially in non-fiction you will need to use a
‘signal’ (an adverbial conjunction) that you are going to change tack.
‘However’, ‘nevertheless’, ‘on the other hand’, and ‘despite this’
are just some of the signals used at the beginning of a paragraph to
indicate to the reader that there is ‘flow’ (or cohesion) in your work,
but that for the moment you are going against the flow, so to speak, by
putting an alternative point of view.
We have tried in this section to practise precisely what we’ve been
preaching by writing model paragraphs that connect to one another
without jarring. If you need to consolidate your understanding of
paragraphing, read this whole section again, noting with a writer’s
critical eye the way in which it was written.
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