How not to write

Is it better to say bad things to someone or behind their back? That's a good question, and like a lot of difficult questions, the answer is, "It depends."

Here at RJ Battles I've written some unkind things about the blog The Daily Guru. But every time I wrote one of those posts it crossed my mind that maybe I should send a message or a comment directly to TDG. Just friendly suggestions. But there's not much fun in that, plus, who knows how those suggestions might be recieved. It's been my experience that people don't want to hear anything about their work other than "It's awesome".

So I'm not going to write to TDG and point out what I think are some flaws in his writing style. Instead, I'm going to highlight them here at RJ Battles and let his mistakes serve as a lesson to other writers out there. Stephen King said that the only way to be a good writer was to write a lot and read a lot. And reading bad writing is as important as reading good writing because it shows you what not to do.

The problem with The Daily Guru is that his music reviews are locked into a basic magazine music review formula. As a result, sentences are bloated with cliches and pointless phrases.

I'm going to use two recent reviews as examples.

On October 26 he posted about The Ronettes's "Be My Baby". In the first sentence he uses the phrase "one can easily argue". Then in the third sentence he says, "and yet it can easily be argued". He also ends the second paragraph with "one can easily argue".

Like most of the TDG posts, the "Be My Baby" review is four paragraphs long, and in a piece of writing that size overused words and phrases start to jump out at the reader.

The first, third, and forth paragraphs all contain the phrase "there is no question".

In paragraph two, the phrase "completely unique" is used two sentences in a row.

In one sentence he writes, "nothing short of iconic" and in the very next sentence he writes "nothing short of legendary". In the next paragraph: "nothing short of hypnotizing".

That's bad, right? No, it's good compared to today's post, a review of Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water".

Four paragraphs containing a total of 28 sentences. Again, there are some cases that can be argued easily. But for the most part, there are no cases to be argued- there is, in fact, no question.

Paragraph One
"there is no question"

Paragraph Two
"it is without question"

Paragraph Three
"there is no question"
then, in the very next sentence-
"Yet there is no question"

Paragraph Four
"Yet there is no question"
"is without question"
"there is no question"

I saved my favorite thing for last. This is a sentence from Paragraph Four:

"Yet there is no question that the original stands far above the reach of any imitator, as the fragile beauty that Simon and Garfunkel created here is without question one of the most breathtaking moments to ever be captured on tape."

That sentence is pretty amazing on its own, but then when you think about how many times the phrase "no question" is used- 7- in a 28 paragraph review, you wonder how the writer could avoid noticing. It's crazy if you do the math- 1 out of every 4 sentences contains the phrase (except, as we know, that isn't exactly true; the phrase shows up twice in one sentence).

Anyway, (That's one of my own overused words; I'm no great writer myself. I know.) if you go to The Daily Guru and read these posts you can see that the phrases that he overuses are not needed. If they were erased his writing would be a lot cleaner. From Strunk and White's Elements of Style: "Omit needless words".