For a bracing reminder about good writing practice, Wolcott Gibbs, an editor on The New Yorker, and contemporary of James Thurber, is hard to beat. In Thurber's account of his time on the magazine, The Years with Ross (1959), he transcribes Gibbs' ideas about editing copy - in the form of a 31-point rant, which includes the following nuggets:
- Writers always use too damn many adverbs. On one page recently I found 11 modifying the verb 'said'. 'He said morosely, violently, eloquently, so on' ... It is impossible for a character to go through all these emotional states one after the other.
- Word 'said' is OK. Efforts to avoid repetition by inserting 'grunted', 'snorted' etc are waste motion and offend the pure in heart.
- Our writers are full of clichés, just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliché undoubtedly is one and had better be removed.
- The more 'As a matter of facts', 'howevers', 'for instances' etc, etc you can cut out, the nearer you are to the Kingdom of Heaven.
- On the whole we are hostile to puns.
- Try to preserve an author's style if he is an author and has a style.
- To quote Mr Ross [Harold Ross, the magazine's editor], 'Nobody gives a damn about a writer or his problems except another writer.' Pieces about authors, reporters, poets etc are to be discouraged in principle.
- Editing on manuscript should be done with a black pencil, decisively.
- I almost forgot indirection, which probably maddens Mr Ross more than anything else in the world. He objects, that is, to important objects or places or people being dragged into things in a secretive and underhanded manner. If, for instance, a profile has never told where a man lives, Ross protests against a sentence saying, 'His Vermont house is full of valuable paintings.' Should say 'He has a house in Vermont, and it is full etc.'
How many of these are relevant after more than 50 years? A few sports reporters could note the last point.
Please feel free to contribute to this occasional series of historic advice to journalists. Or find more about writing here.
