The ABCs of Style

About the Book

Newspaper readers are often expected to suffer through sentences that seem to require navigation aids, sentences like this: The father of a man arrested in the four-day disappearance of his ex-girlfriend said Wednesday that his son led authorities Tuesday to a wooded area where she was found shot several times but still alive. By investing considerable effort, one can usually arrive at an interpretation, perhaps even full understanding, of the writer’s intended meaning, but such study demands patience, for which most readers have no time. They would prefer that the writer had cleared up the muddle before the sentence ever saw print. “The ABCs of Style” is a collection of such sentences, taken not only from newspapers but also from students’ essays, professors’ essays, the Internet, books, magazine articles, business letters, corporate publications and news releases. The examples were gathered by Daryl Frazell, a longtime editor for newspapers who now teaches journalism at the University of Nebraska. The professor comments on each item and suggests how bad writing might be made good. As the title indicates, the crippling defects that afflict these examples are organized alphabetically. The chapters and their contents are: A is for absurdity, in which statements defy reason. B is for blather, where the hot air blows. C is for clumsiness, where words and phrases traipse undisciplined. D is for disagreement, in which pronouns and antecedents collide. E is for excess, where the affliction is bloat. F is for fumbles spell check won’t catch, which demonstrates the folly of computer dependency. G is for gobbledygook, the language of unthink. H is for hyphens and such, where the ailment is punctuation inflammation. I is for insensitivity, where politics intrudes. J is for jargon and journalese, the lair of the ing thing. K is for killer keystrokes, wherein editing is mayhem. L is for losing battles, most of them quixotic. M is for muddled modifiers, the domain of the dangler. N is for nits worth picking, or the lice will grow. O is for old ogres, rules that aren’t and perhaps never were. P is for plurals and possessives, wherein the apostrophe loses its way. Q is for quotes worth quoting, and not. R is for r-r-r-repetition, in which redundancy rules. S is for storytelling, and the fundamentals of the art. T is for toss these in the trash, a repository for useless words. U is for unmeaningness, wherein little is clear. V is for verbal vagaries, in which vocabulary is whimiscal. W is for word wars, and the conquest of meaning. XYZ: the last words, on the future of writing.

About the Author

Daryl Frazell teaches editing and writing in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “The ABCs of Style” contains selected items from “The Grouch,” his critique sheet for student writers and press associations. He is co-author with George Tuck of a textbook, “Principles of Editing” (1996). He became an educator in 1990 after a journalism career that began at the Minneapolis Star in 1960 and included service at The New York Times and the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. He is a graduate of Northwestern University.