Praise for the previous edition:

‘How Writing Works is the opposite of a dry writing bible. For those
who take the time to read and follow the strategies, good writer or
bad, you will be rewarded with the ultimate writing resource’.
Writing Queensland

‘What Roslyn Petelin doesn’t know about clear, precise writing is not
worth knowing’.
Leigh Sales, ABC TV

‘A superb guide to great writing in the modern media era’.

Phil Harding, journalist and broadcaster, London
‘Whether you’re a CEO or an intern, the ability to communicate is
your biggest asset. Petelin’s expert advice in this book will accelerate
your career’.
Damian Kington, Investor, Brand Consultant, and
Strategy Adviser, New York
‘It’s time for a new President for the Republic of Writing: Petelin’s
book will win her subjects from students to experienced professionals
electing to learn why writing is so vital and to follow her lively learning
pathways on how to do it elegantly, vividly, and with precision.’
David McKie, Professor, Waikato Management School
‘How Writing Works will be invaluable for all students from
undergraduate to doctoral level, especially as a guide to the
construction of robust and coherent argument.’
Margo Blythman, Former Director of Teaching and
Learning, University of the Arts, London
‘How Writing Works will be an enormous support for undergraduates
and postgraduates who want to be the best writers possible. It
will also help to prepare them for success in the communication
industries, whether as author, editor, publicist or publisher.’
Jeri Kroll, Professor of English and Creative
Writing, Flinders University
‘Roslyn Petelin is the best of the best in teaching clear, readable
writing. This book will improve the writing of everyone who reads it.’
Lelia Green, Professor of Communications,
Edith Cowan University
 How Writing
Works
This is an engaging and broad-ranging introduction to the elements
of grammar, sentence structure, and style that will help you to write
well across a range of academic, creative, and professional contexts,
deftly combining practical strategies with scholarly principles.
The second edition includes updated material based on a
longstanding commitment to writing and to best international
practice. It includes advice on reading; language; grammar and style;
structuring; designing; paragraphing; punctuation; workplace and
academic documents; digital writing for social media; and revising,
editing, and proofreading.
How Writing Works should be on the desk of everyone who needs
to write: students, professionals in all fields, and creative writers. It
is an essential handbook for working writers and writing workers in
the contemporary writing-reliant workplace.
The accompanying companion website includes links to video
interviews and presentations from leading grammarians including
Professor David Crystal and Professor Geoff Pullum, in addition to
online quizzes and activities to support readers’ learning.
Roslyn Petelin designed and initiated the award-winning
postgraduate Program in Writing, Editing, and Publishing at the
University of Queensland, Australia, and developed the hugely
successful international online course WRITE101X English Grammar
and Style. She is co-author of The Professional Writing Guide and
Professional Communication, and consults extensively to government
and other organisations on writing, editing, and information design.
How Writing
Works
A Field Guide to
Effective Writing

Second Edition
Roslyn Petelin
Second edition published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Roslyn Petelin
The right of Roslyn Petelin to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. reprinted or reproduced or

No part of this book may be
utilised in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
or

known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in

any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and

explanation without intent to infringe.

First edition published by Allen & Unwin 2016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-032-01630-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-01628-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-17934-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003179344
Typeset in ITC Giovanni Std
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Aces the companion website: www.routledge.com/cw/petelin

This book is dedicated to my dear friend Professor Linda K.
Fuller of Worcester State University, Massachusetts, whom I can
always rely on to produce perfect prose.

And to Robbie and Claudia of Henley, whom I can always rely

on to produce perfect handwriting.
 Contents
Preface
xii

CHAPTER 1 How writing works1

Writing in our contemporary information society
1
What is writing?2
Vocation or avocation?3

Writing workplace
in the 4
5
The writing-thinking-learning connection

Keeping a journal7
Inspiration for journalling9
Writing as a problem-solving process 10

Getting started 12

Producing writing worth reading 12

What characterises good writers? 13

ix
The last word 14

Activities 14

Further reading 17

CHAPTER 2 How reading works 18

Why read? 18
How does reading help writing? 19

Writing for your readers 20

Reading in the workplace 24

Structuring writing for reading 29

Reading critically 30
The last word 32
Activities 34
Further reading 36

CHAPTER 3 How words work 37

Using words well 37

Taking words seriously: Style, voice, and tone 41

Choosing words wisely 45

Spoken communication 64
The last word 65
Activities 65
Further reading 67
CHAPTER 4 How sentences and content words work 68
Grammar and syntax 68

Descriptivism and prescriptivism 71

Traditional grammar 71

Syntax 75
Content words 82
The last word 99
Activities 99
Further reading 104

CHAPTER 5 How structure words and paragraphs work 105

Structure words, interjections, and paragraphs 105
Structure words 105

Interjections/exclamations 120

Analysing sentences 120

Paragraphs 120
The last word 123
Activities 123
Further reading 128

CHAPTER 6 How punctuation works 129

Why punctuate? 129

Categories of punctuation marks 131

Punctuation patterns 144

The last word 145

Activities 145
Further reading 148

CHAPTER 7 How structure and design work 150

Shaping the verbal and the visual 150

Structuring 150
What is document structure? 151

Design considerations 164

The last word 173
Activities 173
Further reading 174

CHAPTER 8 How genres and workplace documents work 175

Understanding genre expectations 175

Writing in a professional context: Workplace genres 176

The last word 201
Activities 201

CHAPTER 9 How academic research and writing work 205

Research-based writing: How academic writing works 205
Academic research and writing 207
Critical reasoning 212

Getting started on research 214

The last word 234

Activities 236

CHAPTER 10 How digital writing works 238

The inexorable rise of digital media 238
The early years 240
Email: Insistent and indelible 240

Writing for social media in the workplace 245

Organisational websites 246

Blogs250
Twitter254

Texting 256
The last word 258
Activities ...258

CHAPTER 11 How revising, editing, and proofreading work 260

Writing with the intention of revising 260

Revising 262

Editing 265

Proofreading 269

Using computers for writing and editing 272

What happens in publishing? 274
Five levels of edit: Checklist 274

Typographical errors 282

The last word 283
Activities 283

Acknowledgements 286

Answers to the activities 288

References 296

Index 307
 Preface
Roslyn Petelin
Whether you are a student writer, a workplace writer, or a creative
writer, whether writing is your vocation, your avocation, or both,
this book aims to provide you with a substantial and engaging
introduction to contemporary writing with its accelerating demands
for succinct and coherent writing. If you can absorb and apply the
advice that I have distilled from decades of teaching writing, you will
be able to write the concise, lucid, nuanced, and compelling prose
that is so valued in universities and in the professions.
Although I have written this book primarily for university and
workplace writers, I firmly believe that much of the material and
advice will be valuable for creative writers, who also need to be their
own best editors.
The book will develop your understanding and use of generic
survive
structures in academic and workplace contexts and help you to
and thrive in the writing-reliant arenas of the twenty-first century.
The book introduces the core concepts of writing and reading,
then follows with a discussion of writing at the word, sentence
(including punctuation), and paragraph level. It then covers the
structure and design of documents in the most common academic
and workplace genres, followed by a chapter on digital writing and a
concluding chapter on revising, editing, and proofreading.
The book also contains a wide range of resources, with references
to useful print and online sites for further reading and learning. Take
advantage of the limitless resources of the internet to explore the rich
pickings of cultural and literary references alluded to in the book.
I’d love everyone who reads this book to use it by putting into
practice its heuristics (from the Greek word ‘to discover’) in their
own writing. Whether your writing is already reasonably good or
less than good, following the book’s advice and systematically
implementing its explicit strategies will exponentially enhance your
writing self-efficacy (your confidence and competence). At the end
of each chapter there are practical activities, which are supplemented
by the accompanying website.
Some of the content in this book is based on material that I wrote
for Professional Communication: Principles and applications by Peter
Putnis and Roslyn Petelin (Prentice Hall, 2nd edn, 1999). I have also
adapted a small amount of the material that I wrote and which was
published in The Professional Writing Guide: Writing well and knowing
why by Roslyn Petelin and Marsha Durham (Longman Professional,
1992). Many of the examples have been drawn from my work in
consulting about writing and editing to the international corporate
sphere in Australia, the UK, the USA, and SE Asia.
I have made every effort to locate sources and copyright holders
of other original material reproduced in the book, but if there are
any errors or omissions, I will be pleased to insert the appropriate
credit in any subsequent edition.
Roslyn Petelin
 CHAPTER 1

How writing works

Roslyn Petelin

You have to let words talk to words.

Ken Macrorie

Writing in our contemporary

information society
communication.
Before writing was invented, speaking was the main mode of
And while orality—a term derived from the Latin word
writing,
for the mouth—was central to culture before the invention of
culture.
writing has become absolutely central to contemporary
Ong defines culturally literate beings as ‘those whose thought
processes do not grow out of simply natural powers but out of the
powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of
writing’. ‘Writing’, he says, ‘has transformed human consciousness’
(1982, p. 78).
professional
These days, everyone’s a writer—in social, educational, and
spaces (Pullum, 2014; Yagoda, 2013). Writing is a mass
globally,
daily experience (Brandt, 2015). In 2020, Zizikes reported that,
about 3.5 billion people are active social media participants,
posting, during a typical day, 500 million tweets and over 10 billion
pieces of Facebook content.
Professor
In a presentation on YouTube, workplace-writing researcher
Deborah Brandt describes how, over the past 50 or 60 years,
the world economy has shifted from a base in manufacturing goods
to a base in manufacturing services, that is, knowledge, ideas, data,
 and information. She says: ‘as a consequence of this shift, writing
has become the work of our time’ (2012). Living in the twenty-first
century entails living in a service-oriented information society—
known as ‘the knowledge economy’. Writing is at the heart of this
knowledge economy: it is ubiquitous, demanding ever greater levels
of verbal sophistication.
dramatically
The rise and rise of the internet in our digital era has
upped the ante. Employers want graduates who are problem-
solvers—variously called ‘gold-collar workers’, ‘knowledge workers’,
and ‘information architects’—that is, graduates who can research,
analyse, write, and edit, and who are critical and creative thinkers
with technological competence and design sensibility.
Contemporary government, business, education, and industry
rely on writing. I can think of no disciplines or professions that aren’t
critically reliant on the researching, writing, and editing nexus. The
BBC reported a research project by the Society for Human Resource
Management that found ‘two crucial skills lacking in US college
Australia
graduates both involve . . . writing’ (Nguyen, 2015). Reports in
and the UK record the same problem.
Writing is at the centre of all disciplines and professions. We are
often judged on the quality of our writing, so it’s essential to strive
for professionalism. You’ll need to write well to succeed in your
studies and to have a great career path in whatever profession you
enter. The workplace requires a strong grasp of words, grammar, and
sentence structure—what is widely regarded as Standard English.
Standard English is rather an elastic term, but English holds its place
as the language of power and prestige in much of the world.

What is writing?
Writing is a process in which thinking and learning take place. This
process is known as the writing–thinking–learning connection. It’s
a process that results in a communicative product that conforms
to grammatical, syntactical, mechanical, and genre conventions.
Importantly, writing also performs recognisable social functions
that have increased in importance with the rise of social media. We
live in what has been called a ‘participatory society’, where social
media consistently provide us with opportunities to interact in
global conversations.
People often think that they can’t begin to write until they’ve
decided what they want to say, but writing well is a complex skill

HOW WRITING WORKS

fashion.
that develops slowly over time and not necessarily in a linear
Experienced writers know that writing is a difficult, complex,
time-consuming, recursive process. They draft so that they can revise
(‘re-see’) what they have written. Put another way, they write with
correct
the intention of revising. They write knowing that it’s easier to
than to create, confident that once words are on the page or on
the computer screen, those words will ‘talk to’ other words.
In his influential book Style: Toward clarity and grace, Joseph
Williams uses a cookbook analogy to explain that ‘knowing the
ingredients and knowing how to use them is the difference between
reading cookbooks and Cooking’. Williams says that ‘describing a few
of the devices that some graceful writers use . . . is about as useful as
listing the ingredients of the bouillabaisse of a great cook and then
writing
expecting anyone to make it’ (1995, p. 153). He points out that
success is highly dependent on learning and adapting to the often
implicit rules and genre conventions of a discourse community—
that is, of the context in which writing takes place.
To understand the conventions, writers need excellent briefing
and excellent exemplars to imitate, or, better still, to emulate. They
need to be able to identify errors that characterise non-standard
rectifiable
English (see Chapter 4). They need to be able to identify
weaknesses. They need to know how to read for substance and
subtext. They need to be able to discern perspectives, inaccuracies,
biases, gaps, and blind spots. They need to be able to identify and
analyse the rhetorical and stylistic devices that accomplished writers
information,
use. They need to be able to analyse, evaluate, and select
economical,
and structure and synthesise it into logical, meaningful,
persuasive prose of their own. Much of this competence
will come from writing instruction by knowledgeable teachers, but
it also comes from the processes of reading and writing.

Vocation or avocation?
Do you aspire to be a writer? Are you a writer already? Do you
regard writing as a vocation or an avocation, or, perhaps, both?
A vocation—from the Latin verb vocare, ‘to call’—is an occupation,
a calling. It’s roughly synonymous with ‘career’ or ‘profession’. An
avocation is an activity that one engages in for pleasure outside one’s
main occupation.
vocation;
So we have the writer Anton Chekhov, who was a physician by
the poet William Carlos Williams, who was a paediatrician; the

HOW WRITING WORKS

poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin, who was a librarian; the novelist
Salley Vickers, who is a psychoanalyst; the novelist Beryl Bainbridge,
captain;
who was a painter; the novelist Joseph Conrad, who was a sea
and the poet Wallace Stevens, who was an insurance executive.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle practised as a medical doctor. T.S. Eliot was
a banker. As Robert McCrum (2012) notes in his article ‘Against type:
Writers with other careers’, ‘There is a lot to be said for writers who
don’t just write’.
university
The American poet Robert Frost moved from a vocation,
intertwining
teaching, to his avocation, poetry, but declared their
in the final stanza of his poem ‘Two tramps in mud time’:
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Whether writing is your vocation or avocation, a great deal of your
effectively,
success in life will hinge on whether you can communicate
and, if you can embrace and even become excited about the
range of possibilities writing well opens up, it will add pleasure to
and enrich your life.

Writing in the workplace

Some years ago, I used the terms ‘working writer’ and ‘writing worker’
to distinguish between professionally trained writers (career writers)
and those who are not necessarily trained as professional writers but
whose jobs require them to write (Petelin, 2002).
novelists,
The working writers are journalists, reviewers, copywriters,
scriptwriters, playwrights, poets, bloggers, digital content creators,
technical writers, etc. The writing workers are lawyers, accountants,
technologists,
marketers, economists, managers, engineers, architects, nurses,
researchers,
scientists, public affairs and information officers,
software developers, etc.
Although writing is a mainstream activity in most professions
and an employee’s writing ability is likely to be critical to their
writing
career path, many of those who write in the workplace regard
as marginal; they do not see it as essential to their working lives.
They are not reflective about its importance because writing is often
a rather invisible activity in organisations. Its importance in organ-
isations often goes unnoticed until there’s a document-related crisis.
Untrained writers think that because they can talk they can write.
universities,
That’s not necessarily so. In most Australian and British
writing is under-taught, under-valued, and under-researched.
Writing has a higher profile in American universities, where there
is a long tradition of rhetoric and composition at undergraduate
level.
Writing is feared by many workers who are not hired as writers but
find that a substantial part of their day, and sometimes their night,
is spent writing. Such a worker may not consider themselves to be
a writer by profession, but they find that they are one by default. As
I mentioned earlier, Brandt’s North American research on literacy
in the workplace (2015, p. 7) revealed an intensifying use of writing
for work. These writing workers need to know about the writing–
thinking–learning connection.

The writing–thinking–learning connection

Language scholars have long argued that humans find meaning in
the world by exploring it through their own use of language. Many
creative writers testify that they don’t know what they’re thinking
until they start writing about it. Many professional writers would say
the same. This is what the English novelist E.M. Forster had to say:
‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ In an essay in
The New York Times Book Review Joan Didion, the American writer,
said: ‘Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind
there would have been no reason to write’ (1976).
When people write about something, they understand and learn

connection.
it better. That’s why it’s called the writing–thinking–learning
thinking, By exploiting this interdependence between writing,
and learning, you will be able to use writing as a tool to more
effectively think, learn, and communicate, both at university and
in the workplace. Writing creates ideas. We get to know the world
Writing
through language. We write to find out what we want to say.
is epistemic: it constructs/creates knowledge. As the American
scholar T.Y. Booth explains:
The assumption that composing is primarily or essentially
a matter of getting clearly in mind what we want to say, and
then finding the words which will recall those meanings and
make them available to others, is possibly the single most
serious obstacle for most people all through the composing
process.
(1986, p. 455)
When we start to put words on the page or on the screen, we discover
what we are really thinking much more clearly than when we try to
mentally visualise our topic before we write. We think about what
we have learned and learn about how we think, which makes the
whole process circular and generative.
The relationship between observing and writing is not a
one-way traffic: the more acutely and passionately one
observes, the more there is that feels worth recording,
yes; but conversely the more one becomes committed to
such writing, the more active—as a consequence—one’s
observings become . . . The world that is verbalized is
more interesting potentially than the world that remains
unverbalized.
(Fulwiler, 1987, p. 37)
Each element—thinking and learning—is both a cause and an effect
of the other. Therefore, start to appreciate writing as an essential key
to unlocking thinking and learning.
How does writing bring about learning?
1. Writing gives concrete form to ideas.
2. Pursuing an idea through writing requires us to think in a
focused way.
3. Writing out thoughts allows us to move beyond the trivial
and immediate to the more complex and significant.
4. Rewriting demands an internal monologue on the ideas
under consideration about phrasing, connections, ‘signposts’,
inclusions, exclusions, and structure.
Two well-known writers have this to say: Stephen King notes that
‘Writing is refined thinking’ (2001, p. 131), and Oscar Wilde is
alleged to have said, ‘If you cannot write well, you cannot think well;
if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you’.
Keeping a journal
One way to make thinking and learning central to your writing and
to exploit their connection is to keep a journal/notebook/log/diary/
day book—what was once called a ‘commonplace book’ and even
more quaintly, a vade mecum. Many professionals keep a journal in
the form of a field notebook in which they record observations, notes
of conversations, reflections on actions they have carried out, articles
Management
and books they have read, insights they have reached, etc.
Professor Nancy Adler headed an article in the Harvard Business
Review with the title ‘Want to be an outstanding leader? Keep a journal’

journal,
(2016). Many people are committed to the benefits of an online
but my research has revealed a large body of support for the value
of handwriting, particularly when students take handwritten notes
rather than verbatim notes on a laptop (Perez-Hernandez, 2014).
benefits
Adler believes that ‘Writing online doesn’t provide the same
as writing by hand’ and urges her readers to ‘buy a real journal’.
In her Christmas Day message in 2013, Queen Elizabeth II urged
everyone to keep a journal as a record of their lives. Keeping a journal
is valuable for you as a writer because it will enhance your writing–
material
thinking–learning processes and, of course, supply you with
for your ongoing writing. As it obviously has done for the
Clintons and the Obamas, with their best-selling autobiographies.
Creating and maintaining a journal will allow you to:
• be introspective and self-aware and gain perspective on your
thoughts and feelings by clarifying your thoughts
• hold a private conversation with yourself
• practise writing by experimenting with different styles
• stimulate your imagination and keep your mind open
• harness your creativity, such as when you write in a stream-
of-consciousness manner
• speculate and brainstorm
• keep a record of to-do lists, fragments of text, particulars,
thoughts, observations, incidents, and events that you can
come back to later with no fear about forgetting anything
• remain organised and focused
• keep sight of your past accomplishments and milestones
writing,
• develop a sourcebook of materials such as snippets of
images, videos, websites, etc. from which you can extract
material to share with others later, perhaps in blog posts
(see Chapter 10).
Many medical professionals and institutions have also endorsed
journalling as a method to achieve cathartic release and quieten the
mind by managing overwhelming emotions and thereby reducing
therapeutic:
anxiety and stress. There is no doubt that writing can be
complaint
just remember the last time you wrote a strongly worded
letter, but of course didn’t send it until you had simmered
down and followed my advice on constructing a complaint letter
in Chapter 8.
In a post on the website thoughtco.com labelled ‘12 reasons to
keep a writer’s diary’, columnist Richard Nordquist quotes famous
essayist
writers on the benefits of keeping a diary. The novelist and
Virginia Woolf called her diary a ‘capacious hold-all’ (Olivier,
1977). The poet Sylvia Plath said: ‘As of today I have decided to
keep a diary again—just a place where I can keep my thoughts and
opinions when I have a moment. Somehow I have to keep and
hold the rapture of being seventeen’ (Connors & Bayley, 2007).
And those of us who spend way too much time pootling around
literary
daily on the internet can identify with the reason advocated by
critic Northrop Frye for keeping a daily diary: ‘Meeting my
dithering
own conscience at the end of the day may cut down on my
time’ (Denham, 2001).
A double-entry journal—that is, a journal in which you reflect in
a meta-entry on what you have written previously—is particularly
valuable. You initially write on the right-hand page of your journal,
and later comment on the facing left-hand page. When you reread
perspective,
earlier entries, you can expand on your learning, achieve
remember and take stock of where you have been, synthesise,
self-evaluate, and delight in your progress. The nineteenth-century
American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne said: ‘You’ll be surprised
to find on re-perusing your journal what an importance and graphic
Earnest,
power these little particulars assume’. In The Importance of Being
Oscar Wilde has a diary enthusiast in Gwendolen, who says:
‘I never travel without my diary. One should always have something
sensational to read in the train’.
Writing educator Ann Berthoff (quoted in Fulwiler, 1987) calls

writing
the double-entry journal a ‘dialogue journal’ and says that
in a journal provides the readiest means of carrying out what
I.A. Richards called an audit of meaning.
Writing as a way of knowing lets us represent ideas so that
we can return to them and assess them. Keeping a journal is
the best habit any writer can have; indeed, most real writers
whatever
probably couldn’t function without their notebooks,
form they take or however they are kept. Notebooks
can serve as cradles, which is the way Henry James charac-
terised his jottings—scraps of conversations, speculations
about one image or another, sketches of characters, plot
ideas, etc; notebooks can serve as shorthand records or

observations
detailed accounts. Of what? Of observations—and
of observations; recollections, remembrances, things
to be remembered—memoranda; things to be returned
to—nota benes; things to be looked up—ascertainable
facts; notions to be puzzled over. Keeping a notebook is
a way of keeping track of the development of ideas, as
well as their inception and origin, of monitoring a work in
progress.
(p. 11)

Inspiration for journalling

To get you started on keeping a journal, you might like to write an
entry discussing the ways in which writing is like running or dancing
or boxing or painting or cooking, or any other activity you can think
of (particularly one you enjoy). The novelist Haruki Murakami has
running
written about writing and running in a New Yorker article, ‘The
novelist’ (2008), and Ferris Jabr (2014) has a wonderful essay
in The New Yorker about why walking helps us think. The novelist
Neil Gaiman has written about writing and cooking while talking
about writing the short story ‘A study in emerald’ (2006). Gaiman
says ‘Writing’s a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won’t rise, no
matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better
than you ever could have dreamed it would’.
In an essay titled ‘Cooking dumb, eating dumb’, the late Nahum
Waxman, owner of a unique cookbook shop on the Upper East Side
of Manhattan called Kitchen Arts & Letters, says that he dreads being
asked by customers if the recipes in a cookbook ‘work’. He tells them
that it is they who must work. He says that his customers ‘must
think, must apply their intelligence and judgment to ideas and
to the materials that will be turned into a dish’ (1996). He could
well be talking about some of the potential pitfalls of writing when
he goes on to say that customers

need to bring their own good sense to cooking—their ability

to understand variability in ingredients, to recognise error

preferences,
in a written text, to acknowledge their own tastes and
to not let themselves be intimidated by the food
arbiters into dreary cooking-by-numbers.
You could add to this list of suggestions one of the key tenets of
writing and editing advice: ‘first you make a mess and then you clean
suggestions
it up’. The Further Reading at the end of this chapter contains
for material that may provide topics for reflection. You may be
motivated to follow up on some of these by writing about them in
your journal. When you are ready, go back and reflect on your earlier
entries. This is where your double-entry journal comes into play:
use your original entries to self-evaluate your personal and writing
progress.
Because journal entries can be self-reflective, speculative, and
experimental, written in the rhythms of everyday speech, you may
use colloquial diction, first-person stance (‘I’), loosely structured
and meandering sentences, and informal punctuation.

Writing as a problem-solving process

process
Many people lack confidence in their writing and see the
as a painful chore, but if you treat it as a thinking–learning
problem-solving process and put into practice the strategies that
I advocate in this book, you will come to find writing pleasurable.
Being able to produce writing worth reading will guarantee your
professional
success in your studies at university and in your subsequent
and personal life.
Writing is judged on how successfully it communicates with its
intended readers. How do you ensure that your readers can act on
the information provided in your documents? Your writing needs to
say something. It needs to make things happen. Writing is not just
getting things down on paper; it’s getting things into the minds of
other people. Readers read to understand, to learn, to remember, or
egocentric
to be entertained. So, aim for a reader-centred dialogue, not an
writer-centred monologue.
 All communication rests on rhetorical relationships, that is, the
relationships between:
• the purpose of the document
• the content of the document—its substance and argument
• the writer
• the reader
• the genre of the document—its structure and style
• the context of the document (when and where it will be read)
• the consequences of the document—its reception and any
response it evokes.
Identify and analyse the problem, situation, or exigency to be addressed
by the document, its subject, purpose, readers, and context, by using
the heuristic for professional writing that I have developed, shown
in Figure 1.1. This heuristic is based on the journalist’s heuristic of
the five Ws and an H, spelled out so neatly in a poem in Rudyard
Kipling’s story, ‘The Elephant’s Child’:
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

Figure 1.1. A heuristic for professional writing

 To use the heuristic, you need four levels of knowledge:
1. topic/content knowledge
2. knowledge of the genre conventions of your document
3. rhetorical awareness, sensitivity, and sophistication
4. metaknowledge—that is, knowing what you know about the
principles of writing, along with your repertoire of strategies.

Getting started
How do you start to write?
• Exploit the writing–thinking–learning connection by keeping
it in mind at all times.
• Use predetermined headings and subheadings in templates, if
available.
• Recognise that it’s easier to correct than to create. ‘Satisfice’
(make do) on a first draft (also known as a ‘zero’ or ‘discovery’
draft).
• Use WIRMI (what I really mean is). WIRMI is the strategy you
can use to talk to yourself when you can’t immediately express
yourself in the formal style that your document requires. For
example, in a job application you might use WIRMI to write
I know that if you gave me this job I could do it, and subsequently
‘translate’ that into I believe that my qualifications and experience
make me an appropriate applicant for this position.
• Avoid premature editing. Elbow reminds us that our ‘editorial
instinct is often much better developed than [our] producing
instinct’ (1973, p. 25). (See Chapter 11.)
• So, value iteration (looping and recursivity), not linearity:
writing is rewriting.

Producing writing worth reading

What is ‘writing worth reading’, and how do you produce it? How do
you write what needs to be written to achieve the results you want—
that is, rhetorically appropriate and effective texts?
There’s a knack to producing writing worth reading. It requires
sharp rhetorical cutlery. However, there are no absolute laws of
composition. Each principle of writing may be flouted to solve a
particular problem in a specific piece of work. The key question that
a writer should apply to a page is the question: ‘Does it work?’
reliable
To begin with, though, you need to have a compendium of
practices and explicit strategies that will unequivocally lead your
reader to your intended meaning. You need to be your own best
reader and editor, which requires competence and confidence—
what psychologists call ‘self-efficacy’. The ‘just-sounds-better-that-
way’ approach simply won’t do. In a world awash with swathes of
unedited writing, well-edited material has a higher currency than
ever. (See Chapter 11.)
Habitual, immersive practice in writing will build an instinctive

familiar
self-efficacy, which will lead to the kind of pleasurable writing
to experienced writers when they are intellectually engaged in
writing tasks.
Aim for:
• writing that’s riveting (compellingly captures and holds your
reader’s attention), tight (concisely encapsulates what you
conveys
mean and makes every word count), and smart (logically
the hierarchical structure of your ideas, by linking them
explicitly and leading your reader down the ‘reading path’
that you design)
•
•
innovative,
writing that’s original, vital, exuberant, stylistically
and engaging
writing that conveys specific, significant, relevant, current,
information
accurate, comprehensive, authoritative, and honest
that is clear, coherent, structured (ordered), focused, and
confusion’
simple—writing that provides ‘a momentary stay against
(Frost, 1939).

What characterises good writers?

They:
• know why they are writing and what their readers hope
to find
• know what they know and what they perhaps don’t know
about their topic
• can draw on their large repertoire of writing strategies and
principles and know what works
• prefer simple, direct expression of ideas
 • satisfy the reader’s need for information, not their own need
for self-expression
• know the rules, but also know when to break them for effect
• exhibit syntactic clarity and rhetorical sensitivity and
sophistication
• present work that has been meticulously edited and proofread.

The last word

To conclude this chapter, I’d like to emphasise that writing is hard
document
and takes a long time. A helpful tip when you are writing a
over several days is to ‘park on the downhill slope’. In other
words, stop writing for the day at a point where it will be easy to get
going again in your next writing session. There is not one, correct,
easy writing process to follow when preparing documents. There are
no shortcuts, even for very experienced writers.
Richard Nordquist devotes a column ‘Pros on prose: The best
advice on writing’ (2015) on thoughtco.com to some further advice
about writing: write one inch at a time (similar in meaning to taking
one step at a time); finish your first draft; write with authority; and
Sitzfleisch! (Sitzfleisch is a word of German origin that means ‘The
ability to endure or persist in an endeavour—to sit through it’.) So,
writing
to summarise: hang in there and put in the time to finish your
task.

Activities
Geoffrey
1. Watch on YouTube my video interview with Professor
Pullum at the University of Edinburgh (Pullum, 2014)
about the upsurge of writing with the rise of the internet,
listed in the Further Reading list, and/or watch ‘The history
of English in 10 minutes’, also on YouTube, and respond by
writing in your journal about any aspects that interest you.
2. Comment in your journal on whether you can identify with
writing educator Peter Elbow’s statements below about ‘writ-
ing with power’.
Writing means getting power over words and readers;
writing clearly and correctly; writing what is true or
 real or interesting; and writing persuasively or making
some kind of contact with your readers so that they
actually experience your meaning or vision.
But writing with power also means getting power
over yourself and over the writing process; knowing
what you are doing as you write; being in charge;
intimidated.
having control; not feeling stuck or helpless or
I am particularly interested in this second kind
of power in writing and I have found that without it
you seldom achieve the first kind.
(1998, p. 1)
3. Reflect on your knowledge about and experience of writing
and comment in your journal about which of the following
statements are myths about writing that need to be dispelled.
• Writing simply involves transferring thoughts from the
mind to the paper or to the screen.
follow
• The writing process must begin at the beginning and
on through to the end in a linear, left-to-right fashion.
• Writing should be right the first time.
• There is a standard, step-by-step writing procedure that, if
followed, ensures good writing.
• Writing is speech plus handwriting, spelling, and
punctuation.
• A writer is a gifted individual—born, not made.
• You must have something to say in order to write.
• Writing is easy.
• The world of work is routinised, and the writing it needs
is largely formulaic, so there is no room for the infusion
of a personal voice.
separated
• Form and content are separable (what you say can be
from how you say it).
application
• Writing is an artificial, academic exercise with little
to the real world.
• Writing is always a sedentary, silent, solitary activity.
• Good writing is always correct writing.
• There are so many different types and styles of writing
that you have to be an expert to use them all, and most
people will never have to use that many anyhow.
 • Every teacher or boss has their own way of writing that you
will have to learn, and you’ll have to unlearn everything
you’ve ever studied before.
• If you didn’t get a good writing background in primary or
secondary school, it’s too late for you now!

followed
4. Do you have any writing rituals as idiosyncratic as those
by some famous writers?
• Robert Frost avoided daylight.
• Charles Dickens couldn’t write without his china
monkey.
• Friedrich Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk and his
feet in ice-cold water.
• Marcel Proust wrote in a cork-lined room.
• James Jones said: ‘As long as I don’t get too drunk, I can
write anywhere’.
• Agatha Christie apparently wrote in a large Victorian
bathtub.
• Edith Sitwell liked to write lying down in an open
coffin.
• James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Truman Capote also liked
to lie down to write, while Virginia Woolf and Ernest
Hemingway preferred to stand up.
• Several writers have written in sheds, including Roald
Dahl, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Pullman.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley and Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote
bareheaded in the sunshine.
• Vladimir Nabokov liked to write in his car.
• Victor Hugo placed himself under house arrest.
• Gertrude Stein liked to write in her Model T Ford while
parked in a Parisian street.
(Burnham, 1994; Isard, 2015)

writing?
5. What is your reaction when you are asked to do some
Why? Can you remember when you first started to feel
that way? Reflect on a time when writing worked for you. What
form did it take? What processes did you follow? (Where?
When? How?) Explore your metaknowledge; that is, reflect
on what you have learned about writing. If you had to pass on
your best advice about writing, what would it be?
If you use journal entries as the basis for later blog posts, as I suggest
in Chapter 10, here are the criteria to aim for:
•
•
readers
content that’s interesting, engaging, and appropriate for
(be aware of cultural differences)
content that speculates, poses problems, raises questions,
challenges or informs and is based on authentic, credible, and
authoritative research
• structure that’s logical, coherent, cohesive, and focused
• style that’s energetic, compelling, and concise
• sensitively crafted humour to avoid offending readers who
don’t share your sense of humour
• correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

academic
However, if you subsequently use material from your journal in
or professional contexts, you’ll need to adhere to more formal
conventions.

Further reading
Brandt, D. (2012, October 18). ‘Deborah Brandt on how “writing has become
the work of our time”’. Retrieved from youtube.com/watch?v=V79Sh
f6FKSY
Pullum, G. (2014, November 10). ‘UQx WRITE101x Interview with Geoffrey
Pullum’. Retrieved from youtube.com/watch?v=AruB5h3MWJE (Pullum
talks about the upsurge in writing with the rise of the internet)
OpenLearn from The Open University (2011, June 24). ‘The history of English
in 10 minutes’. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA0307
5BAD88B909E
How writing works
Brandt, D. (2012, October 18). ‘Deborah Brandt on how “writing has become the work of our time”'.
Retrieved from youtube.com/watch?v=V79Shf6FKSY
Pullum, G. (2014, November 10). ‘UQx WRITE101x Interview with Geoffrey Pullum'. Retrieved from
youtube.com/watch?v=AruB5h3MWJE (Pullum talks about the upsurge in writing with the rise of the
internet)
OpenLearn from The Open University (2011, June 24). ‘The history of English in 10 minutes'.
Retrieved from www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA03075BAD88B909E

How reading works

Bennett, A. (2007). The Uncommon Reader: A novella. London: Faber.
Birkerts, S. (1994). The Gutenberg Elegies: The fate of reading in an electronic age. New York:
Fawcett.
Fadiman, A. (1998). Ex Libris: Confessions of a common reader. New York: Penguin.
Hill, S. (2010). Howard's End is on the Landing. London: Profile Books.
Jacobs, A. (2011). The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Jacobs, A. (2020). Breaking Bread with the Dead: A reader's guide to a more tranquil mind. New York:
Penguin.
Manguel, A. (1997). A History of Reading. London: Flamingo.
Manguel, A. (2010). A Reader on Reading. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Pennac, D. (2010). The Rights of the Reader. London: Walker Books. (Gallimard: Paris, 1992).
Prose, F. (2006). Reading Like a Writer: A guide for people who love books and for those who want to
write them. New York: Harper Collins.
Quindlen, A. (1998). How Reading Changed My Life. New York: Ballantine.
Schwartz, L. (1996). Ruined by Reading: A life in books. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Spacks, P.M. (2011). On Rereading. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
See Electric Lit's very detailed infographic ‘The science of speed reading' (2015, April 18) at
electricliterature.com/infographic-the-science-of-speed-reading/

How words work

Ferriss, L. (2011, August 21). ‘I'm relatable, you're relatable'. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved
from chronicle.com
McWhorter, J. (2013, March 29). ‘Washington's favorite, weaselly new verb'. Retrieved from tnr.com
Mogollón, O. (2013, July 1). ‘The history of English in ten minutes'. Retrieved from
youtube.com/watch?v=njJBw2KlIEo
Pullum, G. (2015, February 11). ‘Comprise yourself '. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved
from chronicle.com
Wilson, P. (n.d.). ‘Academic writing in British English'. Retrieved from
hullawe.org.uk/index.php/Category:AmE
Yagoda, B. (n.d.). ‘Not one-off Britishisms'. Retrieved from britishisms.wordpress.com/list-of-entries/
Yankovic, ‘Weird Al' (2014, July 15). ‘Word crimes'. Retrieved from youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-
vPoDc

How sentences and content words work

See my interview with ‘Grammar girl' Professor Mignon Fogarty at youtube.com/watch?v=JJa7IIrvvAU
How structure words and paragraphs work
Garber, M. (2013, November 19) ‘English has a new preposition'. The Atlantic. Retrieved from
theatlantic.com (in this article, Megan Garber talks about the new use of because as a preposition).
Nordquist, R. (2016, February 24). ‘“Oh, wow!”: Notes on interjections'. Retrieved from thoughtco.com
Pullum, G. (2013b, February 5). ‘Being a preposition'. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved
from chronicle.com

How punctuation works

Crezo, A. (2012, October 5). '13 little-known punctuation marks we should be using'. Retrieved from
mentalfloss.com
Curzan, A. (2013, March 14). ‘Commas and feelings'. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved
from chronicle.com
Dolnick, B. (2012, July 2). ‘Semicolons: A love story'. The New York Times. Retrieved from
nytimes.com
Economist, The (2014, October 1). ‘The rise and fall of the interrobang'. The Economist. Retrieved
from economist.com
Ferriss, L. (2013, March 29). ‘Auto-da-fé for the façade of diacritics'. The Chronicle of Higher
Education. Retrieved from chronicle.com
Ferriss, L. (2013, May 29). ‘The battle[']s joined'. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from
chronicle.com
Ferriss, L. (2014, January 29). ‘Cannibal commas'. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from
chronicle.com
Ferriss, L. (2015, April 27). ‘Apostrophe, where is thy comma?' The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Retrieved from chronicle.com
Houston, K. (2013, September 24). '8 punctuation marks that are no longer used'. Retrieved from
huffingtonpost.com
Norris, M. (2014, April 12). ‘In defense of “nutty” commas'. The New Yorker. Retrieved from
newyorker.com
Norris, M. (2014, February 23). ‘Holy writ'. The New Yorker. Retrieved from newyorker.com
Press Association (2014, February 6). ‘Council reverses the ban on apostrophes'. The Guardian.
Retrieved from theguardian.com
Shepherd, J. (2011, October 27). '14 punctuation marks you never knew existed'. Retrieved from
buzzfeed.com
Soffe, E. (2015, September 23). ‘Perfect your punctuation'. Retrieved from ted.com
Walsh, J. (2013, June 14). ‘The plucky punctuators fighting against apostrophe catastrophes'. The
Independent. Retrieved from sindependent.co.uk
Yagoda, B. (2011, May 12). ‘The rise of “logical punctuation”'. Slate. Retrieved from slate.com

How structure and design work

Barrett-Forrest, B. (2013, April 28). ‘The history of typography: Animated short'. Retrieved from
youtube.com/watch?v=wOgIkxAfJsk
Norvig, P. (n.d.). ‘The making of the Gettysburg PowerPoint presentation'. Retrieved from
norvig.com/Gettysburg/making.html

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