How to Say Nothing in 500 Words
By Paul McHenry Roberts
**Note: This essay was written in the 1950s. The basics of good writing, however,
haven’t changed.
It's Friday afternoon, and you have almost survived another week of classes. You are just
looking forward dreamily to the weekend when the English instructor says: “For Monday
you will turn in a five hundredword composition on college football.”
Well, that puts a good hole in the weekend. You don't have any strong views on college
football one way or the other. You get rather excited during the season and go to all the
home games and find it rather more fun than not. On the other hand, the class has been
reading Robert Hutchins in the anthology and perhaps Shaw's “EightyYard Run,” and
from the class discussion you have got the idea that the instructor thinks college football
is for the birds. You are no fool. You can figure out what side to take.
After dinner you get out the portable typewriter that you got for high school graduation.
You might as well get it over with and enjoy Saturday and Sunday. Five hundred words
is about two doublespaced pages with normal margins. You put in a sheet of paper, think
up a title, and you're off:
WHY COLLEGE FOOTBALL SHOULD BE ABOLISHED
College football should be abolished because it's bad for the school and also for the
players. The players are so busy practicing that they don't have any time for their studies.
This, you feel, is a mighty good start. The only trouble is that it's only thirtytwo words.
You still have four hundred and sixtyeight to go, and you've pretty well exhausted the
subject. It comes to you that you do your best thinking in the morning, so you put away
the typewriter and go to the movies. But the next morning you have to do your washing
and some math problems, and in the afternoon you go to the game. The English instructor
turns up too, and you wonder if you've taken the right side after all. Saturday night you
have a date, and Sunday morning you have to go to church. (You can't let English
assignments interfere with your religion.) What with one thing and another, it's ten
o'clock Sunday night before you get out the typewriter again. You make a pot of coffee
and start to fill out your views on college football. Put a little meat on the bones.
WHY COLLEGE FOOTBALL SHOULD BE ABOLISHED
In my opinion, it seems to me that college football should be abolished. The reason why I
think this to be true is because I feel that football is bad for the colleges in nearly every
respect. As Robert Hutchins says in his article in our anthology in which he discusses
college football, it would be better if the colleges had race horses and had races with one
another, because then the horses would not have to attend classes. I firmly agree with Mr.
Hutchins on this point, and I am sure that many other students would agree too.
One reason why it seems to me that college football is bad is that it has become too
commercial. In the olden times when people played football just for the fun of it, maybe
college football was all right, but they do not play college football just for the fun of it
now as they used to in the old days. Nowadays college football is what you might call a
big business. Maybe this is not true at all schools, and I don't think it is especially true
here at State, but certainly this is the case at most colleges and universities in America
nowadays, as Mr. Hutchins points out in his very interesting article. Actually the coaches
and alumni go around to the high schools and offer the high school stars large salaries to
come to their colleges and play football for them. There was one case where a high
school star was offered a convertible if he would play football for a certain college.
Another reason for abolishing college football is that it is bad for the players. They do not
have time to get a college education, because they are so busy playing football. A football
player has to practice every afternoon from three to six and then he is so tired that he can't
concentrate on his studies. He just feels like dropping off to sleep after dinner, and then
the next day he goes to his classes without having studied and maybe he fails the test.
(Good ripe stuff so far, but you're still a hundred and fiftyone words from home. One
more push.)
Also I think college football is bad for the colleges and the universities because not very
many students get to participate in it. Out of a college of ten thousand students only
seventyfive or a hundred play football, if that many. Football is what you might call a
spectator sport. That means that most people go to watch it but do not play it themselves.
(Four hundred and fifteen. Well, you still have the conclusion, and when you retype it,
you can make the margins a little wider.)
These are the reasons why I agree with Mr. Hutchins that college football should be
abolished in American colleges and universities.
On Monday you turn it in, moderately hopeful, and on Friday it comes back marked
“weak in content” and sporting a big “D.” This essay is exaggerated a little, not much.
The English instructor will recognize it as reasonably typical of what an assignment on
college football will bring in. He knows that nearly half of the class will contrive in five
hundred words to say that college football is too commercial and bad for the players.
Most of the other half will inform him that college football builds character and prepares
one for life and brings prestige to the school. As he reads paper after paper all saying the
same thing in almost the same words, all bloodless, five hundred words dripping out of
nothing, he wonders how he allowed himself to get trapped into teaching English when
he might have had a happy and interesting life as an electrician or a confidence man.
Well, you may ask, what can you do about it? The subject is one on which you have few
convictions and little information. Can you be expected to make a dull subject
interesting? As a matter of fact, this is precisely what you are expected to do. This is the
writer's essential task. All subjects, except sex, are dull until somebody makes them
interesting. The writer's job is to find the argument, the approach, the angle, the wording
that will take the reader with him. This is seldom easy, and it is particularly hard in
subjects that have been much discussed: College Football, Fraternities, Popular Music, Is
Chivalry Dead?, and the like. You will feel that there is nothing you can do with such
subjects except repeat the old bromides. But there are some things you can do which will
make your papers, if not throbbingly alive, at least less insufferably tedious than they
might otherwise be.
AVOID THE OBVIOUS CONTENT
Say the assignment is college football. Say that you've decided to be against it. Begin by
putting down the arguments that come to your mind: it is too commercial, it takes the
students' minds off their studies, it is hard on the players, it makes the university a kind of
circus instead of an intellectual center, for most schools it is financially ruinous. Can you
think of any more arguments, just off hand? All right. Now when you write your paper,
make sure that you don' t use any of the material on this list. If these are the points that
leap to your mind, they will leap to everyone else's too, and whether you get a “C” or a
“D” may depend on whether the instructor reads your paper early when he is fresh and
tolerant or late, when the sentence “In my opinion, college football has become too
commercial,” inexorably repeated, has bought him to the brink of lunacy.
Be against college football for some reason or reasons of your own. If they are keen and
perceptive ones, that's splendid. But even if they are trivial or foolish or indefensible, you
are still ahead so long as they are not everybody else's reasons too. Be against it because
the colleges don't spend enough money on it to make it worthwhile, because it is bad for
the characters of the spectators, because the players are forced to attend classes, because
the football stars hog all the beautiful women, because it competes with baseball and is
therefore unAmerican and possibly Communistinspired. There are lots of more or less
unused reasons for being against college football.
Sometimes it is a good idea to sum up and dispose of the trite and conventional points
before going on to your own. This has the advantage of indicating to the reader that you
are going to be neither trite nor conventional. Something like this:
We are often told that college football should be abolished because it has become too
commercial or because it is bad for the players. These arguments are no doubt very
cogent, but they don't really go to the heart of the matter.
Then you go to the heart of the matter.
TAKE THE LESS USUAL SIDE
One rather simple way of getting into your paper is to take the side of the argument that
most of the citizens will want to avoid. If the assignment is an essay on dogs, you can, if
you choose, explain that dogs are faithful and lovable companions, intelligent, useful as
guardians of the house and protectors of children, indispensable in police work — in
short, when all is said and done, man's best friends. Or you can suggest that those big
brown eyes conceal, more often than not, a vacuity of mind and an inconstancy of
purpose; that the dogs you have known most intimately have been mangy, illtempered
brutes, incapable of instruction; and that only your nobility of mind and fear of arrest
prevent you from kicking the flearidden animals when you pass them on the street.
Naturally personal convictions will sometimes dictate your approach. If the assigned
subject is “Is Methodism Rewarding to the Individual?” and you are a pious Methodist,
you have really no choice. But few assigned subjects, if any, will fall in this category.
Most of them will lie in broad areas of discussion with much to be said on both sides.
They are intellectual exercises, and it is legitimate to argue now one way and now
another, as debaters do in similar circumstances. Always take the that looks to you
hardest, least defensible. It will almost always turn out to be easier to write interestingly
on that side.
This general advice applies where you have a choice of subjects. If you are to choose
among “The Value of Fraternities” and “My Favorite High School Teacher” and “What I
Think About Beetles,” by all means plump for the beetles. By the time the instructor gets
to your paper, he will be up to his ears in tedious tales about a French teacher at
Bloombury High and assertions about how fraternities build character and prepare one for
life. Your views on beetles, whatever they are, are bound to be a refreshing change.
Don't worry too much about figuring out what the instructor thinks about the subject so
that you can cuddle up with him. Chances are his views are no stronger than yours. If he
does have convictions and you oppose him, his problem is to keep from grading you
higher than you deserve in order to show he is not biased. This doesn't mean that you
should always cantankerously dissent from what the instructor says; that gets tiresome
too. And if the subject assigned is “My Pet Peeve,” do not begin, “My pet peeve is the
English instructor who assigns papers on 'my pet peeve.”' This was still funny during the
War of 1812, but it has sort of lost its edge since then. It is in general good manners to
avoid personalities.
SLIP OUT OF ABSTRACTION
If you will study the essay on college football [near the beginning of this essay], you will
perceive that one reason for its appalling dullness is that it never gets down to particulars.
It is just a series of not very glittering generalities: “football is bad for the colleges,” “it
has become too commercial,” “football is big business,” “it is bad for the players,” and so
on. Such round phrases thudding against the reader's brain are unlikely to convince him,
though they may well render him unconscious.
If you want the reader to believe that college football is bad for the players, you have to
do more than say so. You have to display the evil. Take your roommate, Alfred Simkins,
the secondstring center. Picture poor old Alfy coming home from football practice every
evening, bruised and aching, agonizingly tired, scarcely able to shovel the mashed
potatoes into his mouth. Let us see him staggering up to the room, getting out his econ
textbook, peering desperately at it with his good eye, falling asleep and failing the test in
the morning. Let us share his unbearable tension as Saturday draws near. Will he fail, be
demoted, lose his monthly allowance, be forced to return to the coal mines? And if he
succeeds, what will be his reward? Perhaps a slight ripple of applause when the
thirdstring center replaces him, a moment of elation in the locker room if the team wins,
of despair if it loses. What will he look back on when he graduates from college? Toil
and torn ligaments. And what will be his future? He is not good enough for pro football,
and he is too obscure and weak in econ to succeed in stocks and bonds. College football
is tearing the heart from Alfy Simkins and, when it finishes with him, will callously toss
aside the shattered hulk.
This is no doubt a weak enough argument for the abolition of college football, but it is a
sight better than saying, in three or four variations, that college football (in your opinion)
is bad for the players.
Look at the work of any professional writer and notice how constantly he is moving from
the generality, the abstract statement, to the concrete example, the facts and figures, the
illustrations. If he is writing on juvenile delinquency, he does not just tell you that
juveniles are (it seems to him) delinquent and that (in his opinion) something should be
done about it. He shows you juveniles being delinquent, tearing up movie theatres in
Buffalo, stabbing high school principals in Dallas, smoking marijuana in Palo Alto. And
more than likely he is moving toward some specific remedy, not just a general wringing
of the hands.
It is no doubt possible to be too concrete, too illustrative or anecdotal, but few
inexperienced writers err this way. For most the soundest advice is to be seeking always
for the picture, to be always turning general remarks into seeable examples. Don't say,
“Sororities teach girls the social graces.” Say, “Sorority life teaches a girl how to carry on
a conversation while pouring tea, without sloshing the tea into the saucer.” Don't say, “I
like certain kinds of popular music very much.” Say, “Whenever I hear Gerber
Sprinklittle play 'Mississippi Man' on the trombone, my socks creep up my ankles.”
GET RID OF OBVIOUS PADDING
The student toiling away at his weekly English theme is too often tormented by a figure:
five hundred words. How, he asks himself, is he to achieve this staggering total?
Obviously by never using one word when he can somehow work in ten.
He is therefore seldom content with a plain statement like “Fast driving is dangerous.”
This has only four words in it. He takes thought, and the sentence becomes:
In my opinion, fast driving is dangerous.
Better, but he can do better still:
In my opinion, fast driving would seem to be rather dangerous.
If he is really adept, it may come out:
In my humble opinion. though I do not claim to be an expert on this complicated subject,
test driving, in most circumstances, would seem to be rather dangerous in many respects,
or at least so it would seem to me.
Thus four words have been turned into forty, and not an iota of content has been added.
Now this is a way to go about reaching five hundred words, and if you are content with a
“D” grade, it is as good a way as any. But if you aim higher, you must work differently.
Instead of stuffing your sentences with straw, you must try steadily to get rid of the
padding, to make your sentences lean and tough. If you are really working at it, your first
draft will greatly exceed the required total, and then you will work it down, thus:
It is thought in some quarters that fraternities do not contribute as much as might be
expected to campus life.
Some people think that fraternities contribute little to campus life.
The average doctor who practices in small towns or in the country must toil night and day
to heal the sick.
Most country doctors work long hours.
When I was a little girl, I suffered from shyness and embarrassment in the presence
of others.
I was a shy little girl.
It is absolutely necessary for the person employed as a marine fireman to give the matter
of steam pressure his undivided attention at all times.
The fireman has to keep his eye on the steam gauge.
You may ask how you can arrive at five hundred words at this rate. Simple. You dig up
more real content. Instead of taking a couple of obvious points off the surface of the topic
and then circling warily around them for six paragraphs, you work in and explore, figure
out the details. You illustrate. You say that fast driving is dangerous, and then you prove
it. How long does it take to stop a car at forty and at eighty? How far can you see at
night? What happens when a tire blows? What happens in a headon collision at fifty
miles an hour?
Pretty soon your paper will be full of broken glass and blood and headless torsos, and
reaching five hundred words will not really be a problem.
CALL A FOOL A FOOL
Some of the padding in freshman themes is to be blamed not on anxiety about the word
minimum but on excessive timidity. The student writes, “In my opinion, the principal of
my high school acted in ways that I believe every unbiased person would have to call
foolish.” This isn't exactly what he means. What he means is, “My high school principal
was a fool.” If he was a fool, call him a fool. Hedging the thing about with
“inmyopinion's” and “itseemstome's” and “asIseeit's” and
“atleastfrommypointofview's” gains you nothing. Delete these phrases whenever
they creep into your paper.
The student's tendency to hedge stems from a modesty that in other circumstances would
be commendable. He is, he realizes, young and inexperienced, and he half suspects that
he is dopey and fuzzyminded beyond the average. Probably only too true. But it doesn't
help to announce your incompetence six times in every paragraph. Decide what you want
to say and say it as vigorously as possible, without apology and in plain words.
Linguistic diffidence can take various forms. One is what we call euphemism. This is the
tendency to call a spade “a certain garden implement” or women's underwear
“unmentionables.” It is stronger in some eras than others and in some people than others
but it always operates more or less in subjects that are touchy or taboo: death, sex,
madness, and so on. Thus we shrink from saying “He died last night” but say instead
“passed away,” “left us,” “joined his Maker,” “went to his reward.” Or we try to take off
the tension with a lighter cliché: “kicked the bucket,” “cashed in his chips,” “handed in
his dinner pail.” We have found all sorts of ways to avoid saying mad: “mentally ill,”
“touched,” “not quite right upstairs,” “feebleminded,” “innocent,” “simple,” “off his
trolley,” “not in his right mind.” Even such a now plain word as insane began as a
euphemism with the meaning “not healthy.”
Modern science, particularly psychology, contributes many polysyllables in which we
can wrap our thoughts and blunt their force. To many writers there is no such thing as a
bad schoolboy. Schoolboys are maladjusted or unoriented or misunderstood or in the
need of guidance or lacking in continued success toward satisfactory integration of the
personality as a social unit, but they are never bad. Psychology no doubt makes us better
men and women, more sympathetic and tolerant, but it doesn't make writing any easier.
Had Shakespeare been confronted with psychology, “To be or not to be” might have
come out, “To continue as a social unit or not to do so. That is the personality problem.
Whether 'tis a better sign of integration at the conscious level to display a psychic
tolerance toward the maladjustments and repressions induced by one's lack of orientation
in one's environment or — ” But Hamlet would never have finished the soliloquy.
Writing in the modern world, you cannot altogether avoid modern jargon. Nor, in an
effort to get away from euphemism, should you salt your paper with fourletter words.
But you can do much if you will mount guard against those roundabout phrases, those
echoing polysyllables that tend to slip into your writing to rob it of its crispness
and force.
BEWARE OF PAT EXPRESSIONS
Other things being equal, avoid phrases like “other things being equal.” Those sentences
that come to you whole, or in two or three doughy lumps, are sure to be bad sentences.
They are no creation of yours but pieces of common thought floating in the
community soup.
Pat expressions are hard, often impossible, to avoid, because they come too easily to be
noticed and seem too necessary to be dispensed with. No writer avoids them altogether,
but good writers avoid them more often than poor writers.
By “pat expressions” we mean such tags as “to all practical intents and purposes,” “the
pure and simple truth,” “from where I sit,” “the time of his life,” “to the ends of the
earth,” “in the twinkling of an eye,” “as sure as you're born,” “over my dead body,”
“under cover of darkness,” “took the easy way out,” “when all is said and done,” “told
him time and time again,” “parted the best of friends,” “stand up and be counted,” “gave
him the best years of her life,” “worked her fingers to the bone.” Like other clichés, these
expressions were once forceful. Now we should use them only when we can't possibly
think of anything else.
Some pat expressions stand like a wall between the writer and thought. Such a one is “the
American way of life.” Many student writers feel that when they have said that
something accords with the American way of life or does not they have exhausted the
subject. Actually, they have stopped at the highest level of abstraction. The American
way of life is the complicated set of bonds between a hundred and eighty million ways.
All of us know this when we think about it, but the tag phrase too often keeps us from
thinking about it.
So with many another phrase dear to the politician: “this great land of ours,” “the man in
the street,” “our national heritage.” These may prove our patriotism or give a clue to our
political beliefs, but otherwise they add nothing to the paper except words.
COLORFUL WORDS
The writer builds with words, and no builder uses a raw material more slippery and
elusive and treacherous. A writer's work is a constant struggle to get the right word in the
right place, to find that particular word that will convey his meaning exactly, that will
persuade the reader or soothe him or startle or amuse him. He never succeeds altogether
— sometimes he feels that he scarcely succeeds at all — but such successes as he has are
what make the thing worth doing.
There is no book of rules for this game. One progresses through everlasting experiment
on the basis of everwidening experience. There are few useful generalizations that one
can make about words as words, but there are perhaps a few.
Some words are what we call “colorful.” By this we mean that they are calculated to
produce a picture or induce an emotion. They are dressy instead of plain, specific instead
of general, loud instead of soft. Thus, in place of “Her heart beat,” we may write, “her
heart pounded, throbbed, fluttered, danced.” Instead of “He sat in his chair,” we may say,
“he
lounged, sprawled, coiled
.” Instead of “It was hot,” we may say, “It was
blistering,
sultry, muggy, suffocating, steamy, wilting
.”
However, it should not be supposed that the fancy word is always better. Often it is as
well to write “Her heart beat” or “It was hot” if that is all it did or all it was. Ages differ
in how they like their prose. The nineteenth century liked it rich and smoky. The
twentieth has usually preferred it lean and cool. The twentieth century writer, like all
writers, is forever seeking the exact word, but he is wary of sounding feverish. He tends
to pitch it low, to understate it, to throw it away. He knows that if he gets too colorful, the
audience is likely to giggle.
See how this strikes you: “As the rich, golden glow of the sunset died away along the
eternal western hills, Angela's limpid blue eyes looked softly and trustingly into
Montague's flashing brown ones, and her heart pounded like a drum in time with the
joyous song surging in her soul.” Some people like that sort of thing, but most modern
readers would say, “Good grief,” and turn on the television.
COLORED WORDS
Some words we would call not so much colorful as colored — that is, loaded with
associations, good or bad. All words — except perhaps structure words — have
associations of some sort. We have said that the meaning of a word is the sum of the
contexts in which it occurs. When we hear a word, we hear with it an echo of all the
situations in which we have heard it before.
In some words, these echoes are obvious and discussible. The word
mother
, for example,
has, for most people, agreeable associations. When you hear
mother
you probably think
of home, safety, love, food, and various other pleasant things. If one writes, “She was like
a mother to me,” he gets an effect which he would not get in “She was like an aunt to
me.” The advertiser makes use of the associations of
mother
by working it in when he
talks about his product. The politician works it in when he talks about himself.
So also with such words as
home, liberty, fireside, contentment, patriot, tenderness,
sacrifice, childlike, manly, bluff, limpid
. All of these words are loaded with associations
that would be rather hard to indicate in a straightforward definition. There is more than a
literal difference between “They sat around the fireside” and “They sat around the stove.”
They might have been equally warm and happy around the stove, but
fireside
suggests
leisure, grace, quiet tradition, congenial company, and
stove
does not.
Conversely, some words have bad associations.
Mother
suggests pleasant things, but
motherinlaw
does not. Many mothersinlaw are heroically lovable and some mothers
drink gin all day and beat their children insensible, but these facts of life are beside the
point. The point is that
mother
sounds good and
motherinlaw
does not.
Or consider the word
intellectual
. This would seem to be a complimentary term, but in
point of fact it is not, for it has picked up associations of impracticality and ineffectuality
and general dopiness. So also such words as
liberal, reactionary, Communist, socialist,
capitalist, radical, schoolteacher, truck driver; operator, salesman, huckster,
speculator
. These convey meaning on the literal level, but beyond that — sometimes, in
some places — they convey contempt on the part of the speaker.
The question of whether to use loaded words or not depends on what is being written.
The scientist, the scholar, try to avoid them; for the poet, the advertising writer, the public
speaker, they are standard equipment. But every writer should take care that they do not
substitute for thought. If you write, “Anyone who thinks that is nothing but a Socialist (or
Communist or capitalist)” you have said nothing except that you don't like people who
think that, and such remarks are effective only with the most naive readers. It is always a
bad mistake to think your readers more naive than they really are.
COLORLESS WORDS
But probably most student writers come to grief not with words that are colorful or those
that are colored but with those that have no color at all. A pet example is
nice
, a word we
would find it hard to dispense with in casual conversation but which is no longer capable
of adding much to a description. Colorless words are those of such general meaning that
in a particular sentence they mean nothing. Slang adjectives like cool (“That's real cool”)
tend to explode all over the language. They are applied to everything, lose their original
force, and quickly die.
Beware also of nouns of very general meaning, like
circumstances, cases, instances,
aspects, factors, relationships, attitudes, eventualities
, etc. In most circumstances you
will find that those cases of writing which contain too many instances of words like these
will in this and other aspects have factors leading to unsatisfactory relationships with the
reader resulting in unfavorable attitudes on his part and perhaps other eventualities, like a
grade of “D.” Notice also what etc. means. It means “I'd like to make this list longer, but
I can't think of any more examples.”
This essay was written by Paul McHenry Roberts
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