Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style

Hence Vonnegut’s seventh rule: “Pity the readers”: Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers, ever willing to simplify and clarify.37

he would rather you err on the side of caring passionately vs. writing eloquently:

Hoosier

urbane.

His work crosses borders of age, ethnicity, and time.

esoteric

How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.551

Dialogue is the most pictorial component of ordinary prose.* Even veteran writers have to work on the mechanics of dialogue. A good conversation on the page can look like a tennis match. One swings. The other swings back. No speaker attributions. Just the ball of dialogue going back and forth.

Written language is one of the visual arts. Visual devices that we call punctuation direct the reader when to pause, or stop. They alert you to what’s more important (and less). Quotation marks let you know someone is speaking, paragraphing that a new thought-cluster is occurring, and a line skipped after a paragraph that there’s a change coming in