Writing well

We recognize the difficulty of treating adequately a topic-the habit of good writingwhich has inspired hundreds of books and thousands of articles. We recognize, too, that writing is an art as well as a craft. The people who declare that can't teach anyone to write may be correct if that means you cannot teach the loftier aspects of writing without the prospective writer possessing as prerequisites unusual imagination, genius for expression, and a fresh perspective toward the world. All of us, however, writing lectures, memos, reports, articles, letters, scholarly studies, books, and the like can learn the craft of writing-can improve the way we write. Indeed, to paraphrase an ancient adage, by writing well we can leave the world of writing better off (not worse) because we wrote. Writing well is not that difficult. It requires attention to faults most of us commit frequently, easy to correct. According to the contemporary American poet, Ezra Pound, bad writing is immoral. Perhaps. His indictment prompts us to think of ten commandments that lead, if practiced, to good writing. For memory's sake, we call these the ten commandments of good writing. Before turning to these commandments, however, we should comment on the state of academic, scholarly, or administrative writing today-as reflected in scholarly professional journals and magazines, reports and memoranda, letters and studies. Generally, the quality of writing in educationa, pronted media today is poor, substandard. The writing is verbose, jargon-infested, almost always over-long, bland, and lifeless-prose not written as if intended for people to read it. Some of this writing is simply obfuscation. What, for example, does the following passage, excerpted from a significant book in sociology, mean

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• Society, Culture, and Personality

  Open Access•Pitirim A Sorokin•Revista Mexicana de Sociología•1947

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