Economical Writing

8/24/2021

Unlike Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, Deirdre McCloskey’s Economical Writing features full sentences for chapter titles. Some titles are commands while others are plain statements. For Goldberg’s work, I summarized each chapter with a sentence. There are more than 60 of them. For McCloskey’s work, I try in this current essay to summarize each chapter in a pair of sentences, showing the original title in bold.

In her opening McCloskey states that writing is the economist’s trade. She highlights that economists get paid for writing well although they are not told they do and that they will likely spend most of their working lives writing papers and proposals.

Writing is thinking, McCloskey argues, stating that it is wrong to distinguish between content and style or to think your content will compel readers despite your poor style. Through writing, she argues, we uncover the flaws in the arguments we try to make.

Rules can help, she tells us, but bad rules hurt. She recommends many books that cover good rules but criticizes with witty examples some 8th-grade lessons for their ruinous and debilitating effect.

Be thou clear; but for lord’s sake, have fun too, she urges. Provoking the reader with unclear sentences, she argues that while it is worth developing the skill of writing clearly (where your reader has no chance to get confused), beginners should not be discouraged from writing for fear of being unclear.

The rules are factual rather than logical, she says. She recommends a list of economists who are also good writers, pointing out that you can quickly tell from their writing that they do not violate the rules of clarity.

She tells us that classical rhetoric guides even the economical writer. She states that the standard tools of argument (invention, arrangement, and style) are how even economists write to persuade.

Style, the third rhetorical tool, comes with practice which comes with irrational cheerfulness. And so fluency can be achieved by grit, sitting down to write, dispelling resistance, and revising your work again and again.

Write early rather than late, she says, encouraging us to spit out whatever thoughts come to us without delay. We can then read through the thoughts (our invention) and piece them together like a mosaic (our arrangement) before we even begin to worry about style.

Besides stationery, you’ll need a dictionary, a thesaurus, and maybe even a dictionary of quotations if you are to write well. You will need tools.

Keep your spirits up, she says because if you can’t think of anything to say, maybe you have to educate yourself first by reading good writing. But forge ahead anyway [in the spirit of Natalie Goldberg] and when you take breaks, be sure to write notes on where you left to avoid having to warm up when you start again.

Speak to an audience of human beings, she says, because sticking with one imaginary reader makes for steady prose. But she also emphasizes here the importance of revising your writing.

Avoid boilerplate, the prefabricated, predictable overtures, the repeated summaries and prolonged intros, she says, as she quotes Barzun and Graff’s The Modern Researcher (1980). Don’t start a paper with the all too common “this paper,” and drop the table of contents paragraph because it betrays a bankrupt imagination.

Just as it's important, she says, to stick with one imaginary reader, it's important to keep an appropriate implied author. It helps you control your tone which should be neither unpleasant nor dull, neither too opinionated nor tendentious, and neither timid nor pompous.

She gives advice about the essay as a whole but also stresses the point of paragraphs. Give readers a break, she says, by skipping to a new line because paragraphs should have points.

Your writing however is not all that must be lucid. Make tables, graphs, and displayed equations readable, she says, pointing the reader to Oskar Morgenstern’s On the Accuracy of Economic Observations and Edward R. Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information.

Footnotes, she says, are nests for pedants. They should be used only to guide the reader to sources, not to interrupt sentences or provide otherwise useful information that would have been better off integrated with the main text.

In typical McCloskey fashion, breaking the rules to show you why you should follow them, she urges you to make your writing cohere. In English you can do so by repeating words of the same root (e.g. link, linkage, linking), not by signaling (e.g. indeed, however, furthermore) as I do.

With more of her witty tricks, breaking the rules in the very sentences in which she conveys them to you to show you their merit, she tells you to use your ear to manipulate your rhythm. Voicing John Gardner’s advice in The Art of Fiction, she urges you to vary how much you elaborate on each of the subject, verb, and object across sentences to spice up your writing.

Of course you should write in complete sentences. Sentence fragments are not always obvious.

You might be enticed to use different words and phrases to convey the same idea in different ways. But McCloskey suggests you avoid elegant variation while also keeping an eye out for pointless repetition.

Contrast singulars with plurals and feminines with masculines to avoid ambiguous references. And clarify and watch how each word connects with others.

Another thing to watch is punctuation. For most writing use commas lightly, McCloskey says, and she provides concise rules for using dashes, parentheses and brackets, full stops, colons, and semicolons.

The order around switch until it good sounds, she says provocatively of words in a sentence. She urges you to cultivate two habits: rearranging words until sentences make the most sense and mentioning the most important ideas or longest words last.

If you want to revise well, read, out loud. This won’t work, however, without what Hemingway calls an “internal bullshit detector” so read broadly and read old books because they are the best models.

Delete unnecessary words, particularly adjectives and adverbs. Use nouns and verbs, active ones, to bring vigor to your work.

Avoid words that bad writers love, McCloskey says, admonishing for instance the word “interesting” [as do Strunk and White (1970, p. 50)]. Other such words include vague nouns and pronouns (e.g. process), pretentious and feeble verbs (e.g. critique), pointless adjectives (e.g. aforementioned), useless adverbs (e.g. respectively), and clumsy conjunctions (e.g. via).

Be concrete, McCloskey implores. Professional economists are professional codebreakers, even though writing should clarify rather than confuse.

In a chapter filled with witty examples, McCloskey says be plain which you can do by ditching Latin words, using “of,” and letting nouns become verbs and verbs become nouns. Replace Teutonic phrases such as “private wealth-seeking activity” with “the seeking of wealth.”

Scolding the use of acronyms, she urges writers to avoid cheap typographical tricks. And don’t think of playing with word processing tools like right justifying for an academic audience.

This-ism, McCloskey doesn’t like. Avoid this, that, these, those because they distract the reader and you'd be better off referring again to the thing itself or just saying “it.”

Prepositions cause trouble so pare them away if they are not essential. [Is “away” a preposition there?] She encourages readers to study dictionaries and style books but, above all, she says just look at your words.

McCloskey asks if you didn’t stop reading her book and offers you an opportunity to join the flow. In this last economical chapter, she lists advice from Mark Twain and George Orwell and, in one last economical sentence, she summarizes her own lessons.