If I could urge only one book on aspiring writers, it would be Constance Hale's Sin and Syntax, a witty handbook on how to break the rules of English grammar and have fun doing it. Bad writers habitually break rules out of ignorance or laziness, while mediocre writers stick to them slavishly. Good writers know exactly when to break rules, overthrow conventions, and come out on top with crisp, lively prose.

In Hale's book the many "don'ts" we cut our teeth on become "do's". Start sentences with conjunctions. End them with prepostitions. Split infinitives with a vengeance. Mark Twain cheerfully broke rules like this: "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to." (p 120) Churchill ridiculed those who would insist on a statement like, "This is the sort of bad language up with which I will not put." (p 110) And George Bernard Shaw knew that "to definitely avoid" sounds better than "to avoid definitely". (p 72) Sin boldly when you can make your prose stronger. The rules taught in school, like many rules, are meant to be broken.

The sins you don't want to commit are actually those not often recognized as such. Hale presents what she considers the "seven deadly sins in writing" (pp 18-29), the capital offenses:

1. Sloth. "Grabbing the closest shopworn words without so much as a glimmer of guilt, or hastily creating inelegant nouns out of other nouns, or even verbs." (p 18) And even worse -- as I often complain about -- creating verbs out of nouns. More and more of these "verbs" are becoming acceptable, lazy reconfigurations of existing nouns: to dialogue, to advantage, to summit, etc. Then there are cliches, which should always be avoided (I would say "avoided like the plague", but that's a cliché, right?). Hale is probably right that sloth is the most common and insidious sin among writers.

2. Gluttony. "The gourmandish urge to use five words where one would do." (p 20) This often leads to the use of roundabout and redundant prepositional phrases instead of straight nouns and verbs. I had a problem with this in college, and learned slowly and painfully that less is more, more often than not. A good mantra to recite when sitting at the keyboard.

3. Fog. "Using vague and woolly words rather than concrete ones. A writer who hasn't stopped to think about what he or she is trying to say piles up abstract nouns like phenomenon, element, individual, objective." (pp 20-21) It's easy to fall into this trap when having a brain cramp, but the remedy is simple: go back, revise, and defog your writing.

4. Pretense. "Resorting to pompous, ponderous, or just imponderable nouns." (p 22) The worst sinners are academics so preoccupied with their diction that they lose sight of their goal: communicating with an audience (p 23). Insecurity and arrogance lie behind pretentious words like utilize, praxis, pericope, normalcy and colloquy. Drop them in favor of use, practice, passage, normality and conversation -- except in the very rare contexts which warrant the others.

5. Gobbledygook. An inability to keep things simple. Examples: capitalized cost reductions instead of down payments; a specialist in arms control and security issues instead of a weapons wonk. As with sin #2 (gluttony), less is more.

6. Jargon. Technical lingo. Revelling in the aforesaids, hereofs, hereinbelows, etc. Lawyers and doctors naturally excel in jargon.

7. Euphemism. Describing offensive behavior with inoffensive terms, or sensitive issues with politically-correct language. So in place of firing managers use downsizing, rightsizing, or reshaping. When referring to the bombardment of defenseless villages, the government speaks of pacification. "Euphemisms are for wimps, invented in an attempt to avoid offending others or to pussyfoot around socially prickly subjects. They conceal reality rather than reveal it -- which is, after all, what a writer should be doing." (pp 26-28)

I suspect that many would object to Hale's catalog of sins (especially #s 1, 4, and 6) on grounds that language evolves, and we shouldn't be linguistic fundamentalists. "To dialogue" may be a slothful way of creating a new word, but for better or worse, the dumbing down of English nouns has become increasingly acceptable. Academics may sound pretentious, but their vocabulary evolves according to the canons of their profession. But the counter-retort, Hale's point, is that language doesn't always evolve for the better. Following conventions and trends doesn't put you on the road to strong and aesthetic prose anymore than slavishly following the rules does. The trick is knowing when to follow the crowd and not to. For myself, I'll never warm to "dialogue" as a verb, no matter how many dictionaries acknowledge it.

The last (#7) is also tricky. I dislike euphemisms as much as Hale, but refusing to use them period can put you at risk. People these days are too easily offended. If you insist on using retarded instead of mentally challenged, black instead of African American, farming instead of exploiting the earth, etc, you'll find yourself under fire depending on your audience. Sometimes this is a bit sad, and I agree with Hale that writing plainly isn't the same thing as being rude. Civility and tact are important (as she emphasizes on p 26) and should certainly be cultivated in writing -- but perhaps not with euphemisms.

So by all means be sinful when crafting your prose, but be selectively sinful. Knowing what the rules are before breaking them, and why you're breaking them, is the key to becoming a good writer. Dangling prepositions and objective pronouns after the verb "to be" are often crimes to be proud of. Slang can be pretty cool too, depending. It's the more insidious sins you need to guard against -- language that makes you sound lazy, cliché, redundant, obscure, pompous, or evasive. Just because "it's in the dictionary" doesn't mean you ever want to use it. The best writers -- Twain, Shakespeare, Orwell -- understood all of this. That's what made them great.

The library has a number of books (besides Hale's) that teach you the rules of writing, the art of breaking them, and more advanced guides to getting published. The following are a sample:

The Little, Brown Handbook, by H. Ramsey Fowler. Classic overview of the basics: rules of writing, research, and grammar. Best to begin here.

ActionGrammar: Fast, No-Hassle Answers on Everyday Usage and Punctuation, by Joanne Feierman. Covers rules that are (in the author's view) etched in stone vs. those you can break more liberally.

MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, by Joseph Gibaldi. Classic guide to writing research papers. Belongs on the shelf of any serious writer.

The Little English Handbook: Choices and Conventions, by Edward P.J. Corbett. A small, popular user-friendly guide to the English language.

Sin and Syntax, by Constance Hale. The best available guide to breaking rules and crafting "wickedly effective prose". Reviewed above, and see what customers have to say at amazon.

Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction -- and Get it Published, by Susan Rabiner & Alfred Fortunato. Filled with trade secrets about what it takes to impress an editor and get published.

The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life, by Noah Lukeman. How to write engaging fiction.

This Year You Write Your Novel, by Walter Mosley. A suitable guide for beginning novelists.