Here’s some advice that English instructors repeat all the time: “Write for your audience.” I heard it from my my own instructors many times over the years, and I always nodded and tried to look as if I understood what it meant.

The truth is that I didn’t fully understand – and I think many writers are as befuddled about writing for an audience as I was. Audience is a big, heavy, static word…what do you do with it? Of course you should state your ideas clearly, and edit your sentences carefully, and make sure your ideas are strong and coherent. But you don’t need the concept of an audience to do those things.

So how do you write for an audience? You keep real people in mind – your readers – as you’re writing. It’s not easy to do when you’re already juggling a multitude of writing skills and principles as you work on your piece.

But help is on the way. Here are some tricks that professional writers use to forge a connection with their audience. Despite their simplicity, these strategies really work!

1. Put yourself in your readers’ shoes.
2. Think about your readers before you start writing.
3. Decide what experiences you want your writers to have: surprised? touched? motivated? angry? impressed?
4. Think about a living person you know who’s similar to your imaginary audience. Write for that person.
5. Figure out what your audience already knows about your topic. Be prepared to fill in the rest of the background they’ll need, and do it early.
6. When you get to the editing stage, reread your piece slowly, looking for any words your readers might not understand. Delete them (or insert clues to their meaning).
7. Ask a friend or family member outside your field to read your piece and give you feedback.

If you’re sitting there smugly and congratulating yourself that you already do these things, beware. I’m pretty smart, and I have years of experience with professional writing – and yet I’ve botched up #5 numerous times.

It’s always a good idea to go over the strategies again just to make sure you’re reaching your audience effectively!

Charlie and I are huge fans of Death in Paradise, a British mystery series set on a beautiful Caribbean island. Now that I’m not working full-time, I’ve discovered that Charlie has a knack for discovering terrific shows we enjoy watching together. Lately I’ve been analyzing some of them to see if I can pass on some hints to writers who read my blog. More about that in a moment.

One of the rare shows that he likes but I don’t is Midsomer Murders. I have lots of complaints about it. There are too many characters, and most of them aren’t likable. The detective in the episodes I’ve watched – Tom Barnaby – is a nice-enough guy, but there’s nothing special about the way he solves the crimes. Worst of all – and here comes a confession – the plots are too complicated for me.

It gets worse. Charlie and I have been watching Death in Paradise for years, and of course we’ve seen every episode. We started watching them a second time and discovered that we often couldn’t remember who the murderer was. And then – sigh – we started watching the show for the third time, and I still almost never get the murderer right. (Charlie remembers about half the time.)

In a feeble attempt at defending myself, I’m going to point out that Death in Paradise  – like all good mystery shows – follows a formula – one that was a favorite with Agatha Christie. She used to populate her books with multiple suspects who seemed equally smarmy until the true killer was finally revealed.

Oddly enough, I don’t like Agatha Christie’s mysteries either. (I guess I’m hard to please!) But the mysteries that happen in Death in Paradise are different from Christie’s – and better, I think. The ensemble is wonderful – every person is likable and fun. The settings are gorgeous. The music and local culture give every show a party atmosphere. There’s a lot of humor in the show.

And there are two other formula elements that I think work very well. Always, as the show draws to a close, there’s an ordinary happening that triggers an aha! experience and solves the crime. One time it was ants on a windowsill. In another episode it was a bottle of ketchup.

The other formula element is one found in every one of Rex Stout’s mysteries about detective Nero Wolfe. (I’m assuming Death in Paradise stole it.) Nero Wolfe always assembles everyone connected to the murder and dramatically reveals the guilty party. Each episode of Death in Paradise ends exactly the same way. (Funny how a show – or book – can be so predictable and yet so entertaining!)

But what I really want to talk about today is my own idiocy in not remembering who the murderer is, even on the third go-round. Here’s what’s really strange. Charlie and I just started watching a new series, The Coroner, that we’re also having fun watching. But about a third of the time, I can identify the murderer just five minutes into the show.

Did I suddenly acquire a brain? Sadly, no. The Coroner is built from a different formula, and it happens to be much easier for me to figure out. (Perhaps that’s why the show was canceled after only two series.)

If you’re writing a short story, novel, or memoir, some of the points I’ve made in today’s post may be helpful to you: Have a recurring set of likable characters. Create an inviting and engaging atmosphere. Don’t overcomplicate your story (Midsomer Murders). Don’t oversimplify your story (The Coroner).

But there’s one exceptionally useful piece of advice that too many writers are slow to discover and employ. Here it is: Develop a watchful brain. Notice your own reactions – positive and negative – and dig into them for lessons you can apply to your own writing. In Death in Paradise, Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman used a bottle of ketchup to solve a murder. Surely your brain can be equally innovative!

In a post last week I argued that lessons in formal grammar aren’t helpful to students who need to sharpen their writing skills. In my opinion, usage is the way to go.

A good friend emailed me to say that she generally agreed with me, with one exception: You need grammatical theory and terminology to teach commas.

I say she’s wrong, and I’m going to use the topic of restrictive and non-restrictive clauses to make my point.

Any English teacher will tell you that these terms are a nightmare to teach. (I used to struggle with them myself until I found an easier way.)

Here’s the thing, though: you hear these sentences done correctly in conversation all the time – and the people constructing them aren’t whizzes at grammar. Read these three sentences aloud as you listen to what your voice is doing:

1. Uncle Gary, who was a baseball star in college, can give you some tips about pitching.
2. Cars that are parked overnight may be ticketed and towed.
3. This assignment, which seemed impossible at first, turned out to be easy and fun.

Your voice automatically went down when you came to “who” in Sentence 1 and “which” in  Sentence 3 – and then back up near the end of the sentence. But your voice didn’t change in Sentence 2. (Amazing, isn’t it? You learned to do that as a child!)

So (radical idea!) – couldn’t students in a writing class learn to insert those commas the same way? Say the sentence aloud, listen to your voice, and insert the punctuation.

But can teachers really do that?

Yes. I did it with students for years. I had students practice speaking these sentences in groups and pairs. Then I passed out strips of paper (I always carried plenty of them with me to class) and had students work together to write and punctuate their sentences. 

It helped that I always made a point of using lots of these sentences myself as I was teaching (with an exaggerated voice change). For example: “Your homework, should you choose to accept it, is to complete Exercise 2 on page 15.”

Doesn’t it make sense to build on what students already know about language? None of this is new to them, folks. Why make writing so @#$%! difficult? Life is hard enough!

(I always used a clip from the old Superman show to teach these commas. Click here to learn more. Go to h to download a free handout that explains commas – without grammatical jargon.)

It’s taken me more than three weeks to get back to normal after my trip to New York for my 50th college reunion. It never takes me that long to bounce back after a trip, and I started to think that maybe I should make an appointment with my doctor.

And then I realized what was really going on: I was grieving for my college years. I can only hope that you, reading this, have had – at some point in your life – as much fun as I did in college.

Which brings me to the subject of discipline. I was not disciplined in college. (Talk about understatement!) I spent big chunks of time mooning over Richard Burton, listening to the Beatles, watching ballet, reading Hamlet criticism, and hanging out with my friends. (I’m listening to “Let It Be” as I type this right now.)

Decades later my doctoral program finally convinced me that it was time to set some priorities and stick to them. Peter Pan grew up! Those habits have stuck.

Yesterday morning – more precisely, at six yesterday morning – I suddenly felt like myself again. First thought: Priorities! What was I going to do with the surging energy that hauled me out of bed before sunrise?

My writing philosophy is to tackle the hard jobs first and then reward myself with the fun stuff. So there I was, in my pajamas, with our cat in my lap, trying to rev myself up to tackle the book on Shaw that I’m writing.

What I really wanted to play with, though, was a neat idea I’d come across for article about police reports. (I know, I know. Doesn’t sound like fun! But it was.) I was sure I could get it finished in a couple of hours. But that would set my little writing train on the wrong track. What to do?

Of course I wrote the article – in fact I’d finished a complete draft by the time Charlie was ready for our morning walk. Sometimes discipline is not the way to go! I would have lost that momentum and the ideas that were lined up in my head.

And I’ll tell you what else I did yesterday that took me off course: I vacuumed. (Most of the time I use housework as a reward for slogging away at a difficult writing project.)

Charlie talked me into buying an electric broom when our vacuum cleaner gave up the ghost a few months ago. I could weep when I think of all the hours I used to spend hauling that heavy machine around. The electric broom is so light and versatile that I can vacuum our whole condo in less than 15 minutes. (It helps that we don’t have carpets.)

Sometimes it’s nice to reward yourself before you tackle a gosh-awful task.

Advice to writers: Get rid of your carpets and buy an electric broom.

Better advice to writers: Be a friend to yourself, your energy, and your momentum.

Whenever there’s a conversation about the sad state of writing today, you can count on one thing: someone is going to suggest a return to old-fashioned grammar.

I disagree, on several counts. First, I insist that grammar is different from usage – they’re not synonyms. What’s more, I believe that our tradition of grammar worship is a big mistake that – ironically – takes us down the road to more mistakes and weaker writing.

Let me explain.

Grammar deals with the underlying structure of language. It’s an abstract subject that covers only a few errors, such as subject-verb agreement, misplaced modifiers, and pronoun case. When you study grammar, you spend most of your time learning terms like noun, appositive, adverbial conjunction, antecedent, and infinitive.

But don’t you need to understand those concepts in order to create intelligent sentences? No. The grammatical system in English is based on word order. Jane fed the cat is very different from The cat fed Jane.

In other languages (Latin, for example), word order doesn’t matter. Here’s a clumsy attempt to show you how our sentence might be done in Latin: The cat object Jane subject fed. Sounds difficult, doesn’t it? But whether it’s Latin, English, or any other language, tiny children quickly master sentence grammar. (You never hear a child say, “Mother me gave a cake of piece.”)

Here’s the surprise: Most of the mistakes that drive teachers and editors crazy have nothing to do with grammar. Those mistakes arise from problems with arbitrary writing practices, such as quotation marks, homophones, apostrophes, word-choice errors, and double negatives. That’s the realm of usage.

So you can spend hours and hours diagramming sentences, memorize dozens of grammatical terms, and spout every rule of grammar from memory – and never discover that – for example – ain’t is a poor word choice.

Another issue that lies outside the realm of grammar is confusion about American vs. British usage. Writers who live in the USA often lapse into British word choices (amongst, whilst, centre) and British-style quotation marks. Again, those are usage errors.

My problem with grammar is that it doesn’t address most writing problems. Students with severe writing issues obediently spend weeks or months learning about intransitive verbs and interrogative pronouns – and continue to make the same errors nevertheless. 

So what’s the answer? Focusing on the areas where the problems lie. Here’s an example of how to do that. When I was teaching first-year-college students, I used to give them a list of problem words to memorize. The first test of the semester involved taking out a sheet of paper and writing the list from memory. Here it is:

Of course students also had to be able to identify the problems associated with these words. For example, many people (not just students) mistakenly insert apostrophes into hers, ours, and similar words. So few people know how to spell lose that I believe it’s going to disappear from the language before long. The same is true of woman – it’s a word that many writers never use: everyone is a women. A lot and receive are so consistently misspelled that I often send a congratulatory email when I see them spelled correctly. And so on. (Did you notice that many of those errors have nothing to do with grammar?)

The list also saved me a lot of time when I was grading papers. On days when assignments were due, I used to visit each group while students were peer-editing their work. A paper with an error from this list was immediately handed back to the author, who had to go through it carefully and find the mistake. (The groups were a big help with this.) Of course I didn’t point out the error – no point doing students’ work for them! 

Result? Fewer errors. (If you’re an instructor who wishes your students were more accountable for the quality of their writing, click here.)

A few weeks ago my husband showed me a problematic sentence in the gardening column he was writing, and we put our heads together to fix it. Here’s his original sentence:

Plants in the Euphorbia family produce a white sap that’s so foul and irritating, creatures that try biting off a piece don’t come back for a second taste.

We spent a couple of minutes talking about possible revisions – and then Charlie suddenly started scribbling. Here’s the improved version he came up with:

Creatures that take exploratory nibbles soon learn to avoid plants from the Euphorbia family. The white sap is so foul and irritating that they don’t come back for a second taste.

Why is this version better? First, it’s two sentences instead of one (a favorite strategy I’ll take credit for teaching Charlie to use.) More important: instead of stating a fact, the new version shows us critters on the move – taking an exploratory bite and then deciding not to come back for more.

What’s interesting is what Charlie didn’t do: start from the beginning, with the disgusting white sap, and then go on to show mice, bugs, and other garden critters stopping by for a taste.

Here’s a rule-of-thumb for you: You don’t have to start from the beginning!

It’s human nature to write the way we think. That means we often write in first-this-happens-and-then-that-happens fashion – leading to a lot of dull writing.

If you take a look at the examples below, you’ll notice that each revision reverses the usual start-from-the-beginning strategy.

Marge spent long hours studying math. For that reason, she earned an A in calculus.  FLAT

Marge earned an A in calculus. Those long hours of study paid off for her.  BETTER

I found a cake recipe on a tattered piece of paper in my grandmother’s kitchen. When I tried the recipe, the cake was a big hit.  FLAT

Everyone devoured the cake. I’d found the recipe on a tattered piece of paper in my grandmother’s kitchen.  BETTER

One of my favorite pieces of writing advice comes from Steven King’s On Writing: Don’t do your readers’ thinking for them. It’s an elegant principle that – frankly – I would never have come up with myself.

Here’s an example of what King is talking about. A typical writer (like me!) would probably write a sentence like this one:

Jane wept because she knew Lionel would never come back to her.

Here’s how King might do it:

Jane wept. She knew Lionel would never come back to her.

But is it really ok to write this way? If you’ve ever taken an English course (and who hasn’t?), you can probably picture a teacher scribbling furiously in the margin: choppy.

We’ve all been told that long sentences are better than short ones, and we’ve all been encouraged to use lots of transitional words: because, although, therefore, when, and so on.

I’m an English teacher myself, and I agree with that advice – up to a point. When I was teaching, one of my favorite assignments was to ask students to combine sentences in various ways:

When I won the contest, we all went to an expensive restaurant.

Because I won the contest, we all went to an expensive restaurant.

I won the contest; therefore, we all went to an expensive restaurant.

Sentence-combining activities are a great teaching tool for students who don’t feel confident with semicolons and commas. Students often told me how grateful they were for that practice.

But today I want to talk about why I like Steven King’s advice, even though it often leads to shorter and simpler sentences.

There’s a basic truth that we English teachers sometimes find hard to swallow: plain writing is better than complexity. Picture readers gliding easily through something you’ve written. Here’s what we imagine is going through their heads: “What a stupid writer.” “This is too easy.” “This guy probably doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

But here’s what our imaginary readers are really thinking: “This writer is wonderful! I want to read more.”

Many people – alas – mistakenly believe that pompous writing impresses readers. I’ve known many writers who are afraid to write plain, straightforward sentences. “My readers will think I’m stupid!” is the common cry.

Not at all.

The best way – indeed, the only way – to impress readers is by what you have to say. Readers are always looking for powerful ideas, useful information, and interesting stories. Nobody has ever said, “I can’t wait to read a book that’s full of complicated sentences and big words.” Readers want good books.

Can you write one for them?

Some years ago I published a reflective piece in a spiritual magazine. To my surprise, I received a phone call from a reader who wanted me to help her unravel a powerful dream she’d had a few nights earlier.

Dreams are not an area of expertise for me, and I probably wasn’t much help. But we had a pleasant talk anyway about an interest we shared in common – Jungian psychology. The clue to our shared interest came from one word in our conversation: she described her dream as “numinous.” Only someone who’s read Carl Jung, Marion Woodman, or another Jungian would be likely to use that word.

And that brings me to today’s point: Our language practices transmit many clues about our backgrounds, interests, and education – often without any awareness on our part. It’s an idea I’ve been thinking about ever since I read a provocative article in a recent issue of The New Yorker: “The Case for Black English.” 

I will leave it to the experts to argue about Black English (often called “Ebonics). It’s another topic – like interpreting dreams – that’s largely outside my experience. But I do have something to say – a lot, actually – about the kinds of language choices we’re faced with as English speakers in the 21st century. To me, they all revolve around a single question: Do I want to sound like myself?

I know that sounds strange, but to many people (like me) it’s a huge issue. We reveal parts of ourselves every time we open our mouths, pick up a pen, or tap a keyboard. And even though our language patterns are intimately our own, we may not be aware of the messages they’re sending.

I once spent a morning with a Hispanic activist who was proud of her down-to-earth, woman-of-the-people persona. She was astounded when I asked how she’d come to attend an expensive private school as a child – it was a part of her life story she never revealed to anyone.

But there it was, in her speech: why else was she using a possessive noun with every gerundive? (Example: “I was delighted about John’s making the team.” Most people would just say “John making the team.”) Nobody in public school is ever taught that rule. (I came across it in a book I was reading for graduate school.)

My personal Achilles heel is my @#$%! Long Island accent.  Every word out of my mouth carries a Long Island label. It’s especially noticeable in my vowels: We Long Islanders purse our lips when we talk, so that we say cawfee, not coffee, and dawg, not dog. My grammar and usage immediately tag me as a college graduate, but my accent plants me firmly in a middle-income town on Long Island (even though I moved away in 1974).

I have a friend who comes from a background similar to mine. She grew up in middle-class Long Island and holds a doctorate. She has a high-powered job and a very public presence in academia. And – most interesting of all – she has not a trace of a Long Island accent. How did she do it? I’ve never dared to ask if she went to a speech therapist – she’d probably rather have everyone think that those perfect vowels came naturally to her.

There are plenty of highly qualified – even brilliant – experts out there who insist that we should leave people’s language habits alone. Long Islanders can sound different from Bostonians and Chicagoans. Bring on the Hispanic accents, Ebonics, and Valley Girl slang. Let freedom ring!

I have a different take on all of this. I would never presume to tell anyone to change their language habits. But over the years I’ve told many students about my struggles to tame my born-in-New-York speech. The point is that each of us can – and should, I think – have some control over the messages we transmit when we talk and write.

And so I’ve parted ways with some New York speech habits. I’ve replaced radiator (the first syllable sounds a little like “rat”) with radiator (similar to “radiate”). I usually (not always, alas!) remember to put an “r” into words like sparkle and particular. The result is that I sound a little less insular (ha!) and slightly more worldly. I’ve been to Europe multiple times – why shouldn’t I sound like it?

I wish experts would focus less on regionalisms and more on empowerment. It’s ok to make choices – even if they involve (gasp!) deciding not reveal your ethnicity or background with every sentence.

Despite my quest for a more neutral accent, I have firmly rejected some of the language advice that was foisted on me in college. When I talk, diaper is two syllables (even though it’s supposed to have three), and I always say that I went to St. Joseph’s College (with an s, not the z you’re supposed to use).

Choices. Power. That’s what language is all about – or should be about. And we, not the politicians or bureaucrats, should be the ones making the decisions. Yes, let freedom ring – but let it be an enlightened freedom, with an array of possibilities to choose from.

                                  Long Island