Reading (and listening) is the key to language development. More specifically, the comprehensible input we get from reading and listening is the key to language development. Without it very little happens. With it, vocabulary grows, a feel for correctness emerges, and fluency increases. Comprehensible input is necessary and also sufficient to achieve your goal – better English.

Decisions you make – what you read and how you read – determine most of the language benefits you receive from reading. Here are some ideas from a recent book, Free Voluntary Reading, that can help you fine-tune your decisions and make your reading as effective as possible.

Effective reading is effortless reading

The best reading for language development is effortless – “easy reading that seems to be completely comprehensible without struggle.” Many students believe they need to challenge themselves, to read above their comfort level to improve. The opposite is true. One researcher, for example, found that your vocabulary grows faster if you know at least 95% of the words in the text you are reading.

Effective reading involves you in the text, not the language

You acquire, or absorb, more language when you get so involved in what you’re reading that you forget that it’s in another language or contains language you haven’t acquired yet. To do this, your reading must be effortless and interesting, or even compelling, so you can focus all your attention on the text and ignore the language.

This idea is related to the concept of flow. Flow is the mental state or condition you experience when you are “deeply but effortlessly involved in an activity. In flow, the concerns of everyday life disappear … our sense of time changes [e.g., time 'stops'] and only the activity we’re involved in seems to matter.” When we say we “got lost in a book,” we’re describing the effect of flow. Language acquisition happens most effectively when you experience flow.

Worrying about your progress makes reading less effective

Language acquisition takes place “behind the scenes.” As a result, you won’t usually be aware of the progress you’re making until sometime later, when a word you need suddenly “appears” or when someone comments about your improvement.

Many students worry too much about progress. They create stress for themselves by worrying about remembering and forgetting what they’ve read. Some manage to convince themselves that they’re not improving.

If you do what you need to do – become deeply involved in effortless reading – your brain will automatically and quietly do what it does well – acquire more language. And you will make progress.

Checking your comprehension makes reading less effective

When you stop reading to check your comprehension, you interfere with the language acquisition process and make it more difficult. This happens, for example, when you stop to look up a word or add it to a vocabulary list for later study.

Stopping to check a word or write it down takes your attention away from what you’re reading. It requires you to remember what you’re reading while you stop to do something else. The result? You’ll be focused on the language, you’ll be less involved in the reading, and you will experience less flow. You’ll enjoy the reading less and, most importantly, significantly reduce its benefits. The more you stay involved in the text without interruption, the more language you will acquire.

Your job

Dr. Jeff McQuillan recently wrote that language acquisition is both incremental – it happens little by little – and incidental – it happens as the result of another activity – reading. Your job, as an English learner, is to do the other activity – to read interesting, effortless English. To enjoy what you’re reading. And to get deeply involved in it. This is the greatest contribution you can make toward your ultimate goal – better English.

A final note: it works for listening, too

You should also apply these ideas to the listening you do.

Warren Ediger

References: Krashen (2011) Free Voluntary Reading; McQuillan (2012) Even better than you think: more good news for incidental vocabulary acquisition.

If you want to improve your English, there’s nothing better than a healthy reading diet of interesting, understandable English. And if you want to become a good writer, there’s no better way than to read the works of good writers. Byliner, a relatively new web site, simplifies finding and choosing good things to read and promises to help you “discover great reads by great writers.”

Put simply, curators are people who identify, organize, and share. In a museum, a curator identifies significant works of art, organizes them into exhibitions, and shares the artworks with museum visitors in a way that helps people enjoy and understand them.

Byliner is a curated web site for readers. By identifying, organizing, and sharing “great reads”, they make it possible for upper-intermediate and advanced English learners to spend valuable time reading rather than looking.

Using Byliner

When you go to the Byliner home page, you’ll find a list of topics – arts, science, politics, business, tech, travel, sports, and crime – across the top of the page. Clicking on a topic takes you to a topic page with recommended articles,  links to articles by a featured writer, and links to the works of the three most frequently read writers in that topic. If you find a writer you like, you can follow him or her to be sure you hear about new articles from them.

Spotlight is a daily collection of articles about a current topic. Today it’s Tech Bubble 2.0? about technology and whether or not we’re entering another tech bubble. The last few days, they’ve spotlighted Arctic Adventures, Tales from Titanic, and others. You can use the Spotlight RSS feed to have each daily Spotlight sent directly to your favorite RSS reader.

The Story Lineup sidebar makes it easy to quickly scan lists of current, just added, and popular articles. And at the bottom of the home page, you can sign up to receive The best stories of the week, Byliner’s weekly email newsletter.

Getting started with Byliner

A good place to start – and the Spotlight that got my attention – is a yearly collection of articles called 101 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories compiled by Conor Friedersdorf.

Wherever you begin, Byliner looks like the kind of web site you’ll want to return to again and again.

Warren Ediger

Related reading:

• More reading, less looking
• Learning to write
• The power of reading and listening

Good writing comes mostly from reading what good writers have written. But quite a few good writers, like C.S. Lewis, John Steinbeck, and George Orwell, have also taken the time to write tips – practical suggestions – for good writing.

The key to good writing – in short – is clear thinking followed by clear, concise writing. Here are some tips from a few of the world’s great writers about how to do that.

C.S. Lewis was one of the greatest British writers of the 20^th century. He is best known for the Chronicles of Narnia, but he also wrote a large number of philosophical and religious works, such as his popular Mere Christianity. Here’s what he said about writing:

• Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
• Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
• Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
• Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”
• Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

David Ogilvy, a writer and advertising executive, has been called “The Father of Advertising.” He tells writers to:

• Write the way you talk. Naturally.
• Use short words, short sentences, and short paragraphs.
• Never send a letter or a memo (or anything else) on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.

John Steinbeck was an American writer. He is best known for his novel Grapes of Wrath.

• Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.
• Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place … it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader.

George Orwell was an English novelist and journalist who wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. His advice is similar to Lewis’s:

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print (In other words, be yourself).
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, alway cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

If you want to learn more about writing, read Learning to write and Better Writing, two collections of short articles I wrote last year.

Warren Ediger

References: C.S. Lewis on Writing, 10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy, Steinbeck’s Tips for Aspiring Writers, and Writing Tips by … George Orwell.

If you’re tired of news and want something different to listen to to improve your English, Audiofiles may become your new best friend. Audiofiles is the audio version of longform journalism – what I have called “more than news, different than fiction.”

More than a year ago, I introduced several good sources for a new kind of non-fiction reading, called long form journalism – well, not new, but newly popular. And I published several lists of articles in Something to read.

I have just discovered a similar source of listening material called Audiofiles, a web site to “share and discover great radio.” Audiofiles’ producers select what they believe to be the best radio programs from networks, radio stations, and producers in the U.S. and Great Britain. It’s a great source of listening material for high intermediate and advanced English learners.

When you go to the Audiofiles web site, you’ll find a seemingly endless list of stories to choose from, beginning with the newest additions to the list. You’ll find a brief description of each story, the names of the producer and source, the length of the story, and the date it was first broadcast.

In the sidebar, you can choose stories by mood – awesome, dark, dreamy, fascinating, funny, etc. – and by type – all-time favorites, art & culture, business, documentary, humor, interviews, etc. You can also select stories by producer, source, or length – less than 10 minutes, 10-30 minutes, and more than 30 minutes.

If you want to learn about new stories on Audiofiles, you can follow them on Twitter.

Happy listening!

Warren Ediger

Lessons for better English is a collection of Successful English articles – organized like a textbook or course outline – for English students and teachers. Its goal – to help you improve your English by helping you understand and practice successful language acquisition.

Someone once told me that you need to know three things to successfully complete a project. You need to know:

• What to do;
• Why it’s important to do that; and
• How to effectively use the resources or tools you have to get the job done.

This collection of readings from Successful English explain the what, why, and how of language acquisition. And, as a bonus, I’ve added three stories that tell how different people have successfully used these ideas to acquire, or pick up, English and other languages.

   I. What you need to do

If you only read one article in Successful English, it should be The power of reading and listening. It clearly describes what you need to do to improve all aspects of your English – reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

 II. Why that’s important

Successful teaching and learning need a solid foundation. There must be good reasons for what teachers and students do. The basics, a series of short essays, briefly explains the theory and research behind the ideas you find in Successful English – why they’re important and why they work.

III. How to work effectively and solve problems

Even when you know what to do and why it’s important, you may still have questions. Here are answers to some of them:

• How does reading or listening to popular fiction help improve my English?
• How can I get the greatest benefit from my reading?
• Does correcting mistakes help me improve?
• How can I tell if my English is getting better?
• How to fight negative feelings about yourself and your English.
• Is working hard the answer to better English?
• What should I do when I see a word I don’t know?
• Why is English so difficult?
• How can I learn to speak better?
• I’ve worked hard to improve my English, but it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. What can I do?

 IV. Success stories

Case histories – the experiences of people or companies – are popular in many university management programs. Here are three case histories to encourage you and give you more ideas for improving your English:

• A group of Korean women
• A Brazilian teacher – part 1, part 2, part 3
• An American language teacher

Warren Ediger

There’s strong agreement among the writers, teachers, and researchers I know best: good writing comes from reading. Many students, however, have trouble accepting this fact. In this article – a case study – I describe the effect that reading has had on one student’s writing.

The path to better writing

Most of the students who ask me to help them improve their writing assume that I will teach them grammar, give them writing assignments, and correct the mistakes they make. They are surprised when I begin by talking to them about the relationship between reading and writing and insist that they set up a regular reading schedule. The writing assignments come later.

During the last year or so, I’ve written several articles about the important relationship between reading and writing. If this idea is new to you, I encourage you to read some of them. Here are three links to help you get started:

• The power of reading and listening - Describes the relationship between reading (and listening) and better English – a good place to start.
• Learning to write – introduction - Four articles that provide a good overview for those who want to become better writers; links at the end of each article take you to the next.
• Better writing, part 1 – Two articles about improving your writing ability and developing a good process for writing; a link at the end of the first article will take you to the second.

A case study: the effect of reading on one student’s writing

A case study – one student’s experience – does not prove a theory. But a case study can effectively illustrate a theory that’s already supported by a significant amount of research and the experiences of a large number of writers and teachers.

This case study describes the writing improvement of a student I’ve worked with since February 2010. A few days ago, he showed me an email he recently wrote to an American professor. In it he wrote about their first meeting and shared some ideas about academic research and publication. It was immediately obvious that the writing in this email was much better than his earlier writing.

I found an email he had written to me shortly after I began working with him and compared it with the one he wrote last week. They are similar: both are longer than most emails and the style is a little more formal, more like academic writing than the casual writing style you usually find in emails.

I marked the errors in both emails, counted them, and put them into three categories:

• Incorrect verb forms – correct verb, incorrect form or tense: for example, “Then I register(ed) myself at a regular English course for adults….”
• Missing words – for example, “For me (it) was really uncomfortable.”
• Incorrect word choice – for example, “I was studying to make (take) a test.”

In 2010 he made 1 error for every 12 words; in 2011 he made 1 error for every 21 words – almost 50% fewer errors. In 2011 he had 85% fewer verb-related errors (2 compared to 12) and made almost 60% fewer incorrect word choices (7 compared to 17) than he did in 2010.

In 2010, almost 25% of the errors gave his writing a native-language accent. They were errors that language learners make when they aren’t sure what to do in English, so they borrow from their first language (for more about this, see It’s not broken!.) There were none of these errors in last week’s email.

Finally, his recent writing was more sophisticated – it ranked higher on a common scale (Flesch-Kincaid) that measures the complexity and difficulty of academic writing.

What’s the point?

Since I met him in 2010, this student has never studied grammar, never practiced writing, and no one has corrected any of his mistakes. I’m sure of that because I’m the only English user he has regular contact with. He and I meet once a week to talk about articles and books that he has read and other interesting topics. We also talk a lot about how language is acquired, or picked up, and what he can do to improve his English acquisition. He has become very knowledgeable about language acquisition and uses this knowledge to improve his efforts.

Two things set this student apart from many other students. First, he reads almost every day and he reads (and listens) a lot – often two or more hours a day. Second, he thinks of English as his language and takes great delight in the time he spends in it even though his personal and professional lives are spent almost totally in two other languages.

When I sent him an early version of this article, he wrote back with two important observations: first, that reading and listening have helped him begin to feel very comfortable with English. Second, he writes: “…I’ve been writing without thinking too much about the words that I use; in that sense I am more focused on the message….” Doing the same things he does could help you significantly improve your English – and your writing.

Warren Ediger

Alex teaches English at an American university. He’s also the director of the university’s TESL program, where students learn how to teach English as a second language. When he wanted to learn Spanish, he began as many English learners do. And failed. He experienced success, though, when he applied a simple principle and found some creative ways to make it work.

Alex’s story

When talking about his early experience with Spanish, Alex describes himself as an “eager yet unsuccessful language learner.” He studied Spanish intensely for two years – learning grammar rules, memorizing vocabulary, being corrected by his teachers. But, as he writes, this kind of study leads to “knowledge about the language rather than the ability to appropriately use it.”

Alex says that this kind of instruction had a disastrous effect on his early attempts to learn Spanish. After all his work, he was unable to use Spanish and became very anxious about his lack of Spanish ability.

Alex’s efforts to acquire, or pick up, Spanish turned in a new direction when he learned that you acquire new language when you understand messages being communicated in the new language, not when you focus on rules.

He also concluded that his frustration with Spanish came from his anxiety, not from his lack of ability or failure to study. He came to understand that stressful teaching methods and learning conditions can make language acquisition difficult. And that anxiety can decrease your confidence and your desire to keep studying the language.

For Alex, success came when he began to apply this simple principle:

You acquire a language when you are exposed to input, or language, that you can understand. This input should consist mostly of language you already know. That way you can pick up new language from the context. If the language you read and listen to is too difficult, it increases your anxiety and makes it harder to acquire new language.

What Alex did

Since Alex loves to read the newspaper, he began the habit of reading an English newspaper in the morning so he could become familiar with the news of the day. Later in the day he read the news in a Spanish newspaper. Since he was already familiar with most of the stories from reading them in English, they were easier to understand when he read them in Spanish. You could do the same thing by first reading or listening to news stories in your language, then reading or listening to them in English.

Alex found most of his Spanish input in English books – books that he had already read – that had been translated into Spanish. He also read graphic novel versions of the same books. Since he had read the books in English – and seen all the movies many times – he was able to understand the Spanish versions of the books.

With everything he reads or listens to, Alex has a simple rule: if it’s not interesting, or understandable, stop! Find something that is.

Alex received oral – spoken – input from his mother-in-law, a native speaker of Spanish. He asked her about familiar topics, such as food, her childhood, politics, and the family farm. She was patient and willing to repeat herself and answer questions. Since she couldn’t speak English, all the input Alex received was in Spanish, the language he wanted to acquire.

What you can do

At the end of Alex’s story, he writes: “I have a life in Spanish that is almost as rich as my life in English. Although I have received little formal instruction, I have managed to acquire quite a bit of Spanish on my own … and I have enjoyed myself in the process. My hope is that … foreign language teachers and students will realize that second language acquisition can simultaneously be enjoyable and fruitful.”

Everything Alex did to acquire Spanish can help you acquire English. Even if you don’t have an English-speaking mother-in-law, you might be able to find someone who’s native language is English – a student or business person. Make a weekly appointment with them. Offer to buy them coffee or lunch and ask them the kinds of questions Alex asked his wife’s mother.

Warren Ediger

Related Reading: Frustration to success; Better English at Sweet Valley High

Reference: Poole (2011) The Monitor Model and Me: A story of successful adult foreign language acquisition. The International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching 7.1.

When you read to improve your English, you want to read for pleasure. You want to choose something that’s easy and interesting, that allows you to “get lost” in what you’re reading and forget that it’s English. But sometimes you must read to learn, for example, on the TOEFL exam. What do you do then?

Reading to learn

Many students read to learn by focusing their attention on the words and ideas and trying to memorize them by reading their assignments several times. One of my students told me that she read every chapter in her textbook 7 or 8 times to try to be sure she could remember the information for the test. This kind of reading to learn, which depends on what we call rote memorization, isn’t very effective. In fact, it doesn’t work well at all, especially when you consider the time and hard work it demands.

There’s a much better way to read when you want, or need, to learn. It’s based on a simple but important research-based principle: “we learn by solving problems….” Learning comes as the result of finding answers to questions, not by trying to concentrate on the facts. The only time rote memorization works very well is when we need to memorize something like the multiplication tables in mathematics or periodic tables in chemistry.

Mortimer Adler, who wrote How to Read a Book wrote this: “A good reader is active in his [or her] efforts to understand. Any book is a problem, a puzzle. The reader’s attitude is that of a detective looking for clues to its basic ideas and alert for anything that will make them clearer.”

How to be an active reader

Let’s use a paragraph from a practice exercise in Barron’s TOEFL iBT (2007) to illustrate how you can be an active reader. Take a minute to read it.

Aboriginal People – Although the first inhabitants of Australia have been identified by physical characteristics, culture, language, and locale, none of these attributes truly establishes a person as a member of the Aboriginal People. Because the Aboriginal groups settled in various geographical areas and developed customs and lifestyles that reflected the resources available to them, there is great diversity among those groups, including more than 200 linguistic varieties. Probably the most striking comparison is that of the Aboriginal People who inhabit the desert terrain of the Australian Outback with those who live along the coast. Clearly, their societies have developed very different cultures. According to the Department of Education, the best way to establish identity as a member of the Aboriginal People is to be identified and accepted as such by the Aboriginal community.

If I had to read this paragraph, here’s what I’d do:

1. Pause a moment when I see the title to ask myself“what do I already know about the Aboriginals?” Asking that question and thinking about for only a few seconds helps focus my attention on what is coming.

2. Notice that the first sentence tells me that the traditional ways we identify groups of people – where they live, their culture, their language – don’t work with the Aboriginals.

3. Ask two questions: Why don’t the tradition methods work? What does work? Now I have questions to answer, or problems to solve, so I scan the text, look for answers, and quickly find them.

One of the reasons I can be confident doing this is that the first sentence of a paragraph – called the topic sentence – is like a thesis statement for the paragraph and gives us the main idea; the rest of the paragraph adds supporting ideas. I’m using what I know about writing to be a better reader.

4. Discover that the traditional ways we identify groups of people don’t work with the Aboriginals because they’re too diverse (middle of sentence 2).

5. Discover that the best way to identify someone as an Aboriginal is to ask other Aboriginals (last sentence): “…the best way to establish identity as a member of the Aboriginal People is to be identified and accepted as such by the Aboriginal community.”

By asking the two questions at the end of the first sentence and scanning the rest of the text for the answers, rather than trying to read every word in the paragraph, I quickly discover the three key ideas of the paragraph:

• The traditional ways of identifying groups of people don’t work with Aboriginals (main idea).
• They don’t work because Aboriginals are too diverse (supporting idea).
• One way that does work to identify someone as an Aboriginal is to ask other Aboriginals (supporting idea).

Final thoughts

You may need to practice a while to become comfortable reading this way. But if you take the time to learn how to read actively, you’ll discover that you learn more in less time and remember it better.

Warren Ediger

References: Adler (1972) How to read a book; Krashen (2003) Explorations in language acquisition and use.

What is reading? Very simply, reading is trying to make sense of a sentence, paragraph, essay, article, or book. It’s trying to understand what’s in the writer’s mind. And the key to making sense of what we read is in the chunks – groups of words – not individual words.

You read more than you know

We read – try to make sense of – many things in life. We do it automatically. We read people’s faces to see whether they’re happy or angry. We read situations so we know how to act: we act differently at the scene of an accident than we do when we walk into a party with friends or into a cathedral during a religious service.

Trying to make sense of things is natural. Unfortunately, many try to do it unnaturally when they read print because they reduce reading print to only recognizing words. Let me give you an example.

Last year I asked one of my students if he had any trouble reading an article we planned to discuss. He said “no.” He told me that he knew most of the words and had looked up the few that he didn’t know. However when I asked, he couldn’t tell me the main idea of the article. For him reading was recognizing words, not making sense of, or understanding, the article.

Making sense of what you read – it’s in the chunks

Good readers do not read word by word. Why? Because meaning comes in groups of words, sometimes called chunks. And if you want to make sense of what you’re reading, you need to read – to recognize and understand – the chunks.

Let me give you a simple example; look at this sentence:

I left my iPhone at home when I went to the doctor.

This sentence consists of three meaningful chunks:

I left my iPhone (what I did)

at home (where I did it)

when I went to the doctor. (when I did it)

If you want to understand the sentence, you have to understand each chunk and how it works together with the others to describe what I did. You can’t do that if you are simply trying to recognize words. You have to be able to read – make sense of – the chunks, quickly and smoothly.

Developing the chunking habit

There are two methods you can use to improve your ability to make sense of what you read – and what you hear – by paying attention to chunks and not just words.

1. Read very easy books, stories, or articles.

You cannot make sense of what you read if you read slowly, word by word. This is especially true if you have developed the habit of translating English words into your first language while you read.

The best way to correct this problem is to read things that are very easy – that you can understand in English without using your first language (or a dictionary). As your reading speeds up, slowly increase the difficulty of what you read.

2. Listen and read at the same time. If you hear and see the text at the same time, you’ll begin to develop a “feel” for chunking. Again, begin with easy.

Today there are many good sources for reading and listening at the same time. Here are a few suggestions:

• ESL Podcast – subscribe to the learning guide and read it while you listen to the dialogue and to Dr. McQuillan talk about it (intermediate).
• VOA Special English – read the stories and listen to the audio at the same time (intermediate).
• TED presentations – exciting presentations on many different subjects by great speakers. Listen to the presentation and read the interactive transcript. Warning: some speakers have strong accents; avoid them for now (advanced).
• Academic Earth – try Dr. Paul Bloom’s Introduction to Psychology class; listen to the video and read the transcript at the same time (advanced).

Some of my students have used audio books and listened to them while they read the print version of the book. You can find audio books at many different levels of difficulty. Here are some articles to help you get started:

• The power of reading and listening
• Finding books for intermediate readers
• Helping battered English learners

Be patient

Developing a new habit takes time. Changing your reading habits certainly will. So be patient. As you begin to read faster and more smoothly, slowly increase the difficulty of what you read. But don’t try to rush it; it won’t work.

Warren Ediger

References: Nishizawa, Yoshioka, Fukada (2009) The impact of a 4-year extensive reading program; Smith (2007) Reading FAQ.

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“So what is good English?” asks William Zinsser. “…it’s plain and it’s strong,” he answers. “It has a huge vocabulary of words that have a precise shade of meaning; there’s no subject however technical or complex, that can’t be made clear to the ordinary reader in good English – if it’s used right.”

Better writing starts in the middle

Writing in English is different than writing in your language. I’m sure you’ve discovered that. And you’ve probably been frustrated by it. But what can you do about it? Where’s the best place to begin if you want to turn your writing into good English?

Good writing begins to appear when you revise what you’ve written. Revising – improving your writing by rereading it and making changes – is the heart of the writing process. And revising is the best place to begin if you want to turn your writing into English that is – in Zinsser’s words – “clear, simple, brief, and human.”

A strategy for revising

To help my students revise their writing, I’ve borrowed several ideas from a strategy UCLA professor Richard Lanham recommends to make writing clear and understandable. His method helps them focus on what’s important for good writing. And after they use it for a while, many begin to automatically include his ideas in their writing. You could do the same. Let’s try it.

Here are two sample sentences from one of Lanham’s books. You won’t find any grammatical errors in them. But at the same time, you won’t find – or you’ll have trouble finding – the writer’s meaning.

The history of Western philosophical thought has long been dominated by philosophical considerations as to the nature of man. These notions have dictated corresponding considerations of the nature of the child within society, the practices by which children were to be raised, and the purposes of studying the child.

Lanham suggests marking all the prepositions and forms of the verb to be when you begin to revise a sentence. Why? If you use too many prepositional phrases and if you use to be too often, you lose the strength of good English – short strong nouns and active verbs – and your writing becomes foggy. When you mark them, you begin to see how often you use them, and it becomes easier to find what’s important in the sentence.

Here are the sentences with the prepositions and the verb to be marked:

The history of Western philosophical thought has long been dominated by philosophical considerations as to the nature of man. These notions have dictated corresponding considerations of the nature of the child within society, the practices by which children were to be raised, and the purposes of studying the child.

Next, to try to understand a sentence, Lanham asks three questions: (1) What’s the action? (2) Who or what does the action? (3) Who or what receives the action?

Take a minute to look at the first sentence and try to answer the questions.

In the first sentence:

• “[P]hilosophical considerations as to the nature of man” do the acting.
• Dominate is what they do.
• “The history of Western philosophical thought” is what they dominate.

This helps, but there’s still a problem: What are “philosophical considerations as to the nature of man”?

Take a moment to think about it. Philosophy asks questions and considers, or thinks about, their answers. So if philosophy is considering – asking and thinking about – the nature of man, it must be asking this question: “What is the nature of man?”

You can also simplify “the history of Western psychological thought.” Lanham points out that the idea of history is already contained in “Western psychological thought,” it refers to both past and present. That’s the way you should write it.

When you put all these ideas together and connect them with our active verb “dominate,” you get this:

One question has dominated Western psychological thought: What is the nature of man?

Much better! How did we do it?

• We found and simplified the actor – “one question.”
• We replaced the passive verb – “has been dominated by” – with an active verb – “has dominated.”
• We simplified the recipient of the action – “Western psychological thought.”
• We identified the question – “What is the nature of man?” – and put it where it would be most effective – at the end of the sentence.

It’s your turn

Try it for yourself. Find something you’ve written and see what happens when you use these steps to revise it.

Remember, when you write, one thing is more important than anything else: making your ideas clear and understandable to your readers. You may be writing to explain. Describe. Convince. Or tell a story. But you won’t succeed at any of them if your readers can’t understand what you’ve written.

Warren Ediger

Reference: Lanham (2007) Revising Prose; Zinsser (2009) Writing English as a Second Language.

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