About Tim Albert Training

Effective writing for
healthcare professionals
Dorking, UK

This article appeared in the Autumn 1996 edition of Short Words, the newsletter of Tim Albert Training. It was written by Tim Albert.

A good writing style: what exactly is it?

Ask most people for a definition of style and they will come up with words such as 'flowing and readable' ... 'witty and elegant' ... 'amusing and sharp' ... 'enjoyable and satisfying'.

Which is fine, up to a point. We can hardly disagree with such words, but they don't really help us when, for instance, we want to know whether to choose one word over another.

This brings us to guidelines and rules. Over the past 100 years many excellent writers on writing have given us many pieces of sensible advice, such as:

use short sentences,
prefer the active to the passive,
use positives rather than negatives,
use familiar words and avoid clichés,
write with nouns and verbs.

The main difficulty here is that such guidelines may be commonly promulgated, but they are equally commonly ignored. Look in any medical journal, for instance, and the sentences will be long, constructions passive, and short words conspicuous by their absence (though not clichés).

A 'good style' for this market will have little in common with the 'good style' as seen by Orwell or Strunk and White.

This leads us to the only plausible resolution: a good writing style becomes the choice of words and grammatical constructions that are most likely to get the message across to the target audience.

Style becomes a means to an end and not a measure of personality or education. Its importance lies in what it allows us to say to other people rather than what it says about us. Once we stop trying to impress, and concentrate on putting across what we want to say, we might end up with something with literary merit after all.

What others say

'People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the secret of style.' Matthew Arnold in Collections and Recollections, chapter 13.
'Style is the dress of thought; a modest dress, neat, but not gaudy, will true critics please.' Samuel Wesley, An epistle to a friend concerning Poetry, 1700.
'Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style.' Jonathan Swift, Letter to a young gentleman lately entered into holy orders, 1720.
'I notice that you use plain simple language, short words and brief sentences. This is the way to write English... When you catch adjectives kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable.' Mark Twain, writing to a schoolboy essayist.

Back to Short Words