THE FIRST RULE OF GOOD WRITING: BE SPECIFIC.

Good writing, of course, assumes many shapes. It may be presumptuous, then, to claim that there are any “rules” that govern all good writing. I’m about to be presumptuous. I believe that all good writing adheres, nearly always, to the following five rules:

1. Be specific.

2. Be concrete.

3. Be precise.

4. When you can, use action verbs in the active voice.

5. Rely on hard facts more than soft facts or opinions.

In this blog entry, I will focus on Rule Number One: Be specific.

Consider the following sentence:

As I walked home last night, I was attacked by a dog.

As you read that sentence, what kind of dog do you picture? For some of you, it might be a small, nipping terrier. 

 








For others, a monstrous, fanged Doberman pinscher. 

 As for me, I find myself a bit fog-lost, trying to capture in my imagination a shape-shifting doggish creature, now gray and wolfish, now brown and pinscher-ish, now yapping and poodle-ish. The actual creature keeps eluding me. My mind doesn’t really have an exact dog to fend off here.

Now rewrite the sentence:

As I walked home last night, I was attacked by a poodle.

Bingo! Suddenly our dog comes into focus. The picture becomes clear. Why? Simply because the word “poodle” is more specific than the word “dog.” Being more specific, “poodle,” though still just one word, actually contains more information than “dog”--information about size, shape, tail, bark, even behavior. This is important to remember: Specific words are more informative than general words.

At this point, I often ask my writing classes, “Is the word ‘dog’ specific or general?” Almost invariably, they answer, “General!” Then I give them a moment to reconsider their answer. Rather quickly, some bright youngster (the one, say, with the shaggy hair in the back row) pipes up, “Well, it’s more general than some words and more specific than others.”

Right. It was a trick question. From general to specific is a continuum. For the word “dog,” it might look like this:

General

thing

living thing

animal

vertebrate

mammal

canine

dog

poodle (at this level, "puppy" or "mongrel" also work)

black poodle

black female poodle
etc.

____

Specific

You can keep adding adjectives to make a concept more specific, but piling on adjectives is usually not the best way to do this. (More on adjectives in future posts.)

Can you think of a way to be more specific than “poodle” in a single word?

Right! You can name a specific poodle. Let’s call her Fifi, the name of your next-door neighbor’s poodle. You can’t get more specific than a single poodle.

Now let’s plug some of these more specific and more general words into our sentence:

As I walked home last night, I was attacked by Fifi.

Whoa! Readers who don’t know your neighbor’s dog might assume Fifi is your French maid, not a dog at all. 

 What’s the problem here? Didn’t I tell you to be specific? Yes, but here you have become too specific for some readers. This leads to a refinement of the original rule. The REAL rule is this:

Be as specific as you can usefully be.

That’s an important refinement, and it means you have to take your reader(s) into account. (All good writing keeps the reader constantly in mind.) If you were writing a note to Fifi’s owner, you would certainly say, “Fifi attacked me,” not “A poodle attacked me” (assuming it was poor Fifi). That’s because “Fifi” is usefully specific for your neighbor. But if you were telling the story to your children years from now, you’d probably just say, “Poodle.” Note that even the name of a breed might be too specific for some audiences: If you say, “I was attacked by a lurcher,” most people who aren’t in the American Kennel Club wouldn’t know what you were talking about.

Now let’s go in the other direction:

As I walked home last night, I was attacked by a mammal.

Or

As I walked home last night, I was attacked by a living thing.

Yipes. 

 Suddenly we’re in the world of science fiction. Why? Because a subtle and important principle is at work, a principle that is at the heart of this rule: Your reader expects you to be as specific as you can usefully be.

In other words, you have an unspoken contract with your reader in which you have promised to be as specific as you can usefully be. So when you say, “I was attacked by a living thing,” you’re telling your reader, “That’s as specific as I can be. I don’t have any more information than that.”

Being specific, then, is more than just a good writing tactic; it’s a writing imperative. It’s what you have promised your reader.

Finally, a word about generalities. There’s nothing wrong with generalities. Generalities are handy for setting the stage for what’s to come. (More on that in future posts, too.) In fact, many a good paragraph begins with a generality.

However, in general (ha ha), I recommend another little rule: Follow every generality with at least one, and preferably three, specific examples.

Here are some specific examples of this specific-example rule:

Generality: “My brother misuses my belongings.”

Follow-up specifics: “He took my laptop to his swimming lesson, spilled soup on my favorite t-shirt, and dropped my cell phone in the toilet.”

Generality: “Please keep personal items off your desk.”

Follow-up specifics: “Family photos, sports trophies, and changes of underwear should remain out of sight of customers.”

I’ll let you come up with your own third example.

Remember: Be as specific as you can usefully be. Follow every generality with at least one, and preferably three specific examples. You have a contract with your reader to follow these rules.

I hope you found this rather long post useful. I promise to keep future ones shorter.
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For those who (masochistically?) want more on this subject, here's a link to my personal website and a mildly humorous essay I once published on the subject of being specific.