This article was originally printed at gamasutra.com. Unfortunately, gamasutra could not include the game inside the article for technical reasons, so it appears here as it was originally intended. Gamasutra also edited several things I wasn't aware of, including the last sentence. For better or for worse, this is the article as I originally wrote it.
This article originally appeared in Game Developer Magazine, September 2007 issue.
I once heard Peter Molyneux say that during the development of Populous he didn’t want the player to be able to pause the game. His reasoning was that Populous is a world that goes on with or without the player. Luckily, his friends talked him out of it, pointing out that sometimes the doorbell rings, the phone rings, or the baby cries.
Games are not for game designers and their ivory-tower ideals—games are for players. Players have lives outside of our games and we should respect those lives and design our games accordingly, rather than expect our players to design their lives around us. Players should be able to save anytime they want, or more precisely, they should be able to stop playing your game anytime without losing their meaningful progress.
This is an old argument where one side talks about the convenience of saving anytime and the other talks about the need to make games challenging, but this is a false dichotomy. We can allow the player to stop playing without excessive penalty and make a challenging game. It’s just a matter of defining what “saving” actually means.
As an example, Mario 64 doesn’t literally allow the player to save anywhere they want, but it still meets this requirement in spirit. The point of the game is to collect all 120 stars, and every time you collect a star, you “save and continue.” You cannot save your exact position in a level, but such a feature isn’t needed anyway. The geography of the game is designed such that a player can reach the entrance to any level in just a few seconds by navigating Mario’s castle and getting back to any specific goal in a level doesn’t take long either. This preserves the game’s difficulty (players can’t save and load to get the stars more easily) and it also means the player can turn the game off at any time, knowing that the only important progress (collecting stars) has been saved.
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| Sometimes Miyamoto forgets where all those stars are. |
Save Point, Checkpoint
God of War 1 and 2 and Resident Evil 4 all use the same save system, which is also common in many other games. They all have save points and check points. Save points let players save their progress and load it later. Check points are sprinkled invisibly between save points and if they die, they go back to the last checkpoint rather than all the way back to the last save point. This system isn’t too bad, but it doesn’t do a good job of letting the player save and quit at any time, either. It would make more sense if the player could pause the game at any time and save progress up to the last checkpoint. I’m not suggesting that the player should be able to take a step, save, fire a shot, save—just that he or she should be able to stop playing the game and resume from the last checkpoint. After all, that would happen anyway through dying.
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| Did you find this part in God of War 2? |
In America, we can show shooting people in the face, but bare breasts are taboo. |
Why separate save points from check points in the first place? I think the answer is for technical reasons rather than design reasons. God of War was designed for the PlayStation 2 and Resident Evil 4 originally appeared on the GameCube (and later on PlayStation 2 and Wii). These consoles take a few seconds to write a save to the memory card, so doing this every time the designers wanted a checkpoint would probably have been too annoying to the player. This lead to spread out save points and the addition of check points for convenience’s sake. In the future, we won’t have these technical restrictions.
Gears of War was designed for the Xbox 360, a system capable of writing a save file quickly. Gears of War’s save system is a definite improvement over God of War’s and Resident Evil’s: The player can play through the entire game without having worry about finding save points, but can also quit playing at any time and automatically start at the most recent checkpoint. Gears of War does this by having many checkpoints, all of which automatically save progress without any action required from the player. This example well-illustrates the false dichotomy I mentioned earlier. The save system is both very convenient and does not interfere with the difficulty of the game. In fact, Gears of War could be tuned to be arbitrarily difficult without sacrificing any convenience in its save system.
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| Gears of War inspired many great cakes... |
...and Etch-A-Sketch scenes. |
Multiplayer
Save systems get a little trickier in cooperative multiplayer games. Players expect to be able to join a friend’s game and leave at any time, and to save and continue their progress later without the game’s save system getting in the way. Gears of War does a great job here too, allowing a friend to join an in-progress game at any time (taking over the AI for the character named Dom). The player can get through a couple of chapters alone, then have a friend join who can leave at any time and pick it up again later. Even if the friend is new to the game, they’re still allowed to join someone who’s playing the last level, because Gears of War is trying to be as convenient to the player as possible.
One hitch is that when the friend leaves, the player must briefly quit the game then restart it from the same checkpoint. On this matter, Lego Star Wars has Gears of War beat because it allows a friend to seamlessly join or leave a game without ever quitting out to a menu screen.
Playing Gears of War with a friend is easier than playing alone (there are no AI adjustments between coop and single player), but it could have been incredibly difficult had the designers wanted it to be. The save system’s flexibility doesn’t prohibit difficulty. That said, if you were really serious as a designer about creating a meaningful leaderboard for single player and co-op play (Gears of War doesn’t do this), then you’d need a single player mode where no one can ever join in, and a co-op mode where the two players are set from the start and can never switch out. This would be highly annoying, so it should only be used as a hardcore leaderboard mode inside a game that also offers a more forgiving system.
Massive Saves
In massively multiplayer online games things get even trickier still. On the plus side, players can log out at almost any moment they want in these games, and their character’s progress (such as items or experience points) will be saved. In World of Warcraft, players can’t log out while “in combat,” and must wait 20 seconds when they do want to log out, but it’s pretty player-friendly overall. There’s even a hearthstone that lets players teleport back a city (once per hour) so they can end their play session at almost any time with character progress saved. What’s much harder to save is progress on a quest or in a dungeon. If a group of four friends is halfway through a three-hour dungeon, one could log out, but it’s socially unacceptable, and that player won’t be able to continue their progress in that dungeon later. This is a worse problem during raids, where 25 people must coordinate their real-life schedules, and the ability to log off at any time is basically gone.
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| This is a very powerful warlock from another world. |
Blizzard has taken some steps to simulate the kind of save points seen in offline games, though. The Scarlet Monastery dungeon starts in an ante-room with four separate portals leading to four different wings. This allows players to play just one fourth of the total experience, stop, and come back later. Also, the Mauradon dungeon gives players an item half way through that allows them to teleport back to the half way point, so they can continue their journey later.
Blizzard added even more winged dungeons and pseudo-save points half way through dungeons in the recent Burning Crusade expansion. Players welcomed these changes as they make the game much more convenient, though they still fall somewhat short. A single player game with save points more than an hour apart would be considered lacking, but at least Blizzard is moving in the right direction here. There is opportunity in the MMO genre to be even more friendly to players’ real life schedules.
Outliers
Let’s return to single player games and look at two unusual examples: Dead Rising (Xbox 360) and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (Nintendo DS). Dead Rising has save points, but no check points. The open-ended nature of the game makes it very easy to forget to save at all, especially considering that the save points are off the beaten path inside the various bathrooms of the shopping mall where the game takes place.
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| A game's bathroom imitating real life. |
A real life bathroom imitating a game. |
When players die in Dead Rising, they are given a confusing choice: they can restart from their last save point, losing all character progress since they last saved, or keep their character’s progress, but lose all save points. Yes, you read that right. If a player wants to keep their character’s progress since the last save (such as experience points gained and moves learned) then they must restart the entire game from the opening cut-scene. Even stranger, Dead Rising only allows a single save slot per Xbox 360 profile, per storage device.
That means the game is trying its hardest to restrict people into playing the game only the way the designer wants, while still remaining easily defeatable if one makes a new profile or uses another memory card. By “defeatable,” I mean this grants users the ability to create two save files, a feature common to almost all games.
The reasoning behind these decisions in Dead Rising was probably to create a very specific experience for the player. They are supposed to care about finding those save points, and care that they are in constant danger from zombies and that if they die, the last save point was a really long time ago so it’s going to be a big deal. The world is against the player—as it almost always is in the horror genre—and so the game’s difficulty is intentionally very hard. If the player keeps playing through the game and dying and starting over, they’ll start each time with a stronger character and with more knowledge of how to navigate the game correctly and save the various victims from the zombies. Incidentally, this same save system was used in the game Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, which was also by Capcom and is rumored to share some team members with Dead Rising.
I understand why a designer might create a save system like this that reinforces the concepts of the horror genre, but games are not meant to satisfy game designer ideals, they are for players. I was personally annoyed by this system to the point of quitting, because I could not play it the way I wanted. Dead Rising is an amazing technological showcase and combines the design concepts of a sandbox game (go wherever you want, do whatever you want) with the horror theme of a mall overrun by zombies. And yet, I’m not allowed even two save slots, I’m bullied into playing the same parts over and over because I feel obligated to restart all the time, and the save points require me to actively seek them out, which means it’s very easy to play for an hour or so and forget to save, then die. That type of save system may work for hardcore players (who border on sadomasochism anyway), but the fictional Little Jimmy from Idaho (the person I often design for) is just going to quit playing out of frustration. I know I did.
On the other hand, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow has an unusual save feature that is intended specifically for the player’s convenience, rather than for the designer’s vision. This game has standard fixed-location save points (with no check points) and it also has a second method of saving called a save marker.
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| Not all Nintendo DS games have dramatic anime hand poses on the box, but these two do. |
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Players can pause the game at any time and create a save marker, and then the game quits to the title screen. When they want to play again, they can either load a game that was saved at a save point or they can resume from their last save marker. The tricky part is that if they resume play through either method, then the save marker is destroyed. That means if the player is in the middle of a boss fight, they can save, stop playing, play something else, then later resume from the exact moment they saved. But players cannot reduce the game’s difficulty with this feature because it does not give them a second chance of any kind. This is another example where the game can remain very challenging, and yet still allow the player to save and quit at any time. This same save system was also used by Fire Emblem (Game Boy Advance) except you didn’t even need to pause and create a save marker. It was automatically created for you any time you turned the Game Boy off during gameplay.
New Mario, Old Trick
One of the most surprisingly bad save systems of recent times comes from an otherwise wonderful game: New Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo DS). It would have been very natural in this game to allow the player to save at any time on the map screen between levels. Instead, the player must beat either the castle at the end of a world or the tower halfway through the world in order to save. For example, in World 2 this means beating a minimum of five levels before reaching a save point. Players can also spend their hard-earned star coins to buy a powerup from various mushroom houses which also lets them save, but they very well might not want to spend their coins.
The need to keep the player at arm’s length from the ability to save is conspicuous here given the traditions of the genre (Mario 64 did much better) and doubly-so considering this is a handheld game. Surely the concern wasn’t about keeping the game challenging, because NSMB lavishes the player with extra lives the whole way through. My girlfriend once asked if she could play Nintendogs on our DS, and I had to explain to her that no, she couldn’t, because I just spent almost an hour collecting nine star coins and didn’t reach a save point yet so I had to leave the DS in sleep mode until I could save. I’m not sure which game designer sensibility this restriction on saving serves, or why it would ever be more important than allowing my girlfriend to play with her virtual dog.
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| Everyone loves being the huge Mario. This is actually a wonderfully designed game aside from the save system. |
NSMB really stands alone here. The most incredible part is that when you beat the game, you unlock the ability to save anytime you want on the map screen! This proves that no technical limitation made the save system the way it was. The convenience of saving anytime was deliberately withheld from the player, and given as a reward at the end. As designers, we can’t do this, and must instead put the real lives of our players ahead of our game designery ideals.
Saving For The Player
A save system should allow the player to stop playing at any time, allow the player to pick up where he or she left off with as close to zero replaying as possible, and save as automatically and seamlessly as possible, so the player will not forget to do it.
Saving should be treated as one of the player’s natural rights, not an earned privilege or a game mechanic around which to make strategic decisions. The design space we have to create new games is so unthinkably large that we lose virtually nothing by restricting ourselves to designs with friendly save game systems that don’t presume to override the real-life needs of players. As I have shown, this does not even require a tradeoff with game difficulty; even difficult games can have convenient save systems.
We should always try to design a save system that simply serves its purpose and fades into the background, otherwise we might end up like New Super Mario Bros.—a game with sales of over 10 million units worldwide, and with ten million girlfriends unable to play Nintendogs.
--Sirlin
I'd like to share with you a way of thinking. It is, as far as I know, the only sensible way to think about the world (Editor's note: now I know a second way). This is not a new method—Galileo pioneered it over four centuries ago—and yet for most people today, it is still as revolutionary as it was then. Galileo said that when we decide whether to accept or reject an idea about how the world works, we do this by actually checking the world, using experimentation and verifiable evidence. We should not factor in who said the idea in the first place—it doesn't matter if the idea came from a military general or a pope or any other "authority." It also doesn't matter whether the idea is pleasing to us. Only evidence from the real world matters when checking the idea.
Galileo was talking about what we call inductive reasoning, the kind of thinking often used by scientists. There are also two other methods of thinking: deductive reasoning (often used by mathematicians) and Alice in Wonderland thinking (often used by all of us). Deductive thinking involves starting with axioms—simple statements that are obviously true or taken as given—then working out the consequences and logical implications of the axioms. Alice in Wonderland thinking involves starting with the verdict, then having the trial later or not at all.
Alice in Wonderland thinking sometimes masquerades as deductive thinking. An example of deductive thinking was when Euclid started with five axioms that logically led to all the theorems of geometry. One of his axioms was that two points determine a line. An example of Alice in Wonderland thinking is starting with the "fact" that the Earth is only 5,000 years old, so therefore men and dinosaurs coexisted, hence the dinosaur with a saddle on it featured in the Creation Museum in Kentucky. There is a logical progression, but it starts with an "axiom" that contradicts all the evidence we have about the age of the Earth.
Before Galileo's time, the best thinkers relied on deductive reasoning and it was very successful in the field of mathematics. But when it came to describing how the world actually works, it turns out that stating “simple rules to start from” is incredibly difficult. Aristotle started with the axiom that all matter is made of four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. He also said that heavier objects fall faster than light objects. His conclusions followed logically from the these axioms, but it turns out that when we actually look at the world—the composition of matter or the rate that objects fall—we find that his assumptions were wrong. It turns out that coming up with simple rules describing how the world works is so difficult that it is the goal of science, rather than the starting point.
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| Stephen Colbert reveals Truthiness with a Capital 'T'. |
There is a widespread belief that science reveals Truth with a Capital 'T,' but this isn't how science works at all. We can usually discover if an idea about the world is false by checking it against the world, but we never really know if something is true—only that our most recent experiment didn't disprove it. I'll borrow an analogy from the great physicist Richard Feynman. He compared our study of the world to a series of gigantic games of Chess played between unknown opponents. Imagine that we are just observers who sit in one corner of the board, and we only get to look at the board every once in a while.
Someone might propose a theory, "when there is only one bishop left in the game, it will always stay on the same color square, even if it moves." When we observe more games, we might discover that the board has a checkerboard pattern and that bishops are only able to move diagonally, so that is why our previous theory is so. We now have a deeper understanding of that original theory. And then after watching thousands of games of Chess, someone might notice one particular game where there is only one bishop left and it does end up on a different color square than it started on.
This would be enormously interesting and exciting because it contradicts something we thought we were sure of. In fact, we were never sure, we only knew that our idea held up several thousand times with no contradictions so far. A closed mind would want to ignore or discredit that new piece of data because it goes against something we "know." A thinking person though, would be excited that there may be some new or deeper rules that explain this strange piece of data. Exactly when did the bishop get on another color square? How did this happen? Why has it not happened in any of the other games? It turns out that in this particular game, the last bishop was captured, but then a pawn made it to the last row and the player decided to turn the pawn into a new bishop, and it happened to be on a different color square. Wow, we didn't know anything about that before!
Something vaguely like this actually happened in science. Johann Kepler proposed three laws describing how the planets move. The data from observatories seemed to match his laws. Later, Isaac Newton proposed a theory about gravity. This theory sounded crazy (action at a distance?), but we don't care about that when we are evaluating ideas about the world. We care about whether these ideas hold up when we check them against the actual world. This theory of gravity correctly explained the motion of objects that fall to the ground. It explained why objects of different weights fall at the same rate. In a huge leap of logic (at the time), it also explained the motion of the planets around the sun, and even the timing of the tides of the oceans! Furthermore, it explained why Kepler's earlier laws were true. Hundreds of years went by and no one could find any example where this theory of Newton's was wrong.
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| A simplified diagram of gravity. |
At one point we briefly thought the theory of might be wrong because it didn't explain our observations about the motion of Jupiter's moons. When Newton's theory was used to compute the timing of these moons, it was 8 minutes too fast when Jupiter was close to Earth and 8 minutes too slow when Jupiter was far from Earth. (Note that Alice in Wonderland thinking would have us throw out the stuff about Jupiter's moons because we already "know" that gravity is real.) Then a man named Olaus Roemer said that maybe the light doesn't get here instantly—maybe it takes 8 minutes. And he was right! Well, he was as right as you can be while still maintaining some doubt because after all, you never know for sure. Anyway, that was a huge discovery for humankind. We later doubted gravity again when our observations about Uranus didn't add up, but two different men independently and simultaneously realized that this was because there must be another planet affecting things that we don't know about
yet. It turns out, they were right (another disclaimer about nothing ever being 100%) and Neptune was discovered.
The reason I tell you all this is that few things have ever been so certain in the history of all human knowledge as gravity. Newton's theory explained falling objects, planetary movement, tidal schedules, the motion of distant galaxies, and is the basis of NASA's calculations on all our missions to the moon and Mars. There's just no way it could possibly wrong. It's been tested and tested and tested for hundreds of years. We're "sure" of it.
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| Gravity can be completely neutralized by attaching a cat (always lands feet-down) to toast (always lands butter-side-down). |
Guess what—we shouldn't have been so sure after all. Newton's gravity does not correctly explain the wobbling of Mercury's axis (Einstein later explained this with his theory of general relativity). Newton's theory also does not correctly explain how light rays bend around the sun, the properties of black holes, or why the universe's expansion is currently accelerating. Even though it seemed so unshakably correct for so long, we now know that there's more to the story.
Now that we made it through all that science gobbledygook, just try put it in perspective with things you "know." For example, are you sure that Earth is 5,000 years old? Are you sure that homosexuality is wrong? Are you sure that evolution didn't happen as Darwin and Dawkins described? Are you sure that withholding birth control from teenagers will improve their lives? Are you sure that you live in "the greatest country in the world?" These beliefs have not withstood anywhere near the testing and scrutiny that gravity withstood for hundreds of years, and yet Newton turned out not to be completely right. What if you discover evidence that contradicts the things you are "sure" of? Is that evidence to be discarded because you already know you're right? (“Alice and Wonderland.”) Or is it exciting and invigorating to explore why that evidence contradicts your beliefs? Why are you "sure" in the first place, even? Because you read it in an old book when you were a child?
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| I think the truth here is self-evident. |
You might say that the very same logic could be applied to ideas from science. How do we "know" that there are such things as plate tectonics, global warming, evolution, or the general theory of relativity? And by the same token, how do we "know" for sure that Adam and Eve didn't ride dinosaurs together? Of course the answer, as I've been saying all along, is that we don't know any of these with certainty. We know them to varying degrees of likelihood. We have mountains of evidence supporting plate tectonics, global warming, evolution, and the general theory of relativity. When people try their hardest to tear these theories down under peer review, they have so far not been able to. In other words, we are very likely to be correct about these things. On the other hand, all our evidence about the age of the Earth and various methods of carbon dating point to Kentucky's Creation Museum being wrong about the saddle on the dinosaur. I won't say we know this 100%, but we know it to a very high likelihood.
When people are “sure” of things, it can be because they are afraid of the unknown, rather than excited by possibility of understanding it. But if you are "sure" of things, then you are sure to never replace your wrong ideas with more correct ones, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. This is why science, as a way of thinking, is based on doubt. We do not know anything for sure, we just know things to various degrees of likelihood. We keep an open mind that we may be wrong and we actively search for evidence that we are wrong, because if we find it, that's exciting.
Bruce Lee told a great story about what it's like to be a man who knows things for sure.
A learned man once went to a Zen teacher to inquire about Zen. As the Zen teacher explained, the learned man would frequently interrupt him with remarks like, “Oh, yes, we have that too….” and so on. Finally the Zen teacher stopped talking and began to serve tea to the learned man. He poured the cup full, and then kept pouring until the cup overflowed. “Enough!” the learned man once more interrupted. “No more can go into the cup!” “Indeed, I see,” answered the Zen teacher. “If you do not first empty the cup, how can you taste my cup of tea?”
–as told by Bruce Lee
If you are full of your own ideas, there is no room left for new ones.
--Sirlin
When writers are asked how to write well, they often reflexively talk about their childhood and how they became writers. James Joyce did it, George Orwell did it, and Steven King did it. I thought this was a strange pattern at first, but now I understand it. Writing well is not just about clarity and omitting needless words—it goes all the way down to the core of a person, and so writers tend to tell you about who they are to explain how or why they write as they do.
Many of us had that one teacher. That one horrible teacher who either hated you, or you hated, or both. I thought long about whether I should protect the names of the guilty, but I think we should all be held accountable for our actions, good or bad, and so I’ll tell you that her name was Professor Ellen Cooney of the MIT writing department. I have encountered many people over the years who disagree with me, insult me, or stand in my way, but never before or since Professor Cooney did I actually think to myself, “At least she will probably be dead before me because she’s older.”
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| Mr. Spock will be born in the year 2230 at Shi'Kahr, Vulcan. |
Before we get to her, I’ll tell you about what happened eight years earlier, in 7th grade. I was in Algebra I, an advanced math class for a 7th grader, because my 6th grade teacher said I was good at math. I had no idea I was good at math before that as I wasn’t particularly good at arithmetic. (Just as writing isn’t spelling—math isn’t arithmetic, so I’d be ok in that class.) After the first test in that class, my friend got a perfect score and I didn’t do very well. I thought back to all the episodes of Star Trek I watched every weeknight at midnight during the summer, and about how Mr. Spock would have gotten a perfect score, too. And how could anyone not get a perfect score? You just follow things through to their logical conclusion and you get the right answer. From that day on, I was good at math and I liked it (and science, too). That’s where my head was.
Except for a girl, that is. Her name was Jenny Sime. I said I’d mention the names of the guilty, so it’s only fair that I mention the names of the innocent, too. (Dear Jenny: did you notice the ironic double meaning of the word “innocent,” as applied to you?) Jenny and I loved ironic double meanings. I talked to her on the phone often, for hours. She was there when the wet cement of my personality was hardening, and I can still feel her impression. We each delighted in the use of language, always saying things without saying them. We understood each other, and even if our classmates could have listened in, they would not have grasped our subtlety. I learned to choose my words carefully with Jenny Sime, and to give them just the right shade of meaning. She gave me plenty of practice, too. I don’t know how much of language ability comes from nature and how much comes from nurture, but it’s probably no coincidence that I had so much practice with language at that young age, and that I’m so adept with it now.
I got an A on every essay in every English class all four years of high school. I was not “one of them,” though, the literature kids I mean. I wasn’t into poetry or literature or reading any of that squishy stuff. I was the math and science kid who stopped by English class to get his A, usually causing a lot of trouble and debate. English teachers and I never had much regard for each other, and I knew some of them absolutely cringed at giving me those A’s, but what else could they do? I remember thinking at one point in high school that it would be an ultimate joke of the universe after all my hating of English classes if I would somehow end up a writer instead of a mathematician or physicist. (Note to the universe: nice one.)
By the time I encountered Ellen Cooney, I knew how to write and I knew how to get an A on a writing assignment. I started her class by writing a short story in the style of Jack London (my choice) about a man and his dog. I thought it was pretty good. She hated it. The narrator actively judged the man in the first and last sentence of the story, on purpose. She hated that even more.
I didn’t know exactly why she hated it, and I wasn’t used to that kind of reaction. She kept saying, “It’s not literature! We write literature here.” It took me the whole semester to even get an inkling of what literature meant to her. It seemed mostly to mean, “boring stuff written by the students who I personally like talking to in class.” She said my story was too fake and she wouldn’t even accept it, much less grade it. She said I had to write another story instead.
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| This is what writing feels like most of the time. |
I may have some ability at writing, but writing takes me a very long time. What’s worse is that I can’t compartmentalize it from the rest of my life. When I write something, the actual time I spend typing is between 1% and 5% of the total time investment. The rest is spent day dreaming about it, thinking of how the ideas will go together, about this sentence that should appear halfway through, about things I might need to research first, and so on. And when all that’s sorted out, I still have to wait around for the moment when I’m not tired, hungry, or distracted. Then I have to keep waiting even more until I’m also inspired. I believe at least three of the planets must be aligned, too, or two plus a moon at the least. The point is, writing another story was a major time investment.
I don’t remember what happened with that second story, but I bet she hated it too. On the assignment after that, I wrote a story about a man who took a long journey to find a magic coin, but there was some kind of trick about how the guy who told him about the coin was not who he seemed. Yeah, she hated that one even more. I spent a very time long on that one making sure it was well-written, too. She said it was “genre writing,” not literature, and that it could appear alongside any other fantasy writing on a store shelf and blend right in. (Is that an insult or a compliment?) Apparently literature couldn’t contain magic. It also couldn’t be a mystery, have too much action, or much violence, I would later learn. Meanwhile, we read a story about two girls who lived in an isolated country-side and used to play together as children, then they tried to keep in touch as adults but their lives had diverged too much to make the same kind of connection. Now that was literature, she said. I have to admit, even though it had no apparent point, it did feel real when I read it.
She made me write two stories for every one that anyone else wrote in that class. It was an incredible amount of time and work and she hated all of it. I wondered why she made me do all that if I was so terrible, yet none of the other students had to.
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| I wonder if Mr. Spock ever went to any 3D Chess tournaments. Remember that one where he programmed the computer to play Chess and it beat him? |
For my final assignment in that class, I decided to write something I knew enough about to bring to life. I wrote about a young man who was entering his first Chess tournament and the various personalities he encountered at the event. The antagonist was a tricky jerk who had enough experience with how the events were run to mess with the main character’s mind. They would face each other in the tournament, and I even went through the trouble of coming up with a real chess situation that was interesting in itself, and that illustrated the mental sparring between the characters. And I took great care describing this so it wouldn’t be boring or overly technical for non-Chess players.
Guess what, she hated it. She said I was a failure as a writer and I’m guessing she added that I’d never amount to anything, for cliché’s sake. She said, and I quote, “You are a master of linguistic flourishes, but you ultimately have nothing to say.” Wow! Yes, she really said it, exactly like that. A master of linguistic flourishes…but ultimately with nothing to say. That was over ten years ago and I remember it exactly.
I began to wonder if she was right. She was a close-minded bitch, sure, but what was I trying to say with that story about the guy and his dog or about the magic coin? Maybe nothing. At least the Chess story had some point. The year after that in another writing class, I decided to write a comedy about depression (challenging!) and another story about someone who is trapped in his own superstitions, but ultimately realizes that he controls his own destiny in life. I was at least trying to really say something.
A few years later, I had a lot to say. I had competed in and organized numerous video game tournaments, and I kept seeing the same annoying losing attitudes. The players I hung out with didn’t have these hangups, but the ones on the periphery often had the whole concept of competition wrong. So I wrote Playing to Win, Part 1. I finally had something to say, and I never got so much attention for writing anything until then.
William Strunk, Jr. famously said to omit needless words. I’ve come to look at this in a new light, and when I see writing that doesn’t really say anything, I wish all the words were omitted. There are a lot of mechanics involved with writing well, but it doesn’t amount to much unless you have something to say. Having something to say often goes along with taking a stand on something. Research what you’re interested in, live life and accumulate experiences, stand up for what you think is right and fight against what you think is wrong. It takes a certain kind of person to do that. Writing is often about revealing a truth or exposing a lie, so it’s no wonder that so many writers are the kind of people who don’t care what people think of them—they care about the truth and saying what they have to say. I don’t mean pop novelists either, I mean Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. Even Richard Feynman was a great writer in this regard when he wasn’t busy being one of the world’s leading physicists. He even wrote a book called What Do You Care What Other People Think?
I worked with an amazing graphic designer for a while until he quit and went to another company. In our last conversation, the day before he left, I asked him how he became so good. How is it that he’s so much better at what he does than most others who try to do it? He said in art school, there was one Korean guy in his class who really shouldn’t have been in there. The Korean guy already took these classes in his own country, but his credits didn’t transfer over for some reason. My friend said he always studied the Korean guy, how he made this line, how he made that shadow, whether he added decoration here or not, and so on. He told me that when some students presented their projects, they had some big artistic vision they were trying to communicate, but they always fell so far short. My friend never focused on that—he focused on execution instead. His reasoning was that once he had mastered the mechanics of graphic design, he would then be able to think about what artistic statements he wanted to make. I did not take such a conscious journey as my graphic designer friend, but perhaps the result is the same: first, how to put sentences together properly, then having things to say.
Many years ago, I had some things to say about game design, so I wrote them down and shared them with all of you. Then for years I wrote design documents and pitches for games. I wrote them with great care. Not only can I not show them to you, but for reasons unrelated to game design, almost none of them came to life. During this time, I have not said much to you, and maybe it was for the best. Even the horse Mr. Ed will never speak unless he has something to say.
Now I have some things to say again. A little of it will be about game design, a little about competition, and most of it about how to think and how to create. But those things are for another time, we’re talking about writing now.
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| I'm not sure what she thinks about when she sits down to write, but I'm curious. |
When I sit down to write, I don’t think about Jenny Sime and the nuances of language I practiced with her all those years ago. Caring about exact shades of meaning is second nature now. But I do sometimes think of Professor Cooney as I write. “A master of linguistic flourishes but ultimately with nothing to say?” I’ll show her, I sometimes think. I’ll prove to her that I do have something to say, and that I’ll say it no matter what the consequences or what anyone thinks. I’ve even developed her same contempt for other people’s empty writing. It was hard to take that criticism back then, but I’m almost willing to admit that she was right.
Maybe being fueled by such a negative fire is a bad thing, but being fueled by no fire is far worse. I’ll leave you with this quote from a guy who’s sold a few books.
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair—the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.
—Stephen King
--Sirlin
This is part three of a three-part series on writing:
part 1 | part 2 | part 3
Fortunately, the act of composition, or creation, disciplines the mind; writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.
–Strunk and White, Elements of Style
I’ve found Strunk and White’s quote above to be exactly right. When I sit down to write about an idea I have clear in my head, I often find that it was not so clear after all. The act of putting it into writing—making it tangible—often reveals facets of the idea I hadn’t thought about. Clear writing only comes when your thinking is clear, and the process of trying to write clearly can clear up your thinking. The process of writing sloppily leaves your thinking muddled.
George Orwell was concerned with the link between sloppy writing and sloppy thinking. In his time, he witnessed political decisions so bad that they could only be explained with vague, deceptive, muddled language. Unfortunately, this poor language fit right in with the sorry state of English in general. It’s remarkable how applicable Orwell’s frustrations are to our own time.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
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| I have too much respect for Feynman to give him a jokey picture. |
The physicist Richard Feynman is one of my favorite thinkers, so it is no surprise that the quality of his writing is excellent. He was intellectually curious, a troublemaker, and acutely aware of the link between clear thinking and clear language. I’ll share with you a couple of his anecdotes from his time at Princeton when he visited the philosophy students and the biology students in an effort to see what the world looked like outside of the physics department.
Feynman sat in on a philosophy seminar where the graduate students were discussing a book called Process and Reality by Whitehead. They talked a great deal about the term “essential object” and Feynman took it as a technical term he didn’t know the definition of. Then the professor leading the seminar asked Feynman if he thought an electron is an essential object. Feynman admitted that he didn’t even read the book (he was just sitting in on this one seminar) but said he’d try to answer anyway if someone could answer for him whether a brick is an essential object.
Feynman’s plan was to then bring up the question of whether the inside of a brick is an essential object. We can’t actually see the inside of a brick; when we break a brick open we create new surfaces, but we believe the inside of the brick is still underneath those surfaces. His point was that an electron isn’t so much a concrete thing like a brick, but more of a concept like the “inside of a brick” that helps us understand the world.
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| Physicist Richard Feynman casts a powerful spell, giving all nearby creatures a -3 penalty. |
Feynman didn’t get to make his point. One student said, “A brick as an individual, specific brick. That is what Whitehead meant by an essential object.” Another man said, “No, it isn’t the individual brick that is an essential object; it’s the general character that all bricks have in common—their ‘brickness’—that is the essential object.” Yet another man said, “No, it’s not in the bricks themselves. ‘Essential object’ means the idea in the mind that you get when you think of bricks.”
Feynman couldn’t believe that these philosophers had spent so much time talking about this subject without asking whether something as simple as a brick is an essential object, much less an electron. It’s a safe guess that any papers they would have written about this subject would turn out bloated, fluffy, and vague. You can only write vigorously and concisely if you know exactly what you’re talking about.
After the philosophy incident, Feynman took a biology class for the hell of it, promising he would do all the assignments like any other student, even though he was already a renowned professor of physics. The students laughed hysterically at one of his biology presentations when he talked about “blastospheres” instead of “blastomeres” or some other such thing.
His next presentation was about the nerve impulses in cats. The research paper he was reading often mentioned specific muscles and nerves in the cat, but Feynman had no idea where any of these things were located relative to each other. He then went to the biology library and asked for a map of the cat. “A map of the cat, sir?” the librarian asked, horrified. “You mean a zoological chart!”
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| A map of the cat. |
Feynman started his presentation to the graduate biology students by drawing an outline of the cat on the board and labeling various muscles. The students interrupted him saying, “We know all that!” Feynman replied, “Oh you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you’ve had four years of biology.” He said they wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
While the philosophy students hadn’t defined their language well enough to have clear ideas, the biology students were so caught up in language and jargon that they had not spent enough time going beneath the surface. Language is a tool, but it is also a barrier between people and ideas. Using vague language is like trying to see those ideas through a dirty lens. But spending all your time polishing the lens (quibbling over jargon rather than the underlying concepts) is no good either. You have to actually look through the lens of language at the ideas underneath.
While we look down on muddy writers because they only convey muddy thoughts, there is another, greater enemy. The most dangerous type of writing comes from clear-thinkers who write vaguely to deliberately deceive you. (Note: only deliberately split an infinitive if you really mean it.)
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
–George Orwell
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
It’s ironic that Orwell uses the image of soft snow falling upon the facts to blur them when the name of the current US Press Secretary (as of this writing) is Tony Snow. His job is almost entirely based on deception. I hate to subject you to even a snippet of his language because reading it triggers the sensation of sinking into quicksand, but you’ll have to suffer through it anyway. This is a perfect example of inflated language that is intentionally vague and confusing, designed to anaesthetize a portion of your brain.
Question: Tony, a couple of minutes ago, you said one of the goals in Iraq is to prevent civil war. Can you take a minute and give us the definition that the President is working with? Because he continues to say it’s not at that state yet; lots of analysts do say it’s at that state. What’s the threshold that the administration is working with –
SNOW: I think the general notion is a civil war is when you have people who use the American Civil War or other civil wars as an example, where people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy within [the land].
[...]
SNOW: At this point, you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it’s not clear that they are operating as a unified force. You don’t have a clearly identifiable leader. And so in this particular case, no.
What you do have is a number of different groups – you know, they’ve been described in some cases as rejectionists, in others as terrorists. In many cases, they are not groups that would naturally get along, either, but they severally and together pose a threat to the government.
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| I guess someone has to defend the atrocities of the Bush administration with deceptive language. Might as well be this guy. |
In case you fell asleep somewhere during that quote, make sure you got the part at the end about how rejectionists and terrorists “severally and together pose a threat to the government.” Tony Snow can’t really tell you the truth—that there is a civil war in Iraq—because that’s not politically good for him to say. He’s forced to play the exact kind of word games that Orwell was trying to unmask.
You can write plainly and clearly, if only you honestly try. Even Tony Snow could, if he had any incentive to. Clear writing is not a skill reserved for professional writers, but it is reserved for those who have their thoughts in order in the first place and for those who aren’t trying to hide the truth. As Strunk and White pointed out, if you don’t have your thoughts in order, attempting to write them down is a good way to help you straighten them out. But if your problem is that you need to hide the truth, then you’re certainly not coming to me for writing tips.
If you’d like a reading assignment, I recommend anything by Richard Feynman. As a physicist, he spent most of his time thinking about how the world works, and was always battling against layers of language. Sometimes it was jargon from other fields, sometimes it was trying to communicate with colleagues who spoke Japanese or Spanish, sometimes it was inflated political language trying to hide the truth. But Feynman was ever-vigilant, cutting through these language barriers so he could understand what the underlying idea really was. Once you truly understand something—and only then—you can explain it clearly to others, leaving out all unnecessary words.
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
–Richard Feynman
--Sirlin
This is part two of a three-part series on writing:
part 1 | part 2 | part 3
 |
| Writing is not like this. |
You should care about good writing. My English teachers cared about good writing, and they did a good job imparting their writing sensibilities to me, even though most of them hated me. What they never taught me though, was why I should care about good writing. I figured it was like ballet dancing; dancers strive to be the best they can at their craft for its own sake, as well as to impress the judges—that small group who can actually detect the nuances between two different performances.
That’s all wrong. Writing isn’t for English teachers or judges of essay contests—it’s for everyone. It is our most pervasive tool for communicating ideas. You should care about writing not for its own sake, but because you care about ideas. You care about clear thinking and the clear and honest expression of that thinking. Incidentally, you’ll be lied to your whole life by marketers, politicians, and business people who deliberately avoid clear language, but that’s the subject of my second essay. For now, let’s focus on the simple mechanics of writing plainly and clearly.
I’ll start by trying to pass on some of my sensibilities to you by examining this letter from a school principal, an example from Zinsser’s book On Writing Well:
Dear Parent:
We have established a special phone communication system to provide additional opportunities for parent input. During this year, we will give added emphasis to the goal of communication and utilize a variety of means to accomplish this goal. Your inputs, from the unique position as a parent, will help us to plan and implement an educational plan that meets the needs of your child. An open dialogue, feedback, and sharing of information between parents and teachers will enable us to work with your child in the most effective manner.
Dr. George B. Jones
Principal
What an impersonal, pompous, impenetrable way of saying that Dr. Jones would be delighted if you phoned the school to discuss why little Jimmy did so poorly on his English assignment last week (maybe because he read more letters written by Dr. Jones?). The above letter uses far too many words to convey a simple idea. The reader gets lost and confused and the writer doesn’t seem to know what he’s saying in the first place.
Once again, with my notes in red:
Dear Parent:
We have established (already sounds wooden) a special (is it really special?) phone communication system (glomming three nouns together is a sure sign of vagueness) to provide additional opportunities (“to allow” is shorter) for parent input (input is for computers). During this year, we will give added emphasis (emphasize it if you must, but don’t “give added emphasis”) to the goal of communication and utilize (avoid “utilize” whenever possible) a variety of means (name these “means”) to accomplish this goal (this sentence ended up saying nothing at all). Your inputs (into a computer?), from the unique position as a parent (don’t patronize me), will help us to plan and
implement an educational plan (you’re going to plan a plan, ay?) that meets the needs of your child (I’m dying here, speak like a normal person, please). An open dialogue, feedback, and sharing of information between parents and teachers (you said the same thing three times) will enable (buzzword) us to work with your child in the most effective manner (wordy, verbose, and too many words).
Dr. George B. Jones
Principal
For contrast, here is one of my favorite paragraphs ever, from Strunk & White’s Elements of Style:
Omit needless words
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
Omit needless words! Vigorous writing is concise! Words to live by. If you intend to write anything, you should own a copy of the Elements of Style and reread it every one or two years. It reminds you to say “Charles’s friend” instead of “Charles’ friend” (on page 1, even). It reminds you when to use “which” as opposed to “that.” Most importantly though, it reminds you to write concisely, precisely, and clearly.
All through the Elements of Style, one finds evidences of the author’s deep sympathy for the reader. Will felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get the reader up on dry ground, or at least to throw a rope.
–E.B.White
The excellent writer George Orwell had plenty to say about omitting needless words:
These [bloated phrases] save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, mitigate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render.
Another pervasive writing problem is wandering around a point instead of directly saying it. Don’t say, “Generally speaking, it’s usually a good idea to clean your fireplace once per year.” Instead say, “Clean your fireplace once per year.” Don’t say, “It seems to be the case that our product may have performed more poorly than our competitor’s product under the test conditions.” Say, “Our competitor’s product out-performed ours in tests.” Get to the point, don’t waffle, and mean what you say.
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| She just wrote a great sentence. |
When you know what you want to say and say it, you create vigorous sentences with no fat on them. You strike cleanly like a Samurai beheading his enemy in a single stroke. When you don’t know what you want to say or when you are afraid to really say it, you create serpentine, boring sentences. Don’t pull punches with your writing; say what you have to say honestly.
When you’re looking for words to omit (and you are looking for them, right?), omit adverbs and adjectives first. “He slammed the door, quickly” is redundant. “She smiled at him invitingly” is ham-fisted. “He stupidly studied material that won’t even be on the test” is one word too many—let the reader draw his own conclusions about the man’s stupidity.
Adjectives aren’t guilty as often as adverbs, but they are close behind. The reader doesn’t learn anything useful about the beautiful sunset, the brown pine-cone, or the cute bunny rabbit. These adjectives are just taking up space, not serving any useful purpose. If it was a radioactive pine-cone or a blue bunny rabbit, those adjectives would pull their weight.
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| The Mistress *offers* the forbidden fruit. Don't diminish her power by saying that the fruit was offered by her (passive voice). |
Let nouns and verbs do most of your work and use adverbs and adjectives sparingly. Also make sure to use the active voice rather than the passive voice. “The house was painted by Joe” is awkward and wordy compared to “Joe painted the house.” In the second case, Joe took an action: he painted the house. In the first case, the house was acted on by a force named Joe. “It was believed by the children that Santa came through the chimney” is a maddening way of saying, “The children believed Santa came through the chimney.” With the active voice, a noun takes action. In the passive voice, something is acted upon by some other thing in a vague, boring-sounding way with too many words.
Here is more of George Orwell’s contempt for pretentious language:
In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.
[Dear George Orwell: you wrote a criticism of the passive voice in the passive voice.—Sirlin]
I think of Orwell’s comments every time I’m at the airport and hear that grating recorded voice caution me against accepting any items or luggage from individuals I don’t know. Individuals is not a formal way of saying people; it’s a sad attempt to sound like the voice of authority. “We the people of the United States,” was a sufficient start for the US Constitution, rather than “We the individuals.” Writer Mike Judge pokes fun at this same word in the movie Idiocracy where the words people, suspect, and prisoner are all replaced with the more pretentious particular individual.
“Okay, sir, this is to figure out what your aptitude’s good at and get you a jail job while you’re being a particular individual in jail.”
–A cop in the movie Idiocracy
Orwell had further contempt for the kind of maddening writing that writes itself without any need for human thought. This auto-pilot prose is especially common when people are trying to sound important or formal. It ends up sounding like they are either full of themselves or trying to hide something in the sea of unnecessary words.
Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.
When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.
At the risk of over-quoting (too late), I feel impelled to include this gem of Orwell’s:
By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: ‘[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write — feels, presumably, that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.
Remember that all this talk about writing clearly and vigorously isn’t so English teachers will be impressed. It’s because you want to express your ideas clearly. If you can’t express your ideas clearly, you might not have clear ideas in the first place. Vague writing leads to vague thinking and usually comes from vague thinking. It is better to be clear and wrong than to cloak your ideas with impenetrable or overly-fancy language.
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| Sometimes people won't like what you have to say. Say it straight anyway. |
The first step in improving your writing is to internalize the sensibilities I’ve been talking about. Ask yourself what Strunk and White would say about your fluffy sentences. Ask what Orwell would think of your hackneyed phrases. Ask what Sirlin would think when you pull your punches because you’re afraid someone might be offended, rather than honestly saying what you need to say.
[Dear Sirlin: You overuse the phrase pull your punches. Think of something original –George Orwell]
I’ll leave you with this short list of guidelines from Orwell. You could certainly do worse than these:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always 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.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
--Sirlin
This is part one of a three-part series on writing:
part 1 | part 2 | part 3
This article was originally printed on gamasutra.com.
Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution says that Congress has the power:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
Back in 1790, the patent examiners who considered each application were the secretary of state, the secretary of war, and the attorney general. Receiving a patent was a notable honor, reserved for important inventions.
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| Thomas Jefferson has been reading up about our mangled patent system and he's not happy. |
In 1793, Thomas Jefferson defined the criteria to patent as
Any new and useful art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter and any new and useful improvement on any art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter.
Today, we say for an idea to be patentable, it must be:
Patents made it possible for great inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers, and Thomas Edison to invest their sweat and genius into expensive new creations. With a patent, an inventor has the government’s guarantee that he can sell his innovation for a limited time without competitors being able to copy the product. After all, why spend money on R&D for new, innovative products if knock-off companies can instantly copy them?
“The patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.”
—Abraham Lincoln
And then something happened. I don’t know exactly when, but patents — especially software patents — have gone off the rails. It took 46 years to reach the 10,000th American patent, but today, there are more than 10,000 patents granted every three weeks. Perhaps patents could be given out as Cracker Jack prizes—after all, the US Patent and Trademark Office already approves more patents per year than boxes of Cracker Jacks sold at Dodger Stadium each year.
A notable change happened in 1991, when the U.S. patent office was no longer funded by the general tax fund and had to start sustaining itself entirely on fees from “customers.” This framed poster at the patent office’s headquarters gives insight into the office’s mentality:
Our Patent Mission:
To Help Our Customer
