John G Maguire comes from a family of news reporters and writers. His father, the late John Maguire, wrote for the Albany New York Times Union. His brother Gregory Maguire is a novelist whose work includes the book Wicked from which a hit musical has been made. John Maguire has been a professional writer all his life. He began in college as a physics major, but switched before graduation to study in English literature. He then pursued a career as a newspaper science writer. He's covered science news for three daily newspapers in the US, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, and he's written several books. He's also taught writing for many years at Boston area colleges. When John was teaching at the Berkley College of Music, he invented a new approach to help sometimes confused and worried students to write well, it's called the Readability Method. It was published by the Education Department of Newsweek Magazine. His latest version of this approach is described in his College Writing Guide. John has a Bachelors and a Master of Fine Arts degree in English. He currently has an editing business and teaches writing at Middlesex Community College in Bedford Massachusetts. Let's welcome John Maguire.
John, you wrote a wonderful article for the Atlantic, The secret to good writing. It's about objects, not ideas. This is pretty counter-intuitive for a lot of people. I mean, most of us have been brought up to think that writing is all about the good ideas. So, can you explain what you meant?
Yes Barbara, it does seem strange for a writing teacher to say, think about objects more than you're thinking about ideas. Of course, it is important to write about ideas. But my point in that article was to say, it's easy to express ideas in terms of objects and what a good writer thinks about is what objects can I use to express my ideas. It's not bad to use idea words, but it's easy to get overrun with idea words and use too many of them. You can become over-abstract, and when you're writing becomes over-abstract and there were too many -ion words or -tion words in a given passage, it becomes very hard for the reader to know what's going on, and in fact the writer often gets confused about what he or she is saying. When things become very abstract, they become very blurry and both the reader and the writer has to spend a lot of time figuring out what the heck is being said. The point I wanted to make is that all ideas are related to objects. Let me show you a diagram. Here on a white board is what we call the ladder of abstractions. This is a ladder that ruins from low to high, and at the top end of the ladder are abstract ideas, let's say the idea of nutrition. Now, an abstract idea is a non-physical thing that you cannot touch. At the bottom of the ladder are connected to the word nutrition, actual things like apples, oranges, slices of bread, hamburger sandwiches. Any idea that you're trying to get across, let us say you are writing about good nutrition for pregnant women, can be communicated in terms of things. The principle that writers follow is when you're writing about ideas, go down the ladder to the world of things, and make sure you write with enough things. So, in our course, we suggest to learners that they should alternate between sort of close in focus in a more diffuse approach to learning in order to learn something difficult.
So, toggling between a tight attention and a loose attention seems to really work, you've told me that professional writers seem to do the same sort of switching. Can you tell us how a writer switches between focused and relaxed thinking?
Any creative person switches from one mode to another frequently. Maybe the best example of this is painters. The classic cliche image of a painter is somebody who's up close to the canvas putting a little dot of paint on and then he backs up halfway across the room, takes a look at what the effect has been of that dot of paint, thinks about it, weighs it, goes back in and put some more dots of paint on the painting. The shifting of focus from up-close too far back is obvious in the world of a painter. You have spoken about how important that is in the world of math and how when you are learning equations, it's a good idea to come in close and really master. What you need to know when sometimes it's a good idea to pull back in order to understand the problems that you have to solve with math. Writers switch focus many different ways. Sometimes you will turn from what you're trying to say and you'll talk to your friends and ask your friends what they know about the subject, that broadens out the discussion of what you're trying to say. Sometimes you will shift and do a little bit of reading. Maybe go on Wikipedia for five minutes to look up some material that relates to what you're talking about. Sometimes you will shift from writing on a computer to writing longhand. I sometimes shift from writing while sitting down to writing while standing up, and of course there's the tried and true, let's take a walk around the block. Charles Dickens did it and if he did it, it's good enough for me and for college writers, I would say. I see.
So, beyond concrete nouns or things, what other advice do you give your students about what they should put into their writing?
Barbara, writing well is a matter of choosing a good style, and style is basically the choice of what kind of words you're going to write with, what parameters are you going to have control over. So, beyond putting in things, which is very important, I tell my students, put in active verbs, these are verbs that makes something happen on the page. I also tell them to put in people. How do you put people into a piece of writing? You name them. Full name or nickname, names of people, put them into your writing. Use some active verbs, make things happen on the page. Other pieces of advice I suggest are, use short words when you can instead of long ones, and use short sentences. It's often important especially for beginning writers not to let their sentences get out of control too long. When in doubt, write it short.
Have you ever taught students for whom English was their second language? What can you tell a student has learned to write outside an English-speaking country?
Yes, I have taught people to write who were ESL speakers. One of the more interesting friends I made recently was a young man named Saktai, I taught him last semester in the city of Lowell. The first papers he turned in were really pretty terrible. I asked him why he wrote that way and he told me he had been taught to write that way by his teacher back in, I think it was Vietnam. I said, you are out of control with what you're saying here, you have to be simpler. He told me that his teacher had told him make sure you use your long words and show people that you're educated, that's the way to write. I said to him, Saktai, that's not the way we do it in English. In English, we really favor the plain style which means clear and simple. So, I'm going to give you some advice. Young man, I said, trying to get his attention, I want you to stop trying to be impressive and just start trying to be clear. I had to say it a couple of times and I told him this, I said, once you are clear, then you're going to be impressive. So, stop trying to be impressive, just work on being completely clear. About four weeks later, his writing had improved quite a bit and he came to me and said, that the advice that I've given him to stop trying to be impressive and just to be clear had really worked. Nobody had ever told him that before, he really needed to hear it. Now, he understood what he had to do and he felt much more powerful as a writer. Instead of trying to do two things at once, which was to be clear and to be impressive, he just tried to be clear. As we both know, when you read something that is really clear, after you finish reading it, you say, wow, that was impressive, and that's the way it works, clarity first. What a great point.
It is funny when I read research papers, I can always tell a difference between the second tier, the lower caliber, research papers and the upper tier research papers because the lower caliber ones are often fuzzy, they use a lot of big words, they're hard to read, they're hard to understand. But, the ones that really are top notch, they're often so simple and so elegantly written, and you might say, well, that's not academic writing because it's too elegant. But, that's actually the very best of writing in any discipline. So, let me ask you about this, some teachers tell students not to edit as they write because they think it's a bad idea. How do you feel about that? I agree with those coaches who say, separate the writing from the editing. Writing is a matter of getting things down on the paper or on the screen rapidly. You want to maintain rapid forward progress. You don't want to get stuck and lose your momentum. Editing is a process of being judgmental, deciding whether things are working. If you're not a very good writer if you're a beginning writer, it's possible to produce a bad sentence and then be totally stymied about how to fix it, and spend minutes puzzling over something stupid that you've written. Far better to choose to maintain your momentum roll forward, you want to get the conveyor belt of ideas rolling. After lots of material has come out of your idea factory and your writing factory, then you can change gears and edit.
I have another idea about editing which is that it's often useful to print out a draft and edit on paper. I do that. I think a great many professional writers will print out a draft, edit it on paper and then enter their edits back into the computer version of the text. That sounds like great advice I know for me when I'm writing and I find myself really getting stuck, it's generally because I'm starting to edit while I'm writing, and so often I'll find that if I just let go and let it come out, later on mostly I find it's not as bad as I thought when I was writing it. Because usually when it comes out I'm thinking, oh it's terrible but it comes out and I do a little tweaking and it's not too bad.
So, suppose a student really wants to write better, is there some special technique of reading that will help improve your writing?
Well, read closely the people you admire. If you're writing short stories, read the short stories you admire. But if you're writing scientific papers or term papers things to be published in journals, read the writers whom you admire. If there is somebody who is great in your field and he has produced very interesting papers that read well, your job is to study what he or she did. I would recommend looking closely at the openings of papers that you like, perhaps copying the opening paragraph down longhand. I would also recommend underlining words that he uses that you might not use but you can consider using. I would recommend you study your writer's sentence length. How long are his sentences? What is the pattern of long sentences and short sentences that your a hero uses? I would recommend looking for a sentence that he wrote that you would think you could never write because it's not in your nature, and then go and write that sentence out long end a couple of times. Study what you admire.
So what if you're writing a paper on a scientific topic which focuses around something like molecules. They're too small to be dropped on your foot. How can you make that somehow more concrete? Good writers are always thinking of their readers. A good writer is thinking, how's my reader going to understand this? A good writer is thinking, what is my reader going to see in his head when he reads my words? So this can produce a problem if you're writing on a scientific topic say about molecules. After all molecules are too small to be dropped on your foot. There's no excuse to stop thinking physically. You can if you're writing about a simple molecule like the molecule of water. You can make a visual metaphor, a grapefruit with two lemons attached to it can stand for H_2O, or you can go looking for the physical objects that are related to the chemical research you're writing about. You can put in as appropriate test tubes or bunsen burners or beakers or spectrophotometers or the laboratory bench. It's a skill to go looking for physical correlates to your topic. But it's a skill that you can get good at pretty quick, and it pays off because you always want to give the reader something to see. I think that's very helpful advice. So, tell me now. What's more important, the words or the ideas? As far as a writer is concerned, there are no ideas outside of the realm of words. Now I will grant you there are wordless intuitions and little images you might get, there are diagrams you can put on a piece of paper to capture an idea. But when it comes to being a writer, your job is to make sure everything gets down in words. So if you would ask me which is more important in the paper the words or the ideas? I say it's the words. I'd say without the right words in the right order, you do not have any ideas to work with. As a writer if you don't have it down in a sentence, you don't have an idea.
Very good advice. So, some coaches talk about the problem of having too little to say. What if a student writer discovers that he or she has too little to say, what or how can she or he deal with that?
I think a student who has "too little to say" is usually a student whose imagination is too narrow. Often it's a student who has decided to write about an abstract topic and has just kept focusing on the abstraction. When a student seems to be devoid of ideas, when a writer is devoid of ideas, he or she should slow down and brainstorm wildly. Go to a piece of paper and write down everything you know about the topic, draw diagrams on the piece of paper, draw idea maps or mind maps, make lists of objects, shift the focus in other words. A student who doesn't have enough to say, has often gotten too tense in trying to say something important. It's a good idea to stop trying to say something important than just try to say something simple and clear. You can find your way to be simple and clear by talking with a friend or by taking a walk as I said. Another thing to do is to write some questions down for yourself. You don't have to be an expert on what you're writing about. You just have to be clear. Write down what puzzles you, write down what confuses you. I am confused about X, I am puzzled about how X relates to Y. Write these things down, cover several pieces of paper with ideas and sketches. It can even look like this. Tape them together, cover a bunch of paper with notes, tape them together, set them down on your desk and go out for a half an hours walk. When you come back, start again. You will have more ideas.
I like that approach. So do you have any final takeaways or advice for writing students. What's one thing a student writer can do to write better?
I'll give you a couple of things a writer can do to make things better. In terms of readability, I would suggest using short sentences. A writer ought to go into this paper and if he has written any really long sentences, ask himself if these sentences have to be this long and replace them with shorter sentences. In terms of completeness, a writer can do two things. It's asking himself a couple of questions. The first one is, what am I trying to say? Did I say it clearly? The second one is, what must I not leave out? The very last question which is, what must I make sure not to leave out? It's very useful. I use it myself all the time as I get to the end of the draft and then ask myself, did I cover everything in particular? Is there anything I must make sure not to leave out? Often it turns out I have left out something important. So, those are my final words on this. I think that's a helpful approach even for me. So I just want to emphasize how important I think good writing actually is to the learning process. I often find myself that I really learn something in the best way when I attempt to write about it. So, I think this is why insight from people like you who've really worked to understand the writing process here is your book, College Writing Guide, it's very very helpful. So here you can see clearly now, and so I just very much appreciate John your interview with me here today and thank you we'll see you on the flip side.
John G Maguire出身于一个新闻记者和作家的家庭。他的父亲，已故的John Maguire，曾为纽约奥尔巴尼时报联盟撰写文章。他的兄弟Gregory Maguire是一位小说家，其作品包括已被改编成热门音乐剧的书《恶作剧》。John Maguire一生都是职业作家。他大学时主修物理，但在毕业前转而学习英国文学。之后，他追求了报纸科学写作的职业生涯。他为美国三家日报报道科学新闻，曾被提名普利策新闻奖，并写了几本书。他还在波士顿地区的学院教授写作多年。当John在伯克利音乐学院教书时，他发明了一种帮助有时困惑和担忧的学生写好文章的新方法，称为可读性方法。该方法由《新闻周刊》杂志的教育部门出版。他这种方法的最新版本在他的《大学写作指南》中有所描述。John拥有英国文学学士和艺术硕士学位。他目前经营一家编辑公司，并在马萨诸塞州贝德福德的米德尔塞克斯社区学院教授写作。让我们欢迎John Maguire。
John，你为《大西洋月刊》写了一篇精彩的文章，《好写作的秘密》。它是关于物体，而不是想法。这对很多人来说相当违反直觉。我的意思是，我们大多数人从小就被教育认为写作全是关于好点子。那么，你能解释一下你的意思吗？
是的，Barbara，对于一个写作老师来说，说“比起思考想法，更多地思考物体”似乎很奇怪。当然，写关于想法的内容很重要。但我在那篇文章中的观点是，用物体来表达想法很容易，而一个好的作家考虑的是我能用什么物体来表达我的想法。使用观念词汇并不是坏事，但很容易被观念词汇淹没，使用太多这样的词。你可能会过于抽象化，当你的写作变得过于抽象，并且在一个段落中有太多的-ion或-tion词汇时，读者很难知道发生了什么，实际上作者自己也常常对他或她在说什么感到困惑。当事情变得非常抽象时，它们就变得非常模糊，读者和作者都必须花很多时间弄清楚到底在说什么。我想说的是，所有的想法都与物体有关。让我给你看一个图表。这里在一个白板上是我们所说的抽象阶梯。这是一个从低到高的阶梯，在阶梯的顶端是抽象的想法，比如说营养的概念。现在，一个抽象的想法是一个你不能触摸的非物质的东西。在阶梯的底部与营养这个词相连的是实际的东西，比如苹果、橙子、面包片、汉堡包三明治。你想要传达的任何想法，比如说你在写关于孕妇良好营养的文章，都可以用事物来传达。作家遵循的原则是，当你在写关于想法的时候，要下到事物的世界，并确保你用足够的东西来写作。所以，在我们的课程中，我们建议学习者应该交替使用紧密聚焦和更扩散的方法来学习难以掌握的东西。
所以，在紧密关注和松散关注之间切换似乎确实有效，你告诉我专业作家似乎也做同样的切换。你能告诉我们作家如何在专注和放松的思维之间切换吗？
任何有创造力的人都会频繁地从一个模式切换到另一个模式。也许这方面的最佳例子是画家。关于画家的经典老套形象就是，有人紧贴画布，点上一点颜料，然后他退后到房间的另一边，看看那点颜料的效果如何，思考它，权衡它，再回去在画上加更多的点。从近到远的焦点转换在画家的世界里是显而易见的。你谈到了这在数学世界里有多么重要，以及当你在学习方程式时，靠近并真正掌握它是好主意。你需要知道的是，有时为了理解你必须用数学解决的问题，退后一步是个好主意。作家们以多种不同的方式切换焦点。有时你会从你试图表达的内容转向，和朋友聊天，询问朋友对这个话题了解多少，这样可以扩展你试图表达内容的讨论范围。有时你会转换一下，阅读一点东西。也许上维基百科五分钟，查找一些与你正在谈论的内容相关的材料。有时你会从在电脑上写作转换为手写。我有时会从坐着写作转换为站着写作，当然还有那个经过实践检验的方法，我们绕街区走一圈。查尔斯·狄更斯就是这么做的，如果他这么做了，对我来说已经足够好了，对于大学作家来说，我会这么说。我明白了。
那么，除了具体的名词或事物之外，你还会给你的学生什么建议，让他们知道应该把什么放入他们的写作中呢？
芭芭拉，写得好是一种选择良好风格的问题，而风格基本上是你将用什么样的词来写作的选择，你将控制哪些参数。所以，除了加入东西（这非常重要），我告诉我的学生，加入主动动词，这些动词会在页面上产生某些事情。我还告诉他们要加入人物。你怎么把人物放进一篇作品中呢？给他们命名。全名或昵称，人的名字，把他们放进你的写作中。使用一些主动动词，让事情发生在页面上。我建议的其他建议包括，尽可能使用短单词而不是长单词，使用短句子。尤其对于初学者来说，不要让句子失控变得太长是很重要的。当有疑问时，写简短些。
你有没有教过那些英语是第二语言的学生？你能告诉一个在非英语国家学会写作的学生什么吗？
是的，我教过那些是ESL（英语作为第二语言）说话者的人写作。我最近结交的一个比较有趣的朋友是一个叫萨克泰的年轻人，我上个学期在洛厄尔市教过他。他交上来的第一篇论文真的很糟糕。我问他为什么这样写，他告诉我他在越南的老师教他这样写。我说，你在这里说的话失控了，你必须简化。他告诉我他的老师告诉他确保使用你的长单词，向人们展示你是受过教育的，这就是写作的方式。我对他说，萨克泰，这不是我们在英语中的做法。在英语中，我们真的更喜欢简洁的风格，意味着清晰和简单。所以，我要给你一些建议。年轻人，我说，试图引起他的注意，我想让你停止试图给人留下深刻印象，只是开始尝试清晰。我不得不重复几次，并且我告诉他这一点，我说，一旦你清晰了，那么你就会给人留下深刻印象。所以，停止试图给人留下深刻印象，只是努力做到完全清晰。大约四周后，他的写作有了相当大的改进，他来找我说，我给他的建议停止试图给人留下深刻印象，只是清晰起来真的很有效。以前从来没有人告诉过他这一点，他真的需要听到它。现在，他明白了他必须做什么，他感到自己作为一个作家更有力量了。他不是试图同时做两件事，既要清晰又要给人留下深刻印象，他只是试图清晰。正如我们都知道的，当你读到某件真正清晰的东西时，你读完后会说，哇，那真是令人印象深刻，这就是它的工作原理，首先是清晰。多么棒的观点。
当我阅读研究论文时，我总是能分辨出二流的、低水平的研究论文和一流的研究论文之间的差异，因为低水平的论文通常含糊不清，他们使用很多大词，很难读懂，很难理解。但是，那些真正一流的论文通常非常简单，写得非常优雅，你可能会说，那不是学术写作，因为它太优雅了。但实际上，这才是任何学科中最好的写作。那么，让我问你这个问题，有些老师告诉学生写作时不要编辑，因为他们认为这是个坏主意。你对此怎么看？我同意那些教练的说法，要把写作和编辑分开。写作是将事情迅速放在纸上或屏幕上的过程。你想要保持快速向前的进展。你不想被困住并失去动力。编辑是一个判断过程，决定事情是否有效。如果你不是一个非常好的作家，或者你是一个初学者，可能会写出一个糟糕的句子，然后完全不知所措，不知道如何修复它，并且花费几分钟时间对你写的愚蠢的东西感到困惑。远不如选择保持你的动力向前滚动，你想要让想法的传送带滚动起来。在你的想法工厂和写作工厂产出了大量材料之后，然后你可以换挡并编辑。
我有一个关于编辑的想法，那就是打印出来草稿然后在纸上进行编辑通常是很有帮助的。我就是这么做的。我认为很多专业作家都会打印出草稿，在纸上编辑后再将修改输入到电脑文档中。听起来是个不错的建议。我知道对我来说，当我写作时发现自己真的陷入困境，通常是因为我开始边写边编辑，所以经常发现如果我放开手脚，让文字自然流淌，之后大多数情况下我发现其实没有我在写的时候想的那么糟糕。因为通常当文字出来后我会想，哦，这太糟糕了，但出来后我做一点小调整，就没那么糟了。
那么，假设一个学生真的很想写得更好，有没有什么特别的阅读技巧可以帮助提高写作水平？
嗯，仔细阅读你所钦佩的人的作品。如果你在写短篇小说，就读你钦佩的短篇小说。但是如果你写的是科学论文或者要发表在期刊上的学期论文，就读你所钦佩的作家的文章。如果有人在你的领域做得很好，并且他写出了读起来很有趣的优秀论文，你的任务就是研究他或她是如何做到的。我建议你仔细观察你喜欢的论文的开头，或许用手写复制下开篇段落。我还建议你划下作者使用的但你可能会忽略的词汇。我建议你研究作家的句子长度。他的句子有多长？你的偶像使用长短句的模式是怎样的？我建议你找出一句你认为永远也写不出的句子，因为它不符合你的天性，然后去把它写下几次。研究你所钦佩的。
那么如果你正在写一篇关于科学的论文，主题围绕像分子这样的东西。它们太小了，甚至无法掉在你的脚上。你怎样才能使它更具体一些呢？好的作家总是考虑到读者。一个好作家会思考，我的读者会如何理解这个？一个好作家会想，我的读者在读到我的文字时脑海里会出现什么？所以如果你在写科学主题，比如说分子，这可能会产生问题。毕竟分子太小了，无法掉在你的脚上。但没有借口停止物理思考。如果你在写水分子这样的简单分子，你可以用视觉隐喻，一个葡萄柚加上两个柠檬可以代表H2O，或者你可以寻找与你所研究的化学相关的物理对象。你可以适当地加入试管、本生灯、烧杯、分光光度计或实验室工作台。寻找与你的主题相关的物理对应物是一项技能。但这是你可以很快掌握的技能，而且它会带来回报，因为你总是想给读者一些可视的东西。我认为这是一个很好的建议。那么现在告诉我。哪个更重要，词语还是想法？就作家而言，除了词语领域之外没有其他的想法。现在我承认你有无言的直觉和你可能得到的小图像，你可以在一张纸上画出图表来捕捉一个想法。但当涉及到成为一个作家时，你的工作是确保一切都用词语表达出来。所以如果你问我在论文中哪个更重要，词语还是想法？我说是词语。我会说，没有正确的词语以正确的顺序排列，你就没有可以用来工作的想法。作为一个作家，如果你没有把它写成句子，你就没有想法。
非常好的建议。所以，一些教练谈到了说得太少的问题。如果一个学生作家发现自己说得太少，他或她该如何处理？
我认为一个“说不出什么”的学生通常是想象力太狭窄的学生。往往是那些决定了写一个抽象主题并且一直专注于抽象概念的学生。当一个学生似乎缺乏想法时，当一个作家缺乏想法时，他或她应该放慢速度，疯狂地进行头脑风暴。找一张纸，写下你所知道的关于这个话题的一切，画图，绘制想法地图或心智地图，列出对象清单，换句话说就是转移焦点。一个说得不够多的学生，往往是在试图说出重要的事情时变得太紧张。停下来尝试说出重要的事情是个好主意，不如试着说出一些简单明了的事情。你可以通过和朋友聊天或者散步来找到简单明了的方式，就像我说的。另一件事是为自己写下一些问题。你不必是你所写的东西的专家。你只需要清晰。写下让你困惑的东西，写下让你迷惑的东西。我对X感到困惑，我对X与Y的关系感到困惑。把这些写下来，用几张纸覆盖想法和草图。甚至可以是这样的。把它们粘在一起，用便条纸覆盖一堆纸张，把它们粘在一起，放在桌子上，出去散半小时的步。当你回来时，重新开始。你会有更多的想法。
我喜欢这种方法。那么你有没有最后的总结或者对写作学生的建议。学生作家能做些什么来写得更好？
我会给你一些作家可以做的几件事情来改善情况。在可读性方面，我建议使用短句子。一个作家应该审视这篇论文，如果他写了任何非常长的句子，问自己这些句子是否必须这么长，并用更短的句子替换它们。在完整性方面，作家可以做两件事。那就是问自己几个问题。第一个是，我想说什么？我说清楚了么？第二个是，我必须不遗漏什么？最后一个问题是，我必须确保不遗漏什么？这非常有用。我自己一直在使用它，当我完成草稿时，然后问自己，我是否涵盖了所有内容？有没有什么我必须确保不遗漏的？通常结果是我遗漏了一些重要的东西。所以，这些是我的最后的话。我认为这是一个有帮助的方法，即使对我也是如此。所以我只想强调我认为良好的写作实际上对学习过程是多么重要。我经常发现自己当我尝试写关于它的东西时，我真的以最好的方式学到了一些东西。所以，我认为这就是为什么像你们这样真正努力理解写作过程的人的洞察力如此重要。这是你的书《大学写作指南》，它非常非常有帮助。现在你可以清楚地看到，我非常感激约翰今天接受我的采访，谢谢你，我们下期节目再见。
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