Tone Up Your Writing with Helen Sword of The Writer’s Diet The Life Story Coach

The Writer's Diet—a book and companion website—won't spiff up your prose for you, but it will point you toward the flaws that can make writing dull and stodgy.
Helen Sword wrote the book and developed the Writer's Diet Test after noting the uneven quality of writing by students and academicians. A professor with a PhD from Princeton in Comparative Literature, she takes aim at zombie nouns, prepositional podge, waste words, and more.
This brief writer's guide is a favorite of mine. Listen to this episode to learn about five common trouble spots in writing, how to spot them in your own prose, and what you can do to fix them.
Not everyone has a zombie video to their credit! Links and Stuff (scroll down for a transcript of our interview) HelenSword.com
The Writer's Diet website
Books by Helen Sword:
The Writer's Diet
Air & Light & Time & Space
Stylish Academic Writing
 
Other books mentioned: Joseph F. Williams' Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace
William Zinsser's On Writing Well
 
Transcript of our interview with Helen Sword Amy:                         00:09         I love reading writing guides and you have such an interesting take on what you've done. But first, could you start by telling the listeners a little bit about your background and why you've decided to make a specialty out of helping people improve their writing?
Helen Sword:   00:25         Sure. Well, I started out as a literary scholar. I have a PhD in comparative literature, taught in an English department for long time and still do a little bit. But at some point I moved into working in faculty development, which is more working with academics to try to improve their teaching and that meant that I started reading research also in, in higher education as well as in literary studies. And I think that made me really aware of the different kinds of writing styles that people use in these different academic disciplines. And it made me really start thinking about why white people didn't communicate more clearly. I guess I'm at the same time. I was also, as always teaching students, reading colleagues work, doing my own writing. And so my first book on, on writing the writer's style really kind of came out of that work.
Helen Sword:   01:26         I was just trying to figure out how to help people write better sentences, was what it came down to. And one of the things that I observed was that as people spent longer in school, particularly like advanced undergraduates and people just starting Grad school, the writing often got worse rather than better, you know, there's sentences got longer and longer and the words got more and more sort of jargon-y. They’re praised for doing that because that is kind of the secret handshake into the discipline in some instances. And so I was just trying to show that you can say the same things often in about 60 percent of the words. I'm not the first person who has done this, but with the writer's style that I developed a particular algorithm to help people see if, as I put it, they're writing is sloppy or fit.
Helen Sword:   02:22         Or you could just say kind of soggy, sharp, you know, different ways of different metaphors you could use on that and then really give some quite clear principles, not rules but principles for writing, clearer, sharper, more energetic sentences. And then that work led me to looking more broadly at academic writing, research, writing and all the different disciplines and John was that people write in. So that led to my book Stylish Academic Writing, where I just trying to distill the principles used by the best writers to try to kind of jolly along those who had fallen into the, into this trap of the long winded boggy prose. Show them how to get out of that by telling stories, by having introductions that make people actually want to keep reading, writing stronger sentences, all that sort of thing. And t