Editor’s note: We’re resurfacing this article to remember Harold Evans after his death on Sept. 23. It was originally published on Dec. 27, 2018.
Early in my career, I had the chance to work with Harold Evans, author of the new writing book “Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters.”
In 2004, he became Sir Harold Evans. Of all the knights in the world, he is the one I am honored to have met — although I would dump him in a Liverpool second for either Sir Paul McCartney or Sir Ringo Starr. (Full disclosure: We share a publisher, Little Brown, and he quotes me briefly in “Do I Make Myself Clear?”.)
This is a sturdy book on good writing. (I will share some of its most helpful and cogent points.) But I will also admit to recommending it primarily for the credentials of the author.
Try these out, from the dust jacket: “Sir Harold Evans, former editor of The Sunday Times and the Times of London, is a British-born writer and broadcaster, and author of several bestselling histories of America. He holds the British Gold Award for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism. In 2001, his peers voted him the all-time greatest British newspaper editor, and in 2004 he was knighted.” (If there is a similar recognition for best British and American magazine editor of all time, I would be inclined to give it to Harry’s spouse Tina Brown.)
Although “Do I Make Myself Clear?” serves as a clever title, transforming a colloquial parental rebuke into a question all writers should ask themselves, it is the subtitle that grabs me by the purpose: “Why Writing Well Matters.” It matters, of course, for many reasons, some literary (people love stories), some financial (people buy books) and for some that stand much higher. From his earliest days as a journalist, Evans has understood the marriage of craft with mission. In the late 1970s, he published guides about the various disciplines within journalism: writing, visual journalism, ethics and leadership.
When I first met him, in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he was writing a book about his experiences at the Times of London, Harold Evans was already famous in journalism circles for one of the most daring acts of reporting and editing in the history of Great Britain, if not the world.
I remember growing up in New York and sneaking peeks at the tabloid newspapers, with bizarre stories and photos about “babies born with seal flippers.” It wasn’t fiction. Babies were being born with deformities caused by a controversial drug called thalidomide, used to treat pregnant women with morning sickness.
This is from The Guardian:
“It was Harold Evans’ finest hour. Maybe it was British journalism’s finest hour, too. Under this tough, smart and persistent editor, the Sunday Times ran its legendary campaign in the late ’60s and early ’70s to uncover the truth about thalidomide, the morning sickness drug given 10 years previously to pregnant women, causing their children to be born with malformed limbs. Evans also battled to get proper compensation for the victims’ families. He was up against an army of lawyers deployed by the Distillers group, which owned the drug, enforcing endless injunctions and pursuing bullyboy tactics with the plaintiff families. Evans also faced a smug and complacent political class.”
Not only did Evans take on the drug companies and their enablers in government, but he took on the British legal system, which put strict limits on what journalists could publish about an ongoing civil trial. Sometimes verdicts took years to reach. Evans, as they say, took it to a higher court, winning the fight and compensation for the victims from the European Court of Human Rights. As a result, the British Government loosened the restrictions on reporting civil cases.
As I write this, Harold Evans is 90, still writing well and showing why it matters.
And now for his book.
The scope of the work is unusual in that it covers a wide range of writing and language topics, from usage to storytelling. Other books do this as well, of course, but in bringing the great editor’s eye to any text, Evans seems incapable of not noticing important things, be they great or small. Chapter topics include: the use and abuse of writing formulas, how to write a good sentence, tools for making yourself clear, making every word count, attending to the meaning of words, and telling stories in long and short forms.
I have chosen one chapter to focus on, both for its kaleidoscopic title, and for its identification of a writing problem that seems universal and without solution, like red ants at a Florida picnic. The title is: “Please Don’t Feed the Zombies, Flesh-Eaters, and Pleonasms.” The first two are metaphors for a kind of bad writing, the last a name for an old rhetorical device worth ignoring. Here is Evans on the literary meaning of eating flesh:
“You can’t see these creatures without an electron microscope that magnifies them millions of times — but they are glorying in the name Zoophagus insidians. I want you to retain the image in your mind as a metaphor for bad things in your prose you barely notice….[Flesh-eaters] are unnecessary words, pompous phrases and prepositional parasites that eat space and reduce the muscularity of your writing — and of writing at the highest level of public affairs.”
This is where things get interesting — and particularly useful.
“In the following chart,” he writes, “I indict one-hundred-plus common flesh-eaters to avoid. Context matters. There may be occasions where they are tolerable, but many are verbose, and the preferred alternatives are crisper and shorter.”
Evans’s chart covers six pages, and I will choose six examples, one from each page, and ones where I am sure I would be seduced into using the flesh-eater rather than the muscle-building alternative:
Roy: “At this point in time”
Harry “now”Roy: “Filled to capacity”
Harry: “full”Roy: “In spite of the fact that”
Harry: “Despite/although”Roy: “Placed under arrest”
Harry: “arrested”Roy: “Take action on the issue”
Harry: “acted”Roy: “Will be the speaker at”
Harry: “will speak”
Harry Evans is not the first editor, knife in hand, to hunt these down. A century ago, William Strunk Jr. exhorted the likes of E.B. White to “omit needless words.” In the 1950s it was Rudolf Flesch and Robert Gunning who carried lights so bright they could cut through the fog of jargon. In the late 1970s it was William Zinsser who showed us what clutter looked like, and why it did us harm.
I am incapable of writing a draft of, say, this essay while wearing the armor of concision. To get the job done, I pour words out on the page. (Do I need the phrase “on the page”? Where else would they pour?) Don’t do this to yourself too early in the process. Building a draft is like eating carbohydrates. Lots of them. Toning the muscles of your prose comes in the exercise of revision.
At the age of 90 Sir Harold Evans makes his case for strong prose, but he never makes a case for craft without a purpose, which is why he picks the perfect title for his opening chapter: “A Noble Thing.”
Better to be knighted than benighted.
Roy Peter Clark teaches writing at Poynter. He can be reached via email at roypc@poynter.org or on Twitter at @RoyPeterClark.
