{"id":285,"date":"2007-11-05T18:50:43","date_gmt":"2007-11-05T22:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/?p=285"},"modified":"2007-11-05T18:54:12","modified_gmt":"2007-11-05T22:54:12","slug":"refactoring-prose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/refactoring-prose\/","title":{"rendered":"Refactoring Prose"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most interesting ideas from software development is that of refactoring code<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A famous book<\/a> on refactoring identifies a set of “code smells” that indicate when something is wrong with your code (blog<\/a>). The book is in part diagnostic, explaining how to identify poor code and determine what the problem is. It is also prescriptive, explaining how to fix many common problems.<\/p>\n

I like the idea of producing a similar list of “writing smells” that helps writers identify bad prose, figure out what the problem is, and how to improve it. Such a list would be much more useful than the laundry lists of do’s and don’ts that form the bulk of style manuals such as Strunk and White. Such laundry lists are usually focused on the problem of writing clearly, a problem for which it is possible to give relatively precise rules, not the vaguer problem of writing in a way that is interesting<\/em>. For the latter problem, the concept writing smells and refactoring prose is, I think, just what is needed.<\/p>\n

An example of such a list of writing smells is provided by the book “Made to Stick”<\/a> by Chip and Dan Heath<\/a>. Summarizing the book here doesn’t do it justice, but it does suggest the following list of prose smells:<\/p>\n