A recent book on good writing with 36 ways to improve your sentences

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an excellent 200-page 2026 book by the husband and wife team of Neal Allen and Anne Lamott titled Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences. Google Books has a preview up to page 23. Each rule is discussed for a few pages by both Neal and Anne.

 

Their rules are:

 

Use Strong Verbs

Replace weak verbs, which are imprecise (‘walked,’ ‘stood’), with vivid verbs, which are specific (‘trudged,’ ‘malingered’).

 

Question ‘Being’ and ‘Having’

The verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ are the weakest of all; by nature static, they slow a narrative.

 

Keep It Active

Pay attention to words that end in -ed or -en and are preceded by a form of ‘to be,’ and watch out for -ing endings; try flipping the sentence to get it more active.

 

Stick with ‘Said’

When attributing a quote, ‘said’ is the default verb; the reader’s attention is on who said it, not how it was said.

 

Don’t Show Off

Let others be erudite; your job is to befriend your reader.

 

Prefer Anglo-Saxon Words

Favor shorter, punchier Anglo-Saxon words over fancy, abstract Latinate words.

 

Sound Natural

Unless you’re writing a technical manual, keep your language conversational and use modern speech patterns.

 

Trust Your Voice

Your natural voice has its own tempo, pitch, ease, and overall sound. Let it ring out.

 

Question Transitions

Transitional phrases (‘then,’ ‘next,’ ‘when,’ ‘meanwhile,’ ‘however’) are not needed unless a gap in time or logic has opened.

 

Link Ideas with Semicolons

If two sentences are tightly linked and one progresses from the other, consider separating them with a semicolon.

 

Drop ‘Very’ and Other Crutch Words

The word ‘very’ seldom improves a sentence.

 

Jettison {All Those} Tiny Words

Remove the clutter of short words (pronouns, prepositions, connectors).

 

Dress Up ‘This’

Pronouns are hard for readers to follow, especially ‘this’ and ‘it.’

 

Remove the Boring Stuff

Spend less time defending what you’ve written, and more time revealing the truth.

 

Refresh Your Words

Don’t repeat a distinctive word unless you must.

 

Know Your Words Inside and Out

Examining the etymology of words makes them more concrete and useful.

 

Stay In Tune

The better word is both precise and unnoticed. A thesaurus is your book of magic spells.

 

Find the Hidden Metaphor

Metaphors mirror humdrum experiences through elegant comparison. In the hands of an expert, they both illuminate and offer depth of field.

 

Twist Cliches

We already think in cliches; you owe it to your reader’s search for novelty to remove or deconstruct your hackneyed phrases.

 

Knock Three Times

For a series of terms to land, you usually need three.

 

Stretch Out

Long sentences require attention to detail, conjunctions, and rhythm – and a payoff at the end.

 

Short Sells

Interrupt lyrical or other long passages with an abrupt, short sentence.

 

Give Your Sentence a Finale

Even if you begin your sentence with a punch, end it stronger.

 

Crystallize Your Dialogue

Dialogue needs to be as zippy and economical as the rest of the book.

 

In Fiction, Archetype Your Characters

Below the human stereotypes are common psychological patterns that readers expect.

 

Show, Then Tell

Start with the concrete – what happened – and after, when appropriate, riff on your thoughts about consequences.

 

Give Them a Hero’s Welcome

Start off by telling the reader who to root for.

 

Once Is Enough

Keep your first description of a character or place distinctive enough that you aren’t tempted to add to it later.

 

Smell the Roses

Sight is only one of the five senses; let your readers enjoy touch, hearing, smell, and taste.

 

Don’t Filter

Don’t point out that someone is thinking, opining, or experiencing what is already happening on the page.

 

Trust Your Reader

Your reader will fill in the gaps; you only need to be complete enough.

 

Layer Your Sentences

Sentences convey more than information; their other purposes must be tended.

 

Write the Hard Stuff

Don’t shy away from the big mysteries of life.

 

Break the Rules

A rule may be of universal use, but need not be universally used.

 

Finish the Damn Thing

Your job is to complete the project. The final quality and consequences are not yet your business.

 

Worship (Talented) Editors

Writing is collaborative, and editors save your skin.

 

 

A botched bar chart about conspiracy beliefs from a discussion of the 2025 Chapman Survey of American Fears

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On May 20, 2026 I blogged about A botched pie chart about homelessness from a discussion of the 2025 Chapman Survey of American Fears. It was in an article titled Chapman Survey of American Fears 2025 Key Findings.

 

That article has another section titled Conspiracy Theories with a horizontal bar chart created by Gabriella Bartsch, shown above, which I have annotated (in green) based on the data presented in the Methods Report for Q22 on pages 72 to 74. All seven percentages she listed for the sum Agree + Strongly Agree are wrong. They are too low by an average of 3.6%, which is much more than the web blank percentage (Don’t Know) that is 0.6% or less.

 

This graphic should have been edited by a professor to check the math before it was put into an article.

 

 

A misty morning at Shoshone Falls

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a post on May 18, 2026 I discussed Attending the 2026 District 15 Conference of Toastmasters International in the Salt Lake City suburb of South Jordan.

 

During my drive back to Boise on May 17th I stopped at the impressive Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, which has a height of 212 feet – 45 feet higher than Niagara Falls. There is a nominal fee of $5 for admission to the city park.  Recent TV news reports had noted that the falls was at peak flow.

 

I stopped around noon, and took the misty soft-focused image shown above from over the fence by the parking lot. At the lower left you can see a viewing platform reached by taking steps down. It was soaking wet, so I didn’t try going down there.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another shaper image from April 25, 2018 shows a similar view when the flow was lower. Then that viewing platform was nice and dry.

 

 

A botched pie chart about homelessness from a discussion of the 2025 Chapman Survey of American Fears

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On October 23, 2025 I blogged about how In the eleventh Chapman Survey of American Fears for 2025, public speaking only was ranked #46 of 67 fears at 33.7%. That survey had some additional questions with four possible agreement levels of Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree. Six of them, Q20 in their Methods Report, asked about homeless people. For example, Q20A was:

 

“Please indicate your level of agreement with the following statements – Homeless people should be allowed to live on the streets or in tents.”

 

There was an article titled Chapman Survey of American Fears 2025 Key Findings, which has a section on Homelessness that included a miscaptioned pie chart (by Emma Boyd) titled OPINIONS OF HOMLESSNESS POLICY which I have shown above with added annotations.

 

The chart caption claims to show the percent who Strongly Agree or Agree, but really does not. I added the correct percent in green. The sum for all six questions is 372.3%, and the percents she shows were rescaled to add to a hundred - divided by a factor of 3.72. The largest percent, which she placed at the lower left, really is 92.4%, but she instead shows 24.8%.  

 

Also, for pie charts the usual layout is to start with the largest wedge beginning at 12 o’clock and then go clockwise in decreasing order. More careful editing could have caught these problems.

 

 

A review article about methods for evaluating public speaking by adults

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a detailed 8-page pdf article (both in English and Portuguese) by Willian Hote Scanferla et al. at Codas on April 27, 2026 titled Indicators for evaluating public speaking in adults: a scoping review. It has 42 references!

 

Their conclusion is that:

 

“The mapping identified recurring indicators in public speaking assessment: discourse structure (introduction, development, organization, clarity, conclusion), supporting resources, language (audience appropriateness, argumentation, pronunciation, fluency), nonverbal behaviors (eye contact, gestures, posture, facial expressiveness), and vocal expressiveness (volume, rhythm, pitch, articulation, modulation). The predominant form of measurement was the Likert-type scale.”

 

The fourth reference in this article is to one by Tingting Liu and Vahid Aryadoust in Behavioral Sciences on August 20, 2024 (Volume 14, Number 8) titled Orchestrating Teacher, Peer, and Self-Feedback to Enhance Learners’ Cognitive, Behavioral, and Emotional Engagement and Public Speaking Confidence which I discussed in my post on May 14, 2026.

 

And the sixteenth reference is to another article which I blogged about on July 9, 2012 in a post titled A new scale (rubric) for evaluating speeches. The twenty-first reference is to the Competent Speaker Speech Evaluation Form from the U.S. National Communication Association (NCA). I blogged about it and others in a post on April 3, 2018 titled Speech evaluation rubrics: how many levels should be on the scale. And which way should it point?

 

My cartoon was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

Attending the 2026 District 15 Conference of Toastmasters International

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Friday May 15th and Saturday May 16th I enjoyed attending the 2026 Toastmasters District 15 Conference in the Salt Lake City suburb of South Jordan, Utah. The theme was The Power of Our Past - The Promise of Our Future. You can find a pdf file of the agenda.

 

The district Humorous Speech Contest was on Friday Afternoon and the International Speech Contest was on Saturday Afternoon. Friday evening Ron Chapman conducted a workshop titled The Elephant in the Room: Leading Change. On Saturday morning he gave a keynote speech titled Becoming a Transformational Leader. In the afternoon he led another workshop. There were five other excellent workshops with speakers and titles as follows:  

 

Dana Jones – What Our Past Tried to Teach Us.

Christine Campbell – The Power of P.O.S.I.T.I.V.E.

Ben Hunt – How to Ethically Use Artificial Intelligence in Speechwriting

Bart Merrell – Mining Your Stories

Kelly Kaye Walker – From Awkward to Awesome: Building Club Culture That Members Can’t Wait to Come Back To.

 

I know how much effort goes into creating a workshop. On May 15, 2024 I had blogged about My workshop presentation at the 2024 District 15 Toastmasters Conference on May 18, 2024 about Creating or Finding Great Table Topics Questions.

 

This is the last conference for District 15. A reorganization will put us into a new geographically larger District 207 that also includes most of Oregon (except the northeast corner).

 

My Garmin GPS got me through the Salt Lake City traffic to the motel and meeting. But when I got into the car on Sunday morning that GPS was dead. I had a Utah road atlas with me, so it was easy to get on I-15 and then to I-84 back to Boise. Later I found the GPS still worked, the power adapter for the car was dead, and the internal battery for the GPS also was dead. It was my second Garmin GPS, so I had a spare power adapter.  

 

 

A scale for measuring engagement in public speaking feedback

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the GLOBIBO blog there is a long undated post by Kenji Nakamura about The Role of Feedback in Improving Public Speaking Training Skills.

 

There also is a recent 23-page pdf article by Tingting Liu and Vahid Aryadoust in Behavioral Sciences magazine on August 20, 2024 (Volume 14, Number 8) that is titled Orchestrating Teacher, Peer, and Self-Feedback to Enhance Learners’ Cognitive, Behavioral, and Emotional Engagement and Public Speaking Confidence.

 

Appendix A.1. has their Public Speaking Feedback Engagement Scale (PSFES) with 15 items. Each item is evaluated on a Likert scale from 1 to 5 where 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = not sure/neutral, 4 = agree, and 5 = strongly agree:

 

There are six items on Cognitive Engagement:

I pay attention to the feedback.

I understand the feedback.

I reflect on and evaluate the feedback.

I realize my strengths and weaknesses through the feedback.

I strategize to improve my speech based on the feedback.

I monitor myself against the feedback when I prepare my next speech.

 

There are another six items on Behavioral Engagement:

I take careful note of the feedback.

I discuss the feedback with my teachers and classmates after class.

I make revisions based on the feedback.

I mark the structure of my next speech based on the feedback.

I search relevant sources for evidence to support my point.

I practice my next speech based on the feedback.

 

Finally, there are three items on Emotional Engagement:

I enjoy receiving/providing feedback.

I find the feedback helpful and valuable.

I look forward to the feedback on my next speech.

 

And Appendix A.2. has the Feedback Sheet with 18 items

 

On May 10, 2010 I had blogged about Rubrics and figuring out where you are. 

 

In the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation Captain Picard says ‘Engage’ to start the warp drive, as shown in a brief YouTube video from Seasons 4 and 5.

 

My engage button was modified from a help button at OpenClipArt.