Good Writing

Neal Allen, a veteran journalist turned corporate writer, and Anne Lamott, a celebrated literary author of both fiction and nonfiction, present a collaborative guide to sentence-level craft. The book is organized around 36 rules that Allen accumulated over decades of professional writing, supplemented throughout by Lamott's commentary, examples, and occasional disagreements. Rather than a guide to becoming a writer or mastering syntax in the abstract, the book focuses on improving sentences after they have been drafted, whether in fiction, nonfiction, journalism, or any other form.

Allen opens by recounting his start as a cub reporter at the Kingston Daily Freeman in New York's Hudson Valley in the late 1970s, where strict journalistic conventions taught him economical prose. His editor Sam Daleo gave him what Allen considers the foundational piece of writing advice: "write with your verbs." This became Rule 1 and what Allen calls the Daleo Rule. A turning point came when Allen read R. W. Apple Jr.'s elegant front-page New York Times coverage of the 1981 royal wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, which showed him that hard news writing could be graceful, not just efficient. Over subsequent years at the Bergen Record in Hackensack, New Jersey, he expanded his collection of rhetorical principles into 36 rules that served him across journalism, speechwriting, ghostwriting, and book authorship. Lamott explains that she encountered these rules shortly after meeting Allen in 2016, began distributing them to her writing students, and internalized them as an editing checklist. She distinguishes her own teaching emphasis, which centers on gaining confidence and writing daily, from Allen's mechanical focus on sentence improvement. Both authors describe their collaborative editing relationship, treating the give-and-take of marking up each other's drafts as essential to raising their work to its highest level.

The first cluster of rules addresses verb choice and sentence energy. Rule 1 (Use Strong Verbs) argues that replacing imprecise verbs like "walked" with vivid alternatives like "trudged" generates more complex sentence structures and reduces dependence on adverbs. Rule 2 (Question "Being" and "Having") contends that "to be" and "to have" suspend sentences in a static state rather than propelling them. Allen draws on Sanskrit, which has two verbs for "to be," one static and one implying "becoming," and analyzes Hamlet's soliloquy to illustrate a shift from stasis to reflection. Rule 3 (Keep It Active) advises flipping passive constructions to active voice, while acknowledging that passive voice is sometimes superior, as when Franklin Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy" speech placed the United States as the grammatical object to emphasize the victims. Rule 4 (Stick with "Said") asserts that "said" is the only necessary attribution verb. Lamott pushes back mildly, accepting functional synonyms like "whispered" and "mumbled."

The next group concerns audience, language register, and personal voice. Rule 5 (Don't Show Off) warns that cleverness risks breaking fiction's seamless world or being dismissed as style over substance. Rule 6 (Prefer Anglo-Saxon Words) favors shorter, punchier words over Latinate ones, citing Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges's observation that English uniquely retains both Germanic and Romance word pairs. Rule 7 (Sound Natural) insists that if writing sounds literary, it fails. Rule 8 (Trust Your Voice) encourages writers to discover their natural voice rather than imitating others. Allen maps writing voice onto the Beatles as archetypes, drawing on G. I. Gurdjieff's concept of the three-centered human, a framework developed by the Russian mystic of the early 20th century that divides experience into head, body, and heart. Lamott recounts trying to emulate Isabel Allende's magical realism after The House of the Spirits was published, only to find that adopting another writer's voice made her sound fraudulent.

A series of rules focuses on economy. Rule 9 (Question Transitions) argues that phrases like "then" and "meanwhile" are usually unnecessary. Rule 10 (Link Ideas with Semicolons) describes the semicolon as a device that reinforces the connection between related sentences without a transitional phrase. Rule 11 (Drop "Very" and Other Crutch Words) argues that "very" weakens whatever it modifies. Rule 12 (Jettison [All Those] Tiny Words) advises removing clutter from prepositions, pronouns, and connectors. Rule 13 (Dress Up "This") argues that the bare pronoun "this" should be followed by a noun naming its referent, since English pronouns carry less grammatical information than those in heavily declined languages like Ancient Greek.

The next set addresses content quality. Rule 14 (Remove the Boring Stuff) warns against over-explaining, arguing that hinting and misdirection serve readers better than proving every logical step. Rule 15 (Refresh Your Words) instructs writers not to repeat a distinctive word within a paragraph, with an exception for deliberate "bridging," as in Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" or Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" refrain. Rule 16 (Know Your Words Inside and Out) encourages investigating etymology. Allen traces "satisfaction" back to satiation, "equanimity" to calm breath, and "contentment" to a root in Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancestral language from which many modern languages descend, meaning extension or expansiveness. Rule 17 (Stay In Tune) argues that the ideal word is both precise and unnoticed. Rule 18 (Find the Hidden Metaphor) broadens metaphor to include parables, allegories, and moral reasoning. Rule 19 (Twist Clichés) insists that clichés must be transformed before publication, as when Allen turns "She was good as gold" into "She was good as brass, barely."

Rules on sentence rhythm follow. Rule 20 (Knock Three Times) asserts that three items in a series create a resolved rhythmic pattern. Rule 21 (Stretch Out) argues that long sentences work when they are linear and propulsive, presenting a 280-word sentence from Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat" as a model. Rule 22 (Short Sells) recommends using short sentences to punctuate longer passages. Rule 23 (Give Your Sentence a Finale) contends that a sentence's strongest element belongs at its end.

A group of fiction-specific rules follows. Rule 24 (Crystallize Your Dialogue) insists on economical dialogue that reveals character. Rule 25 (In Fiction, Archetype Your Characters) urges writers to distinguish characters' personality types using systems like Myers-Briggs and the enneagram, both personality-typing frameworks, so that characters do not blur together. Rule 26 (Show, Then Tell) reframes the familiar directive as a sequence, arguing that pure "show, don't tell" taken to an extreme produces thin fiction. Rule 27 (Give Them a Hero's Welcome) advises establishing early that another character finds the protagonist admirable. Rule 28 (Once Is Enough) states that a character's initial physical description should be distinctive enough that it need not be repeated.

Rules on depth and authenticity follow. Rule 29 (Smell the Roses) reminds writers to engage all five senses. Rule 30 (Don't Filter) advises against phrases like "He thought," which reduce immediacy. Rule 31 (Trust Your Reader) argues that readers fill in gaps from small clues. Rule 32 (Layer Your Sentences) asserts that each sentence should serve multiple purposes. Rule 33 (Write the Hard Stuff) urges writers not to shy away from life's big mysteries, citing Cormac McCarthy's language about stars drowning and whales ferrying their vast souls.

The final three rules address rules, completion, and collaboration. Rule 34 (Break the Rules) distinguishes grammar's fixed constraints from rhetoric's yielding principles. Rule 35 (Finish the Damn Thing) reframes the writer's job as completing the current draft, warning against rushed endings and deus ex machina resolutions, meaning implausible last-minute plot fixes. Rule 36 (Worship (Talented) Editors) argues that editors fill in blind spots, and Lamott estimates that good editors account for roughly 30 percent of why readers love the writers they do.

In a concluding reflection, Allen recounts how at 27 his boss Tom Geyer made an offhand remark about wanting a career as a hack writer, someone who can write anything for anybody, for pay. Two years later, when Geyer offered Allen a larger position, Allen chose to resign and return to reporting, defining himself as a hack writer ever since. When Allen and Lamott met in 2016 and exchanged drafts, their editorial shorthand proved mutually intelligible, suggesting the rules are universal across writing types. Lamott distills Allen's central idea: The rules "economize, favor the plainspoken and the specific, keep the reader's attention sharp, and in other ways show respect for the audience's time and desire for novelty" (176). Both close by affirming that any writer can create good sentences with practice, guidance, and dedication to craft.