It’s Elmore Leonard’s birthday today. He would have been 91.
Fifteen years ago Leonard published “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle” in the New York Times—part of the newspaper’s “Writers on Writing” series. Here’s how he begins:
These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.
The rules that follow that short introduction have been shared thousands of time over the years, and for good reason: They’re no less applicable to marketing communications or business writing than they are to a novel or a short story.
For more on the man Stephen King called “the great American writer,” here’s an Atlantic article from a couple of years ago.
