Writers: Keep your promises

Though I've been a writer longer than an editor, I too often read instructional text with an editorial eye, noticing flaws most readers would fly past. One paragraph that caught my attention was in Mary Cohn Livingston's book, Poem-Making.

Traditionally English poetry was written for many centuries in a measured cadence that we call meter or metrics. This meter is made up of poetic units called feet. The most common of these feet are the iamb, the trochee, the anapest, and the dactyl. Learning about these feet enables poets to control the cadence of words, to recognize that meter can help the words to convey a particular mood" (p. 72).

When I first read the paragraph, I was surprised that Livingston omitted the comma that belongs after "Traditionally." I was more surprised that she introduced meter, feet, iamb, trochee, anapest, and dactyl without defining those terms. However, though her paragraph broke a basic rule of instructional writing, she gets away with it: The whole paragraph is intended only as an introduction to a set of related concepts (meter, feet, etc.).

It has a flaw, however, that wasn't obvious until I read the paragraph that followed it. The above-quoted paragraph ends with these words: "meter can help the words to convey a particular mood." That's transition wording. After reading it, I expected the next paragraph to discuss how words convey mood. It didn't. Nor did the one after it.

When a writer ends a paragraph with transition wording, she making a promise to readers that they expect she'll fulfill. When the writer fails to fulfill her promise, her credibility drops a notch.

The lesson: Writers make promises with their words. Readers expect those promises to be kept.