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article called “Walking on Water,” an update on the California surfing scene. Here’s how he used the bridge word “sponsor” to make a logical transition into a discussion of media.
     
     
    Unfortunately, like the good surfing spots, most potenttial sponsors have already been taken.
     
    The scramble for sponsors makes surfers especially media conscious.
     
     

7. Avoid Wordiness
     
    Wordiness has two meanings for the writer. You are wordy when you are redundant, such as when you write, “Last May during the spring,” or “little kittens,” or “very unique.”
     
    Wordiness for the writer also means using long words when there are good short ones available, using uncommon words when familiar ones are handy, using words that look like the work of a Scrabble champion, not a writer.
     
    The following example of wordiness, which I’ve taken from a letter that appeared in Dr. Adele M. Scheele’s “At Work” column, which appears in newspapers all over the country, shows how dull a writer becomes when he or she tries to impress a reader with “intellectual” language.
     
     
    In preparing a list of professional people whose opinion I respect, you are one of the first that comes to mind.
     
    It is my objective to more fully utilize my management expertise than has heretofore been the case....
     
     
     
    The letter contains many of the writing mistakes we will discuss in this book, but its greatest fault is wordiness.
     
    The overall tone of the letter is apologetic, meek, uncertain. The writer is babbling. She’s trying to find words that are safe because they are vague and they sound very professional to her. By trying to impress the reader with her vocabulary, she is composing a letter that is almost incomprehensible.
     
    Instead of discussing herself, she discusses her “objective,” which is “to more fully utilize” her “management expertise.” She would have made herself clearer with simple words like “goal,” “use,” and “skills.” Instead of writing about her job, she writes about being confined “to the area of small business and self-employment in the apartment management field,” which doesn’t tell the reader what she’s been doing for a living, only what area she’s been doing it in.
     
    Here is a version of that letter that is clear, direct, and simple. It would get a warm reception in any office because the reader doesn’t have to struggle to understand it.
     
     
    I’ve made a list of professional people whose opinion I respect, and your name is at the top of the list.
     
    I want to use my management skills more fully. But since I’ve been running a small apartment management agency for the last six years, I’m a little bit out of touch with the job market. I’d like your guidance and advice so that I can evaluate the market for my skills....
     
     

8. Steal
     
    Be a literary pack rat. Brighten up your story with a metaphor you read in the Sunday paper. Make a point with an anecdote you heard at the barber shop. Let a character tell a joke you heard in a bar. But steal small, not big, and don’t steal from just one source. Someone once said that if you steal from one writer, it’s called plagiarism, but if you steal from several, it’s called research. So steal from everybody, but steal only a sentence or a phrase at a time. If you use much more than that, you must get permission and then give credit. Here are two example of acceptable, honorable ways to steal.
     
    Whenever people ask me what I did for a living before I became a writer, I reply, “I did all those crummy jobs that would someday look so glamorous on the back of a book jacket.” It’s a cute line, one of many I use often in order to keep myself constantly surrounded by an aura of cleverness. But I didn’t invent the line. I read it twenty years ago in a TV Guide article by Merle Miller, and I’ve used it ever since, rarely giving Miller credit for the line.
     
    The previous