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sense of conversation. It should furnish the immediacy and the warmth of a personal conversation.
     
    Most real conversations, if committed to paper, would dull the senses. Conversations stumble, they stray, they repeat; they are bloated with meaningless words, and they are often cut short by intrusions. But what they have going for them is human contact, the sound of a human voice. And if you can put that quality into your writing, you will get the reader’s attention.
     
    So mimic spoken language in the variety of its music, in the simplicity of its words, in the directness of its expression. But do not forfeit the enormous advantages of the written word. Writing provides time for contemplation. Use it well.
     
    In conversation the perfect word is not always there. In writing we can try out fifteen different words before we are satisfied.
     
    In conversation we spread our thoughts thin. In writing we can compress.
     
    So strive to make your writing sound like a conversation, but don’t make it an ordinary conversation. Make it a good one.
     

4. Vary Sentence Length
     
    This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that bums with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
     
    So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.
     

5. Vary Sentence Construction
     
    Most sentences have a subject, a predicate, and an object, and early in life we were taught to present them in that order. The dog ate the bone. Dick and Jane jumped into the river. A man walked down the street. Et cetera.
     
    But identical sentence constructions bore readers. Certainly you should strive for clarity and not arrange your sentences in a way that strangles their logic. But you should also keep the primary elements of the sentence dancing so that they will create their own music.
     
    Below are two paragraphs in which all the sentences are constructed the same way. They all begin with the subject, move on to the predicate, and end with an object if there is one. What conclusion about the writer do you draw after reading them?
     
     
    The Welcome Wagon Lady twinkled her eyes and teeth at Joanna. She was sixty if she was a day. She had ginger hair, red lips, and a sunshine-yellow dress. She said, “You’re really going to like it here! It’s a nice town with nice people! You couldn’t have made a better choice!” Her brown leather shoulder bag was enormous. It was old and scuffed. She dealt Joanna packets of powdered breakfast drink from it. There was soup mix. There was a toy-size box of non-pollutant detergent. There was a booklet of discount slips that were good at twenty-two local shops. There were two cakes of soap. There was a folder of deodorant pads.
     
    Joanna stood in the doorway. Both hands were full. She said, “Enough, enough. Hold. Halt. Thank you.”
     
     
     
    The sentences are all simple constructions—grade school concoctions. One of the marks of an inexperienced writer is his or her inability to move beyond these basic sentence constructions. If Ira Levin’s best-selling novel had opened with those sentences, odds are good it would have been a worst-selling novel. But, it didn’t. The actual opening of Ira Levin’s Stepford Wives (Random House) follows. As you read it, take