A virgin field pregnant with possiblities!

“Verbal awareness” offers protection from knocking up your own prose.

One thing I miss about the demise of newspapers—besides the whole death-of-journalism thing—is the unintentionally hilarious headline. Jay Leno devoted a big chunk of his late-night show to the genre.

Some of my favorites:

Sex to Be on Table at Library Meeting

Campbellsport Brothers Honored for Prowess in Insemination Field.

Pecan Scab Disease Causing Nuts to Fall Off

Oral Treatments for Impotence Developed

Gore Denies Wrongdoing; Vows He’ll Never Do It Again

Classified ads are another lamented source of screwups. Leno showed one ad reading:

Bridal Suite: Buy One, Get One Free

OK, one more ad, this one for a family-sized sofa:

Made with Italian Leather. Seats the Whole Mob.

Hasty writers are prone to this sort of miscue. Usage maven Bryan Garner quotes a church bulletin that reads:

All women wishing to become Young Mothers should visit the pastor in his office.

Garner also notes that several bigshot writers have referred to “Roe v. Wade and its progeny.”

This is why we have editors. The editor of my next book inserted a jillion comments, and the copy editors a jillion more, all saving me from embarrassment. Assuming you don’t have that luxury, the follow the most important rule of writing:

Never settle for a first draft.

In fact, I advise students that the secret to avoiding writer’s block is to write badly. Bang out a horrible first draft, then rewrite, and rewrite again. My son, George wrote more than 30 drafts of his college essay Every one of the 64 posts I’ve published since July has been rewritten multiple times. (This one less than the others, because Italian leather.)

But Garner adds another necessity, verbal awareness. He means being aware of the meaning of every phrase and sentence. Verbal awareness is the same thing as mental awareness. The meaning of everything starts and ends with words.

Still, in my experience, you don’t need to be all that aware while you’re writing. Just turn on that verbal-awareness sensor on every new draft, and keep those syntactical virgins away from the pastor.