Exactly write

Paraprosdokians

2011-04-22T11:03:00.003-05:00

An old friend from Texas sent some paraprosdokians. You can't eat them or plant them in your yard, but you can enjoy them. In fact, you have, even if you didn't know it.

From englishforums.com: A paraprosdokian is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to re-frame or re-interpret the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect. For this reason, it is extremely popular among comedians and satirists.

Examples:

1. I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn't work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.
2. I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather, not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.
3. The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it's still on the list.
4. War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
5. Evening news is where they begin with 'Good evening' and then proceed to tell you why it isn't.
6. How is it one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
7. Dolphins are so smart that within a few weeks of captivity, they can train people to stand on the very edge of the pool and throw them fish.
8. You do not need a parachute to sky dive. You only need a parachute to sky dive twice.
9. A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip.
10. Some cause happiness wherever they go. Others whenever they go.
11. I used to be indecisive. Now I'm not so sure.
12. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

Answer to last week's question: What's wrong with this Fox News Headline?
"Nine people killed in Oklahoma and Arkansas after tornadoes, severe storms moved through"
The word "after." If the people were killed after the tornadoes moved through, what killed them? And what does it have to do with the storms?

Fox bloopers

2011-04-15T15:19:00.004-05:00

Fox News headline:
"Dog Killed by Alligator Lurking Near Florida Home"
I can see where that might make the home's residents nervous. But dead dogs are harmless, aren't they?

What's wrong with this Fox News Headline?
"Nine people killed in Oklahoma and Arkansas after tornadoes, severe storms moved through"

Review review

2011-04-08T14:30:00.004-05:00

Review of a review of a film of a book

Movie reviews are rarely a kick, but P.J. O'Rourke's review of "Atlas Shrugged: Part 1" in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal is.

Read the review even if you've never read the book and don't intend to see the film.

The title of the review is classic O'Rourke: "Atlas shrugged. And so did I." You can almost see the disciples of Ayn Rand reaching for their pitchforks.

He writes: "I will not pan 'Atlas Shrugged.' I don’t have the guts. If you associate with Randians — and I do — saying anything critical about Ayn Rand is almost as scary as saying anything critical to Ayn Rand. What’s more, given how protective Randians are of Rand, I’m not sure she’s dead."

He has Randians, who prefer to call themselves objectivists, pegged. But he did have the guts after all, and he did pan it. Gently.

I might interject that I'm actually looking forward to the movie, which Hollywood has threatened to make ever since Rand personally tried to ingratiate herself to Tinseltown. It is needed in a time when people don't read 900-page books (if they ever did) and are therefore unarmed against the collectivist propaganda spilling out of academia into places where its peddlers might actually exert influence, like the White House.

But I'm off track. O'Rourke correctly notes that the current wave of collectivism gave rise to more than just an overdue — but strangely not updated — film about Rand's most famous book: "Hence the Tea Party, and Ayn Rand is invited. Not for nothing is Kentucky Senator Paul named Rand. The premise of 'Atlas Shrugged' applies to every maker in a world of takers."

The tea party wasn't around when this film was conceived, but the movement will swell the movie audiences. It sounds like a film you hope your "progressive" neighbor will go see to get their derailed thinking back on track — even if you don't get around to seeing it yourself.

By the way, a tale that takes 900 pages to tell won't fit in two hours. Or even three. Thus, as O-Rourke put it, "The movie’s title carries the explicit threat of a sequel."

Let's hope P.J. reviews the sequel as well.

Best of the Web

2011-04-01T14:28:00.006-05:00

So we're agreed?
House Speaker John Boehner did his best, if unintentional, Yogi Berra impersonation yesterday after Democrats announced they had reached a compromise on cuts to this year's budget.

Boehner said: “There is no agreement on numbers and nothing will be agreed to until everything is agreed to.”

Rejected
Have you started your file of rejection letters yet? If your manuscript has been turned down, you're in good company.

Twelve publishing houses rejected J.K. Rowling's first Harry Potter. But one publisher, Scholastic, recognized the potential and agreed to publish it. Sales of her books topped 400 million copies in less than 15 years and she became a billionaire.

John Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, was rejected by 16 publishers. But in the last two decades, Grisham's 25 novels have sold 250 million copies.

Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time was rejected 26 times. It went on to win the Newberry Medal.

Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen received 134 rejections for Chicken Soup for the Soul. But when a publisher finally took a chance on it, the book became a runaway best-seller. Additional titles followed. After 15 years, Chicken Soup for the Soul brand had sold 112 million books and raked in more than $2 billion.

Best of the Web
If you haven't discovered James Taranto's witty "Best of the Web Today" column on the Wall Street Journal site, let me be the first to recommend it. A sampling:

Metaphor Alert
"Even 7.5% unemployment means 11.5 million Americans without jobs. The human cost of that dry statistic can be detailed in a canvas of broken hopes and shattered lives." — Mitt Romney, USA Today, March 31

Dey Got a Point
"Dem Losers Still Blaming Nancy Pelosi" — headline, Politico.com, March 30

Questions Nobody Is Asking
* "Leaping Sea Creatures: Do We Need Bigger Boats?" — headline, CNN.com, March 30
* "What Was the New York Times Magazine Like 100 Years Ago?" — headline, Slate.com, March 30

Answers to Questions Nobody Is Asking
* "Why You Should Care About Cricket" — headline, ESPN website, March 28

Bottom Stories of the Day
* "Jon Huntsman Snags Endorsement of Sam Brownback's Campaign Manager" — headline, DailyCaller.com, March 31
* "Kucinich to Deliver Hour-Long Speech on Libya" — headline, RollCall.com, March 30

Headline doesn't cut it

2011-01-26T11:54:00.003-06:00

The Fox News website has a banner headline:
"GOP: FREEZE DOESN'T MAKE THE CUT"

Wrong idiom. "Doesn't make the cut" means to move to a higher, more exclusive level. An athlete at the Olympic trials who is selected for the team "makes the cut."

The Fox editor should have written: "GOP: FREEZE DOESN'T CUT IT"
If something doesn't cut it, it falls short or is not good enough.

Republicans weren't auditioning the president's ideas for a place on their agenda, they were evaluating his economic plan.

LeConfused

2010-12-03T14:36:00.004-06:00

LeBron James scored 38 points in three quarters to lead his new team, the Miami Heat, to a blowout victory over his former team, the Cleveland Cavs, Thursday night. It was LeBron's first game against his former team in Cleveland, and his former fans booed every time he touched the ball. After the game, an interviewer asked: “The fans had their say tonight. What would you like to say to them if you could?”

"Seven great years, loved every part, loved every moment, from the growth when I was an 18-year-old kid to a 25-year-old man. You know, trying our best as a team, trying our best to bring a championship to this city and just trying to play hard every night. I've got the utmost respect for this franchise, utmost respect for these fans and, you know, just continue the greatness for myself here in Miami and try to get better every day."

Huh? The sports commentators immediately pounced on Lebron's reference to his "greatness." But I haven't heard anyone comment on the fact that his answer was incoherent. Or that he apparently thought he was in Miami.

Deadline oopses

2010-11-19T14:54:00.005-06:00

My friend Frank brought in a yellowed copy of the Nov. 22, 1963, issue of The Paducah Sun-Democrat. You surely know that date. The banner headline — printed in red, six columns, two lines, all caps above the nameplate — is:
KENNEDY IS ASSASSINATED; LYNDON JOHNSON PRESIDENT.

The Sun-Democrat was then an evening newspaper, making it possible to publish the story the day it happened.

But the inside pages were apparently already on the plates before the AP wired the story. On page 7 of the same issue was a story with this headline:
Republicans Get Head Start On 1964 Political Campaign Against Kennedy.

Oops.

To make matters worse, the story quotes Republican leaders in the Senate blasting JFK.
New York's Jacob Javits: "Things have gone from bad to worse."
Texas' John Tower: "Our international standing has clipped low, indeed."
Illinois' Everett Dirksen: "(JFK is) engaging in dangerous economic brinkmanship."
Indiana's Charles Halleck: "... almost total failure ... for three empty years."

Darn those deadlines.

By the way, do you remember what two noted authors' deaths were barely noted in the press because they occurred on the same day?

Coaches Chizik and Childress

2010-11-12T09:49:00.005-06:00

In a press conference a few days ago, Auburn head football coach Gene Chizik said something other than what he meant to say amid allegations against his star player, quarterback Cam Newton.

Chizik: "I'm standing up here on a very important week trying to defend something that's pure garbage."
That's a harsh way to describe your star player. Maybe he meant he was trying to defend AGAINST something — the allegations — he considers pure garbage (and is "pure garbage" an oxymoron?).

He also said, "I want to get off the table up front the fact that Cameron Newton will be playing Saturday against the Georgia Bulldogs. I want to get that off the table."
The idiom "off the table" means to remove from consideration. What Chizik said, and repeated, is that playing Newton is NOT one of his options. Of course, he meant the opposite. What Chizik took off the table was the option of forcing Newton to sit out the game.

If Chizik says the opposite of what he means, another coach makes statements that tell you absolutely nothing — but at least he uses big words to say it. Minnesota Vikings coach Brad Childress said this of trading Randy Moss: "It was a programmatic nonfit, and it didn't work out. When things don't work out, you need to move quickly to take steps."
Programmatic nonfit? Why not "he didn't fit in"?
"Move quickly to take steps"? That literally means hurry to make incremental change — not an apt description of booting Moss.

Neologisms defined

2010-10-29T13:54:00.004-05:00

Neologisms

Definitions to the neologisms I listed in the last post:

Alpha geek: The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group.
Blamestorming: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.
Chainsaw consultant: An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee headcount, leaving the top brass with clean hands.
Cube farm: An office filled with cubicles.
Irritainment: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying, but you find yourself unable to stop watching them (e.g. professional wresting).
Mediocracy: A society or organization in which people of mediocre talent prevail
Meetnik: A person who enjoys meetings and seminars and tries to attend as many as possible.
Mouse potato: A couch potato whose attention is riveted to a computer rather than a TV.
Phobosopher: A person with an irrational aversion to wisdom.
Starter marriage: A short-lived first marriage that ends in divorce with no kids and no regrets.
Stress puppy: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.
Tree ware: Printed material.

Neologisms

2010-09-10T11:47:00.004-05:00

A neologism is a new word, expression or phrase. Sometimes a neologism will make it into the dictionary. Other times it is in vogue only for a season then fades into disuse.

Following are some neologisms, mostly from the 1990s, that didn't make it into common usage. See if you can guess the definitions (no Google searches). Hint: Most have to do with office work.

Alpha geek
Blamestorming
Chainsaw consultant
Cube farm
Irritainment
Mediocracy
Meetnik
Mouse potato
Phobosophers
Starter marriage
Stress puppy
Tree ware

The wit and witless

2010-09-03T10:43:00.004-05:00

This weekend kicks off the college football season. To celebrate, here's another sampling of the wit and witless of the coaching world.

From incoherent:
“These guys are missing one thing, and that's experience. Until you've been out on the field, it's tough to simulate that.” — Houston Nutt
(So go onto the field where it will be easy to simulate experience.)

“The biggest thing, ... was getting here at 7 o'clock Sunday morning from Southern California after a 70-whatever whipping to get to the point where your team went from a whipped, terrible look to having a chance to win as good as Alabama was. That gave us a lot of hope. Build off that. Correct those mistakes. Now go win a game. That's where you see the parallels. I believe that.” — Houston Nutt
(To someone somewhere, something in there might make sense.)

To humorous:
"If you make every game a life and death proposition, you're going to have problems. For one thing, you'll be dead a lot." — Dean Smith

"The man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely the one who dropped it." — Lou Holtz

To wise:
"Leadership is getting someone to do what they don't want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve." — Tom Landry

"The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender." — Vince Lombardi

"Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won't taste good." — Joe Paterno

"People of medicore ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don't know when to quit. Most men succeed because they are determined to." — George Allen

To inspirational:
"I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is the moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle-victorious." -- Vince Lombardi

And just for fun, this from the writer Jack Handy:
“I remember that one fateful day when Coach took me aside. I knew what was coming. 'You don't have to tell me,' I said. 'I'm off the team, aren't I?' 'Well,' said Coach, 'you never were really ON the team. You made that uniform you're wearing out of rags and towels, and your helmet is a toy space helmet. You show up at practice and then either steal the ball and make us chase you to get it back, or you try to tackle people at inappropriate times.' It was all true what he was saying. And yet, I thought something is brewing inside the head of this Coach. He sees something in me, some kind of raw talent that he can mold. But that's when I felt the handcuffs go on.”

Here lies a liar

2010-08-27T11:30:00.004-05:00

I can't remember where I obtained the little pocket-size book, "Everybody's Book of Epitaphs: Being for the Most Part What the Living Think of the Dead." But it is entertaining to read the epitaphs found on tombstones in English cemeteries.

Like this one from the Berkeley Churchyard:

Here lies an editor!
Snooks, if you will;
In Mercy, Kind Providence,
Let him lie still!
He lied for his living, so
He lived while he lied.
When he could not lie longer
He lied down and died.

A number of tombstones carry variations of a bitter widow's lament:

He lied while he lived
And dead he lies still

And a few widowers got their shots in, like this one from Selby, Yorkshire:

Here lies my wife, a sad slattern and shrew,
If I said I regretted her, I should lie too!

Kids

2010-08-20T13:58:00.005-05:00

Kids' ears

Sometimes what we say is not what they hear. The following comments are taken from a thread on a friend's Facebook page:

Gavin told me that his bus driver told him that they sit in "science seats." It took me just a second to realize that she was discussing assigned seats on the bus! Funny boy.

Josh referred listening to "Rap City" instead of Rhapsody today ... those 5 year olds!

When Kathleen was in kindergarten, she told me that she learned about gutters in school — the ones that cows have.

Heidi once had a guest speaker in her Lutheran school classroom tell the story of Bert the Troll. The mother of a boy with a speech impediment marched into her classroom the next day demanding to know why she was teaching fourth graders about birth control.

Speaking of kids

Did you catch the story in The Paducah Sun about the students instructing the instructors? Teachers at Heath High School will attend sessions on how to use their new iBook computers. The instructors will be high school students.

Hope the student-teachers are patient. The brains of geezers (all those over 30) just aren't as pliable as brains of teens.

There was a grammarian

2010-08-18T15:09:00.005-05:00

James Kilpatrick died Aug. 15, three months shy of his 90th birthday. He was best known for his conservative commentary in newspaper columns and on the "Point-Counterpoint" segment of 60 Minutes. After the death of his wife, sculptor Marie Louise Perri, in 1997, he married liberal columnist Marianne Means. It would have been a gas to sit in on their dinner conversation.

Later in life he became better known as a grammarian. He wrote a column on English usage called "The Writer's Art," as well as a book with the same title. His books also included "The Ear is Human: A Handbook of Homophones and Other Confusions" and "Fine Print: Reflections on the Writing Art."

Here's a sample of his writing on language from a June 2008 column, selected because it echoes one of the constant nags of Sun executive editor Duke Conover:

"In the writing game, everybody has to have an irk. Am I being fastidious or merely fussy in my irk against 'there'? A few weeks ago The New York Times' editorial writers backed repeatedly into their morning lectures.
"'There is a lot of talk that Sen. Hillary Clinton is now fated ... There is a lot that Senators Clinton and Obama need to be talking about ...' 'There is no doubt that President Robert Mugabe's henchmen have used ...'
"The yawing or introductory 'there' is an ancient device, not to be condemned out of hand. All the same, a sentence often will be improved by backing up and starting over: 'Some observers contend that Sen. Hillary Clinton ...' Or, 'Senators Clinton and Obama need to talk about ...' Let us trim our shrubbery."

Duke would take it a bit further. He doesn't like "there" anywhere. If you write, "The team is not there yet," he will ask, "Not where yet?"

I admit I'm not so rigid about "there." But then, I have that luxury. Duke is herding cats. I am not. So I take refuge in Kilpatrick's words: "The yawing or introductory 'there' is an ancient device, not to be condemned out of hand." Duke, of course, would emphasize: "... a sentence will often be improved by backing up and starting over."

We agree, however, that your writing will be improved if you avoid "there" where possible.

Amusing, awful and artificial

2010-07-23T16:16:00.006-05:00

King James II of England, when he saw the restored and expanded St. Paul's Cathedral, called it "amusing, awful and artificial." The architect, Sir Christopher Wren, was not offended. On the contrary, he was flattered.

The king did not mean that it was funny or entertaining. He was not calling it atrocious or appalling. He did not consider it fake or pretentious.

In 17th century England, amusing meant "riveting." Awful meant "full of awe" or "awe inspiring." And artificial meant "artistic."

Language evolves and word meaning changes over time through common usage. In this case, words that once had positive meaning gradually devolved. That process is called perjoration.

It doesn't always take four centuries. The word "OK" has undergone more rapid perjoration. Although the etymology is debated, it is clear from its usage a century ago that, when used as an adjective, "OK" was once strong praise. If something was OK, or okay, that meant it was good in every aspect — perfect or "all correct." Today, when we say something is "OK" we mean it is mediocre, or far from perfect.
If we could assign letter grades to OK, it was once an A+, but now it's a C-.

"How was your trip?"
"It was OK."
"Oh, what went wrong?"

So when Oklahoma put the slogan "Oklahoma is OK" on its license plates, it was not lamenting the state's mediocrity but proclaiming that everything about the state was right.

The use of OK to mean assent or agreement now exceeds its use as an adjective. When we say "OK," we are agreeing to something asked of us. Put a question mark after it, and it is asking for someone else's assent.

"Everyone pitch in, OK?" (Meaning: Will you do it? Do you understand? Is that acceptable?)
"OK." (Meaning: Yes. We Understand. We will do it.)

Use of OK as a modifier may fall out of use altogether before it reaches the grade of F.

———

Back to Christopher Wren. He is buried in a crypt at St. Paul's. His modest burial marker reads: "Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice" which means: "Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you."

One of the world's largest cathedrals — how's that for a headstone?

Observations

2010-07-09T15:15:00.004-05:00

Random observations on usage:
1. A defense attorney commenting on an obscenity written on the nail of Lindsay Lohan’s middle finger during her trial that an alert Reuters photographer picked up: “This tops the cake.”
I assume the attorney meant "takes the cake," an idiom that means "is the most extreme example." Of course, it's possible the attorney meant what she said. A cake topper is the final piece, the focal point.

2. The Fox News Website briefly posted this headline: “Missing Missouri Girl Found Safe at Car Warsh.”
Now, now, no need to poke fun of the way Midwesterners talk.

3. MSNBC headline in April:
"LAW MAKES IT A CRIME TO BE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT"
I may have posted that before. Originally I thought it was an editor's goof, but given the debate over Arizona's law, it may have been an editorial comment. In practice, it is not illegal to be illegal.

4. An AP story on immigration included this sentence: “The law requires officers ... to question a person’s immigration status if there’s a reasonable suspicion they are in the country illegally.”

The plural pronoun "they" doesn't match the singular antecedent "person."
Some English teachers go apoplectic over such usage. The singular "they" is widespread in spoken English. But it also has a long history in written English.

The Chicago Manual of Style notes:

On the one hand, it is unacceptable to a great many reasonable readers to use the generic masculine pronoun ("he" in reference to no one in particular). On the other hand, it is unacceptable to a great many readers either to resort to nontraditional gimmicks to avoid the generic masculine (by using he/she or s/he, for example) or to use "they" as a kind of singular pronoun. Either way, credibility is lost with some readers.

With the 14th edition (1993), the Manual revised its neutral stance to recommend "singular use of they and their," noting a "revival" of this usage and citing its "venerable use by such writers as Addison, Austen, Chesterfield, Fielding, Ruskin, Scott, and Shakespeare."

Singular "they" and "their" can be used in most writing to indicate indeterminacy in regard to number — "Anyone willing to give up their seat will receive a refund"; or regarding gender — "Every homeowner must care for their own property."

If you aren't comfortable with any of the three options — singular masculine pronouns, joined masculine/feminine pronouns, or plural pronouns — just do what we do all the time in the news business: Write around it.

Rejection

2010-05-21T11:15:00.003-05:00

Have you ever received a rejection letter? If so, you know it stings, even when it makes clear that the publisher has not bothered to read a word of your writing. But how would you like to receive this letter a publisher sent to Zane Grey?

"You've wasted enough of our time with your junk. Why don't you go back to filling teeth? You can't write, you never could write, and you never will be able to write."

Ouch.

Pearl Zane Grey was indeed a dentist, having attended Ivy League Penn on a baseball scholarship.

He deserved that letter. His early writing was full of grammatical errors and stilted writing. He self-published his first novel. Harper's rejected four of his novels in a row. The publisher told him, "I do not see anything in this to convince me you can write either narrative or fiction."

But Grey had something — or rather someone — in his favor: his wife Dolly. She edited his work, correcting his errors, and gradually Grey's writing improved. Dolly also worked as his manager/agent.

As a young man, Grey read Owen Wister's "The Virginian," the inspiration for many a western writer. It became a template for his novels.

Eventually, he published 90 books, selling 40 million copies. He and Dolly split the proceeds 50/50. Film studios produced more than 100 films of his stories. He mostly wrote westerns, but he also penned books on hunting, fishing and baseball. He also wrote six children's books. His best-known and best-selling book was Riders of the Purple Sage.

Grey never achieved critical acclaim but enjoyed considerable commercial success. And Harper's, the publisher that had rejected all his early works, eventually became Grey's publisher, making millions off his work.

Zane Grey is a case study in perseverance.

Gurley Martin

2010-05-14T15:27:00.004-05:00

In this week's KET debate among the four Republican candidates for U.S. Senate, viewers were introduced to 86-year-old candidate Gurley Martin, a World War II veteran and birther who posted his own birth certificate on his campaign website. Martin is a conspiracist who says every president since 1928 except Ronald Reagan moved the country toward one-world government. And he says Barack Obama is not a legal American citizen.

Martin made the most unexpected and weirdly memorable statement of the one-hour debate when he waxed nostalgic over public executions when asked if he supported the death penalty:

"The death penalty is a learning tool. When I was less than 5 years old I witnessed the legal hanging of a white man for the rape of a white woman on the courthouse square in Ohio County. People came from everywhere, and the crime wave went down immediately."

While the positions of the leading candidates in modern elections are so carefully crafted that you can hardly distinguish one from another, the fringe candidates are the ones who provide the spice on the campaign trail.

And I'll give this to Martin — he speaks in complete sentences. That's rare among politicians.

2010-04-30T13:22:00.003-05:00

This is Kentucky and this is Kentucky Derby weekend and this is a newspaper, or at least an online version of a newspaper, so it's appropriate to recognize — celebrate is too strong a word — the 40th birthday of gonzo journalism. The late Hunter S. Thompson, a Louisville native credited with birthing gonzo, created the new style of journalism at the 1970 Kentucky Derby, with a story entitled "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved." Thompson covered the event for a British sports magazine accompanied by the illustrator Ralph Steadman, whose drawings combined whimsy and vulgarity with only incidental connection to reality, much the same as Thompson's writing.

Gonzo journalism blends fact and fantasy, and it places the writer's experience at the center of the story. The modifiers he applied to the spectacle of the derby, then, necessarily applied to himself as well.

He wrote: "It's a fantastic scene — thousands of people fainting, crying, copulating, trampling each other and fighting with broken whiskey bottles." Not quite wide brim hats and mint juleps.

Gonzo journalism is an oxymoron. Though entertaining and readable, gonzo violates the inviolable rules of journalism: A journalist must report facts, leaving out his own opinions, and he must remain outside the story as a detached observer. In gonzo, facts are optional. And the writer is the subject and star of the story. It is the ultimate expression of narcissism.

Some might argue that the act of suicide is the ultimate expression of narcissism. If so, Thompson had that covered too. He shot himself in the head in 2005, four decades after a trip to Ketchum, Idaho, to investigate the reasons behind Ernest Hemingway's suicide for a magazine piece Thompson was writing.

Thompson's suicide note, entitled "Football Season Is Over," read:
"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt."

Still putting himself at the center of the story.

Thompson's best known work was "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Although never a household name, he had a devoted following that included many Hollywood stars, as well as the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury, who patterned his character Uncle Duke after Thompson. As Trudeau's tribute to the writer following his death, a Doonesbury strip shows Duke learning of Thompson's death after which his own head explodes.

MSNBC blooper

2010-04-27T15:49:00.001-05:00

A headline destined for Leno appeared on the screen yesterday at MSNBC:
"LAW MAKES IT A CRIME TO BE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT"

Sounds like Yogi Berra has found a new gig writing news.

More AP goofs

2010-04-16T10:39:00.003-05:00

Spot the errors in this AP story (two punctuation errors, two capitalization errors and one failure of an ill-informed reporter to recognize irony):

Tony Kueber's signs reflected the anger of the Kentucky Tea Party, where he sold banners Thursday bearing slogans such as "Taxed Enough Already" and "Second American Revolution."
"The Constitution," Kueber said. "It's not a difficult document. Anybody can read it."
That sentiment wove it's way through the second annual anti-tax day rally in downtown Louisville. Around 500 people gathered on a warm, sunny day to protest against the size of government, the tax code, the Democratic Party and President Barack Obama.
Interspersed throughout the crowd were nearly a dozen political candidates, including Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Rand Paul and GOP candidates for Louisville mayor and congress, seeking votes to join or lead the branches of government they spent more than two hours criticizing.
"I'm clinging to my guns, my religion and my ammunition," Paul said. Later, speaking to reporters, Paul said he was just using political rhetoric, not trying to incite anyone to violence.

Answer to the last spot-the-error challenge:

The photo cutline reade: Odong Obong, barely 3 days old, is tended to by his mother as he lays under a mosquito net in a hospital ward in Akobo, Southern Sudan, on Thursday.

Error: "lays" should be "lies"

Military wisdom

2010-04-09T15:20:00.003-05:00

Spot the error from an AP cutline:

Odong Obong, barely 3 days old, is tended to by his mother as he lays under a mosquito net in a hospital ward in Akobo, Southern Sudan, on Thursday.

And here are select military quotes, with plenty of civilian applications, from reader Jack in a forwarded e-mail:

"If the enemy is in range, so are you." — Infantry Journal

"It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over the area you just bombed." — U.S. Air Force Manual

"Tracers work both ways." — U.S. Army Ordnance Manual

"Any ship can be a minesweeper. Once." — Maritime Ops Manual

"Never tell the platoon sergeant you have nothing to do." — unknown Marine recruit

"If you see a bomb technician running, try to keep up with him." — USAF Ammo Troop

"When one engine fails on a twin-engine airplane, you always have enough power left to get you to the scene of the crash." — Multi-Engine Training Manual

"What is the similarity between air traffic controllers and pilots? If a pilot screws up, the pilot dies; but If ATC screws up ... the pilot dies." — Sign over control tower door

Errors revealed

2010-04-02T14:19:00.005-05:00

In case my reader ever comes back and can't figure out the answer to the most recent spot-the-error quiz, here it is.

1. After two tumultuous seasons under Billy Gillespie, Wall and Calipari led Kentucky to its 44th regular-season SEC championship, 26th conference tournament title and a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament.
Error: Placing "Wall and Calipari" after the prepositional phrase "After ... Gillespie." John Wall didn't play under Billy Gillespie, and John Calipari didn't coach under Gillespie. They both came after Gillespie left. The phrase refers to Kentucky, so Kentucky must follow the comma.
The sentence should have read: After two tumultuous seasons under Billy Gillespie, Kentucky won its ... tournament under Calipari and behind Wall (or: ... behind Wall's leadership).

2. Asked if the issue was dead this legislative session, Thayer said, "That remains to be seen."
If the issue's status is uncertain, it cannot be dead. The answer must be no.
By the way, add "remains to be seen" to your list of evil phrases that must never be used. It is meaningless, as it applies to everything in the future.

Other evil phrases to avoid:
"The day started out like any other."
"with interest" as in "I read, with interest, the story ..."
"We'll have to see what happens."
"at this time"

What evil phrases are on your list?

Jock talk

2010-03-23T15:23:00.003-05:00

In honor of the NCAA tournament, here are some more great quotes from athletes and coaches.

Irish football (soccer) player and coach Johnny Giles:
"I'd rather play in front of a full house than an empty crowd."
So make sure you enjoy a pint before the match.

Dick Butkus:
I wouldn't ever set out to hurt anyone deliberately unless it was, you know important — like a league game or something."
As in National Football League?

Joe Theismann
"Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein."
Case in point.

Terry Bradshaw
"I may be dumb, but I'm not stupid."
Case in point II.

Spot the AP error

2010-03-19T14:22:00.004-05:00

What's wrong in these two paragraphs from AP stories?

1. After two tumultuous seasons under Billy Gillespie, Wall and Calipari led Kentucky to its 44th regular-season SEC championship, 26th conference tournament title and a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament.

2. Asked if the issue was dead this legislative session, Thayer said, "That remains to be seen."

More on the Oxford comma

Would it help in this statement from the Lady Vols player who scored the winning basket?
"I'd like to thank my parents, Coach Summit and God."
Well, with those bloodlines, no wonder she's so talented.

Some Stylebooks, AP included, call for eliminating the Oxford comma in most cases but make an exception when "an integral element of the series requires a conjunction." The AP example:
"I had orange juice, toast, and ham and eggs for breakfast."
I don't think the writer of this entry spent a lot of time thinking up the example. Why is the first conjunction — between "toast" and "ham" needed? Ham and eggs are still two different items, aren't they?

Punctuation saves lives

2010-03-12T15:40:00.003-06:00

Some of my Facebook friends recently pointed out a Facebook group entitled:

"'Let's eat Grandma!' or 'Let's eat, Grandma!' Punctuation saves lives!"

The page contains amusing examples of mangled English and unintended messages, as well as discussions on usage. One discussion is on the Oxford comma.

An Oxford comma is the comma before the conjunction in a series. In the following sentence, the Oxford comma is immediately after the word "barbecue":

He bought corn-dogs, barbecue, and cotton candy at the fair.

Newspapers that use the Associated Press Stylebook eliminate the Oxford comma, deeming it unnecessary. The purpose is conserving space — all those commas add up, you know.

But leaving it out can have unintended consequences. An example from the Facebook discussion, sourced to a Peter Ustinov documentary:

"Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector."

Either that describes a most eclectic tour or it reveals things I never would have suspected about Nelson Mandela.

Andy Griffith

2010-02-19T14:19:00.004-06:00

Quiz:

A popular entertainment Web site reported that the actor Andy Griffith was "indicted into the Gospel Country Music Hall of Fame."
Maybe you can spot at least two reasons why that is not true.

Griffith is well known for his TV roles as Sheriff Andy Taylor on the Andy Griffith Show and as the attorney Ben Matlock on the TV drama Matlock. He is also known for his movie roles and even his gospel albums. But his big break into show business didn't come from his singing or acting. Rather, it was a comedy monologue he recorded in 1953 entitled "What it Was, Was Football."

In the monologue he takes the part of a country preacher who accidentally finds himself at a football game. Having never seen the game before, he describes what he sees. A portion:

"And what I seen was this whole raft a people a-settin’ on these
two banks and a-lookin’ at one another acrosst this purty little
green cow pasture! Well, they was! And somebody had took
and drawed white lines all over it and drove posts in it and
I don’t know what all! And I looked down there and I seen
five or six convicts a-runnin’ up and down and a-blowin’ whistles!"

The album sold more than 800,000 copies.

Best selling authors

2010-02-11T15:53:00.004-06:00

And now, the answers you've been waiting for:

Excluding Shakespeare, who was the best selling author of all time?
Answer: Agatha Christie, whose 85 books sold between 2 billion and 4 billion copies, which is actually about the same as Shakespeare despite the slightly more compressed sales window.

Who was the best selling author in the English language?
The same two: Shakespeare and Christie, followed by Dame Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland, another Brit, whose books sold between 500 million and 1 billion copies.

The fourth best selling author of all time is also the answer to the next question:
Who was the best selling American author?
Harold Robbins, with an estimated 750 million copies.

Who is the best selling living author?
Another American — Danielle Steel, whose actual name is Danielle Fernande Dominique Schuelein-Stell, with 580 million copies sold and going strong.

Who is the best selling children's author?
If you guessed J.K.Rowling, you might be right. Or not. She is the best-selling living children's author with an estimated 400 million copies sold. But the 60 books of Theodor Suess Geisel, or Dr. Suess, have sold as many as 500 million copies. Geisel, by the way, also edited humor magazines, wrote humor articles for leading magazines and drew editorial cartoons during World War II.

Precise numbers of books sold are not public information, and book publishers are notoriously protective of those numbers. These rankings are based on a compilation from Wikipedia, which used estimates from multiple sources.

Prolific writers

2010-02-05T10:32:00.004-06:00

I started reading Bernard Cornwell's "Agincourt" recently and noticed in the flyleaf that he has written more than 50 books, historical novels. Cornwell is best known for his Sharpe books, which were adapted for the British film series Sharpe's Rifles starring Sean Bean.

That got me wondering, who is the most prolific author in the world? I knew Isaac Isamov had written 100 books. Was that the most? Turns out Isamov wrote many more than that. Depending on the source, he wrote as many as 500 (most sources credit him with writing or editing 500, with the actual number authored perhaps half the total). But whatever the actual number, Asimov was surely the record-holder, right?

Wrong.

The prize goes to the South African author Mary Faulkner, according to Trivia-Library.com. Faulkner wrote a mind-boggling 904 novels under six pen names.

Second place, at 850 books, was also a woman, Lauran Paine. The most prolific American author, Paine wrote Western novels under 14 pen names, all male — except perhaps the gender-neutral J.F. Drexler and J.K. Lucas. Born in 1916, Paine holds the distinction as most prolific living author.

Another source credits English romance novelist Dame Mary Barabara Hamilton Cartland with "an estimated" 723 books. Trivia-Library.com credits her with 280+ books.

But continuing with the Trivia-Library.com list:
Third: American dime novelist Prentiss Ingraham — 600+.

Fourth: Polish writer Jozef Ignacy Kraszewski — 600+.
Fifth: English children's book author Enid Mary Blyton — 600.

British authors dominate the top-20 list, but American children's book author Howard Roger Garis comes in at 10th, with 500+ books.

Later we'll look at the list of best selling authors. Care to venture a guess at the following?

Excluding Shakespeare, who was the best selling author of all time?
Who was the best selling author in the English language?
Who was the best selling American author?
Who is the best selling living author?
Who is the best selling children's author?

J.D. Salinger

2010-01-29T11:12:00.005-06:00

We're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, so I'll just say I'm thankful I managed to escape any English teacher intent on inflicting Catcher on the Rye on her students. But there's no denying the impact of J.D. Salinger's semi-autobiographical novel, which has sold 60 million copies, on the American consciousness in the first two decades after its publication. Publishers expect a surge in new sales after his death Wednesday at 91.

Soon after the novel was published in 1951, Salinger went into seclusion, where he remained the rest of his life. He never published another novel, although he did publish a collection of short stories.

Catcher was hailed for its authenticity, spawning many imitations. It is anything but. The novel is thick with the pretentious tone that marked too many novels of the mid 20th century.

You can decide for yourself. Here are some popular quotes from Catcher (note the frequent use of the first person pronoun — 20 times in 10 quotes):

"I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect."

"Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it."

“It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it.”

“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.”

“I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”

“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”

“I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.”

“I'm just going through a phase right now. Everybody goes through phases and all, don't they?”

Headlines

2010-01-22T14:51:00.005-06:00

Am I the only person in America who doesn't care who is the Tonight Show host? How does the breathless drama of Leno's and Conan's respective time slots get so much press day after day? With Haiti and the Massachusetts election and so many other real news events, how does this keep getting headlines? Many Facebook friends are weighing in as if it matters. I don't get it.

But speaking of headlines, I confess to being a fan of Leno's weekly feature with that title. Here are a few favorites, forwarded by a reader, followed by my comments (I can't vouch for their authenticity — the headlines, I mean, not the comments):

Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says (that's why they get the big bucks)

Miners Refuse to Work after Death (fine, then they won't get paid)

Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant (you'll never know until you try it)

War Dims Hope for Peace (and that headline dims hope for journalism's future)

Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures (ah, that explains it)

Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges (paid for with stimulus cash?)

Kids Make Nutritious Snacks (they taste like chicken)

Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half (now that's an effective stay-in-school program)

No toaster

2010-01-20T14:58:00.003-06:00

The Poe toaster was a no-show.

Since 1949, a mysterious visitor in a dark cloak has left three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac at the Maryland grave of Edgar Allen Poe on the author's birthday, Jan. 19. A group of Poe fans gathered this year, as they do every year, to read selections from Poe's works while awaiting the mysterious visitor, who has never been identified. It is not known whether the toaster is the same person every year.

The tradition started in 1949, marking the centennial of Poe's death in 1849, and it lasted until last year, the bicentennial of Poe's birth in 1809.

Writers' resolutions

2010-01-15T14:44:00.003-06:00

Here are some writer's resolutions I invite you adopt for the no-longer brand new year:

1. Write. Daily. Schedule it. Two hours is better than one because it takes a while to get into the flow, but one hour is better than none.
2. Read. Good writing will inspire you, but even bad writing has a place — it leaves you thinking, I can write better than this. The ordinariness of most any published work can take the mystique out of writing. That's a good thing if that mystique is an obstacle to getting started.
3. Turn off the TV. It robs creative energy.
4. Walk. A brisk walk outdoors stirs creative energy.
5. Nap. Especially if you stall out. Your thinking will be clearer after a brief rest.
6. Start. Don't let a late start turn into a don't start. Yeah, so it's already halfway through January — so what?

Strunk and White

2009-12-24T09:51:00.005-06:00

For 50 years, writers and editors have relied on a pocket-size grammar
reference book entitled The Elements of Style, but commonly referred to
as "Strunk and White" for its authors, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White.

You probably recognize the name E.B. White as the author of Charlotte's
Webb, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan. The Pulitzer Prize
winning author also wrote for The New Yorker for six decades.

The 1959 publication was actually White's edited and updated rewrite of Strunk's
1918 grammar guide. Strunk had been White's English professor at
Cornell.

The Elements of Style is the best-known and most widely used grammar
guide, having sold more than 10 million copies. But not everyone is
enamored of it.

In an essay for Chronicles of Higher Education in April, University of
Edinburgh English professor Geoffrey K. Pullum shreds Strunk and White.
Pullum's view: "(B)oth authors were grammatical incompetents."

Pullum writes: "The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem
in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges
from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence
has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has
significantly degraded it."

Pullum then picks the volume apart, particularly the authors'
misunderstanding of active and passive voices.

Pullum concludes: "Several generations of college students learned
their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and
the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely
anxious and insecure whenever they write 'however' or 'than me' or
'was' or 'which,' but can't tell you why. The land of the free in the
grip of The Elements of Style.

"So I won't be ... toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and
underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state
of grammatical angst. I've spent too much of my scholarly life studying
English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and
interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch
of trivial don't-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic
bumblers who can't even tell when they've broken their own misbegotten
rules."

The entire article can be found at:
http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497

Although Pullum is on target, I still recommend that you keep a copy of
Strunk and White handy.

Shakespeare?

2009-12-16T15:56:00.005-06:00

Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare? For two centuries, scholars on both sides of that argument have made passionate and reasoned arguments. Among those who doubted that the real Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the works attributed to him were Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Orson Welles, Sigmund Freud and Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin wrote: "In the work of greatest geniuses, humble beginnings will reveal themselves somewhere, but one cannot trace the slightest sign of them in Shakespeare. Whoever wrote [Shakespeare] had an aristocratic attitude."

Others point to the shear volume of Shakespeare's works and conclude that no one man could have written it all. Others say the real author left clues of the clever ruse in the works themselves where only the most perceptive can spot them.

More recent skeptics have included Sir John Gielgud, Joe Sobran and Derek Jacobi, the who produced the "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt."

Whom do the skeptics say wrote the works? The leading candidates are Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford; Sir Francis Bacon; Sir Walter Raleigh; and Christopher Marlow, a prolific writer believed to have faked his own murder to escape execution for heresy. Some say Marlow wrote from exile and credited the works to Shakespeare with the bard's collusion. Dozens of others have been suspected of writing the works, including Queen Elizabeth and King James I.

The author and columnist Joe Sobran's 1997 book "Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time" posits that the real playwright was de Vere.

Because the prevailing view that Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare, there is no list of prominent celebrities who argue their case. But plenty of scholars have made convincing arguments. Here's a couple of readable arguments for:
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/4081/Shakespeare.html

Sports talk

2009-12-11T16:01:00.004-06:00

Post-game interviews are icing on the cake for those writers who also love sports. Watching coaches destroy the English language is as entertaining as watching Ndamukong Suh destroying quarterbacks. Coaches, many of them with master's degrees, mangle phrases as badly as running backs. And coaches have a particular talent for confusing verb tenses. But you expect more from sports writers, who make a living with the language.

Sometimes sportswriters project their own errors onto coaches in quotes. One writer I read frequently online quotes coaches using "that" for "who," as in "He's a player that shows real leadership" instead of "... who shows real leadership." Another writer leaves off the auxiliary verbs in perfect tense. Instead of "We've got to turn this season around," it is "We got to turn this season around." The writer wouldn't write "He got to get better" or "I got to get better" but can't seem to hear the last part of the contraction "we've" during interviews. It took hearing the coaches' own words for me to realize it was the writers who inserted the errors.

The inability to use verb tenses correctly afflicts plenty of national sportswriters. It has become fashionable for coaches and athletes to speak of past events in present and future tense. "If we score on that fourth down we win the game." Ah, but the game is over and you lost, so it's too late for that.

A CBS sportwriter, in a column about this year's five Heisman candidates arriving in New York for tomorrow's award ceremony, makes six errors in the first four paragraphs. Example: "If there isn't a second left on the clock last week in Arlington, Texas, the fallout carries all the way to New York for the 75th Heisman ceremony."

But there ISN'T a second left on the clock. It ran out — twice, actually, as those who saw the game know — six days ago. The sentence should read: "If there hadn't been a second left on the clock last week in Arlington, Texas, the fallout would have carried all the way to New York for the 75th Heisman ceremony." That turns 28 words into 30. Is that really such a problem?

By the way, I pick Colt McCoy for the Heisman. He's had a strong season to cap a stellar four-year career. Mark Ingram can wait until next year. Suh will have to be satisfied with being selected first in next year's NFL draft. Gerhart managed to take 21 credit hours at America's most selective university while racking up 1,736 yards against tough competition. He deserves it as much as anyone. Tebow doesn't have the stats this season to become only the second player to win the Heisman twice, but if they give an award for greatest all-around human being on the planet, he's a shoo-in.

Chesterton on literature and education

2009-11-25T11:58:00.003-06:00

G.K. Chesterton distinguished prose from poetry:
"The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say."

Chesterton dashed the snobbish notion that truly great art or literature cannot be also popular:
"By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece."

Chesterton was a keen observer of society and a biting critic of public institutions. He said of public education: "The purpose of compulsory education is to deprive the common people of their common sense."
And these words from 1935 England fit 2009 America:
"Though the academic authorities are actually proud of conducting everything by means of examinations, they seldom indulge in what religious people used to describe as self-examination. The consequence is that the modern state has educated its citizens in a series of ephemeral fads."

Indeed, the unending succession of educational reforms demonstrates not only that every previous attempt to reform failed, but that every new generation must stumble upon this revelation anew.

Michener on writing

2009-11-13T14:12:00.003-06:00

James Michener on writing:

"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."

That one might surprise readers of Michener's lengthy novels. He packed so much historical information in each novel that the reader might assume that he wasted no time trying to find the right word or worrying about the "swirl and swing."
He accomplished it in two steps. He explains:

“I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.”

My son and I watched an old Waltons episode, "The Literary Man," about a middle-aged drifter in search of the great story he was meant to write. He convinced John-Boy, the aspiring writer, that the secret to becoming a successful writer was to leave everything behind and set out on a personal journey. In the end, of course, the drifter realized he was deceiving himself; success as a writer does not depend on embarking on great adventures (Twain, Hemingway) but writing honestly about what you know.

Or, as Michener said:
"The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination."

The same was true of C.S. Lewis and Beatrix Potter and J.K. Rowling and countless successful writers who were also loners. The adventure might be more fun, but it is more likely to distract you from writing than inspire you to write.
Writing is work. That doesn't mean you can't enjoy it. But you must sit and do it.

Michener:
“I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.”

Do you aspire to write — or to be a writer? If the former, you have a stronger chance.

Coaches' wisdom

2009-11-12T14:50:00.003-06:00

Some coaches dispense wisdom.

"Coaching is not a natural way of life. Your victories and losses are too clear cut."
Tommy Prothro

"Make sure that team members know they are working with you, not for you."
John Wooden

"Every game is an opportunity to measure yourself against your own potential."
Bud Wilkinson

And some coaches, not so much.

"The road to easy street goes through the sewer."
John Madden

“The playbook that Kent has, we have. When they walk out the door, they can take everything else with them. When you have a copy of it, you have a copy of it."
Charlie Weis

“Hey, the offensive linemen are the biggest guys on the field, they're bigger than everybody else, and that's what makes them the biggest guys on the field.”
John Madden

The latter are more fun.

More poetry definitions

2009-11-06T15:00:00.004-06:00

From reader Jack, more on poetry:

"Here is a quote for your son to ponder,
'Seldom seen on restroom wall
are words that do not rhyme at all.'

"or perhaps this, from 'The Journal of My Other Self' (R.M.Rilke)
'he was a poet and hated the approximate'"

Thanks, Jack.

And here's a scholarly, and most unpoetic, attempt to define poetry from About.com:
"Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary. Poetry is an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define."

Snore. All you need are the last three words: "impossible to define."

Bad poetry

2009-10-30T13:42:00.004-05:00

My son, a junior in high school, has developed strong but uninformed opinions about poetry. If a poem doesn't have rhythm and rhyme, he has decreed, it is not poetry. So his definition of poetry is minimalistic: "Words laid down with rhythm and rhyme."

Poetry is, admittedly, difficult to define. But Samuel Taylor Coleridge has provided the best definition of poetry I know of: "The best words in the best order."

Rhythm and rhyme at least demonstrate that the writer selected the words carefully. But that can be demonstrated in many ways. Some poetry can be appreciated only by a practiced ear.

If you as a writer take as much time selecting the right word or rearranging a phrase as other writers take to churn out 1,000 words, you just might be a poet.

My son is a critic, but the harshest critics of writers are other writers. Fortunately for readers, the criticism can be quite amusing.

Will Rogers:
"In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing."

Yeah, and not just in Hollywood.

T.S. Eliot:
"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."

And the editors who have been there are the quickest to recognize writing that is just beyond fixing.

Flannery O'Conner:
"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

True enough, but if you don't stroke those young egos the university will lose paying customers. The professor's first job is not to teach but to keep the customers happy.

Dear writer, don't let those negative comments discourage you. Take the advice of Lillian Hellman: "If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves."

Especially if that advice comes from T.S. Eliot or Flannery O'Conner. But what if that advice comes from Lillian Hellman? Do you take her advice by ignoring it, or ignore her advice by taking it?

Randy Wayne White

2009-10-27T16:09:00.003-05:00

My friend Jack pointed me to the Web site of crime fiction author Randy Wayne White, which contains some writing exercises that might push you toward writing the book you've been mulling. Exercise 1 begins:

"Write the dust jacket copy for the book you hope to write. Write as if your book has already been accepted, as if you've already received your advance payment, and as if what you write will appear on the book when it is published." The copy should emphasize "key why-you-must-read-this-book elements that will put you, the author, in better touch with your novel or work of non-fiction."

White recommends that you begin by reading, "over and over," the dust jacket copy of some favorite books. The copy "should establish key characters and plot elements." And it must be between 225 and 250 words — "no exceptions."

Web site, docford.com, contains plenty more exercises to get your creative juices flowing.

White quotes Elmore Leonard: "My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip."

White has had 23 novels published since 1981, including seven under the pen name Randy Striker, and seven non-fiction books.

Dickens in Kentucky

2009-10-23T10:55:00.005-05:00

Ever wonder how your favorite author might describe the place where you live? The most famous English author of the 19th century, Charles Dickens, was known for his descriptions, so vivid that you can almost smell the coal fires and rotting food, almost hear the wheezing coughs and the clattering hoofprints on the cobblestones of London's streets. But how would he describe, say, Kentucky? Or Illinois?

In his "American Notes," Charles Dickens recounted his only visit to the United States in 1842. Part of the journey took him down the Ohio River aboard a riverboat from Cininnati to Louisville, then past present-day Paducah to Cairo and up the Mississippi to St. Louis. He describes a lengthy conversation with a Choctaw chief who was on his way home, presumably to Indian Territory (Oklahoma), after meeting with government officials in Washington. This was about 10 years after the Choctaw were forcibly relocated from the Southeast to Indian Territory along what became known as the Trail of Tears. The Choctaw were the first of the five civilized Native American tribes to be removed from its homeland. Dickens wrote:

"He spoke English perfectly well, though he had not begun to learn the language, he told me, until he was a young man grown. He had read many books; and Scott’s poetry appeared to have left a strong impression on his mind: especially the opening of The Lady of the Lake, and the great battle scene in Marmion, in which, no doubt from the congeniality of the subjects to his own pursuits and tastes, he had great interest and delight. He appeared to understand correctly all he had read; and whatever fiction had enlisted his sympathy in its belief, had done so keenly and earnestly. ...
"He was a remarkably handsome man; some years past forty, I should judge; with long black hair, an aquiline nose, broad cheek-bones, a sunburnt complexion, and a very bright, keen, dark, and piercing eye. There were but twenty thousand of the Choctaws left, he said, and their number was decreasing every day. A few of his brother chiefs had been obliged to become civilised, and to make themselves acquainted with what the whites knew, for it was their only chance of existence. But they were not many; and the rest were as they always had been. He dwelt on this: and said several times that unless they tried to assimilate themselves to their conquerors, they must be swept away before the strides of civilised society."

Dickens also desribed meeting "a certain Kentucky Giant whose name is Porter, and who is of the moderate height of seven feet eight inches, in his stockings. ... There never was a race of people who so completely gave the lie to history as these giants, or whom all the chroniclers have so cruelly libelled. Instead of roaring and ravaging about the world, constantly catering for their cannibal larders, and perpetually going to market in an unlawful manner, they are the meekest people in any man’s acquaintance: rather inclining to milk and vegetable diet, and bearing anything for a quiet life."

Dickens' account of the region around Paducah was not complimentary:

"Nor was the scenery, as we approached the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, at all inspiriting in its influence. The trees were stunted in their growth; the banks were low and flat; the settlements and log cabins fewer in number: their inhabitants more wan and wretched than any we had encountered yet. No songs of birds were in the air, no pleasant scents, no moving lights and shadows from swift passing clouds. Hour after hour, the changeless glare of the hot, unwinking sky, shone upon the same monotonous objects. Hour after hour, the river rolled along, as wearily and slowly as the time itself."

Dickens was particuarly nasty in his description of Cairo, which I have quoted before:

"At length, upon the morning of the third day, we arrived at a spot so much more desolate than any we had yet beheld, that the forlornest places we had passed, were, in comparison with it, full of interest. At the junction of the two rivers, on ground so flat and low and marshy, that at certain seasons of the year it is inundated to the house-tops, lies a breeding-place of fever, ague, and death; vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope, and speculated in, on the faith of monstrous representations, to many people’s ruin. A dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away: cleared here and there for the space of a few yards; and teeming, then, with rank unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo."

Had Dickens visited Cairo in the 1920s, he would have seen a thriving, bustling city of 25,000. But today, 167 years after Dickens' brief stop, his description is eerily accurate again. The city has lost two-thirds of its population, and it has the highest concentration of poverty in Illinois. Abandoned buildings — homes, downtown storefronts, churches — sit rotting away, overgrown with vegetation.

Buckley's big words

2009-10-16T10:37:00.005-05:00

Readers often criticized the late William F. Buckley's vocabulary, complaining that one couldn't read his books, or even his columns, without a dictionary handy. Buckley found himself constantly defending his use of words unfamiliar to most readers. In fact, he eventually wrote a book on the subject. It was called, appropriately, "The Right Word."

He wrote: "I am often accused of an inordinate reliance on unusual words, and desire to defend myself against the insinuation that I write as I do simply to prove that I have returned recently from the bowels of a dictionary with a fish in my mouth."

Instead, he said, he looked for the word that best fit. He just happened to operate with a greater vocabulary than — well, just about everyone else in the English-speaking world.

In a 1996 interview, he found himself again defending his use of obscure words: "So, in defending the use of these words, I begin by asking the question: why were they invented? They must have been invented because there was, as the economist put it, 'a felt need' for them. That is to say, there came a moment at which a writer felt that the existing inventory didn’t quite do what he wanted it to do. These words were originally used because somebody with a sensitive ear felt the need for them. Do you therefore, because it’s very seldom that one hears an A-flat diminished tenth, say to yourself, I won’t use that chord, notwithstanding the pleasure it gives to people whose ears are educated enough to hear that little difference? People don’t say to a musician, please don’t use any unusual chords."

An accomplished musician, Buckley had a keen ear for the rhythm and tone of words placed together. He wrote in a style that, when read aloud, would be pleasing to the ear, or at least to his ear, which were the only ears he had to work with.

In National Review, the magazine he founded, he wrote: "In language, rhythm is an act of timing. 'Why did you use the "irenic" when you say it means "peaceful"?' a talk show host once asked indignantly. To which the answer given was: 'I desired the extra syllable.' In all circumstances? No, for God's sake."

In a New York Times interview, Buckley said a writer should be "sensitive to cadence, variety, marksmanship, accent, nuance and drama."

What do you do when you come upon a word, in Buckley's writing or elsewhere, that you don't know?

Buckley said, "That reader has the usual choices: he can ignore the word; (he can) attempt, from the context, to divine its meaning precisely or roughly; or he can look it up."

More comments from Buckley can be found at: http://grammar.about.com/od/advicefromthepros/a/buckleywords.htm

Brookhiser on writing

2009-10-12T10:38:00.005-05:00

From Richard Brookhiser's blog, "Right Time, Right Place" on National Review Online:

Secrets of Writing, Revealed
One of the questions that came up in Claremont, Calif., on my Left Coast swing was, How does one become a (better) writer? I gave three practical exercises.

Writing. Practice does not make perfect, unless you are Keats, but it makes you better. Write and write and write, to deadline if possible (that compels you to write faster).

Reading. Read good writers. Steal shamelessly. In time, and with luck, the dross of imitation will fall away, and you will be left with your own alloy. (William F. Buckley Jr. was a model to all who wrote for him, though we couldn't — and shouldn't — have become junior WFBs ourselves).

Editing. (Don't you mean being edited? — Ed.) Having your flourishes struck away is a necessary experience. It is good to have to take one hundred words out of a piece because an ad got bigger; better to have to put the words back and add another hundred because the ad went away.

Poe

2009-09-29T15:25:00.003-05:00

How much do tragic personal circumstances contribute to artistic genius? Mark Twain certainly endured more than his share. Others, like Ernest Hemingway, created their own tragic circumstances.

Unlike Twain, whose life's work was filled with wit and humor despite the untimely deaths of most of his loved ones, Edgar Allan Poe's dark style and macabre stories reflected the tragedies of his own life. His parents, both actors, died when Edgar was a toddler, his mother at age 24, his father at 26. He was estranged from his foster father, and his foster mother died when he was 20. He was accepted into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, but was dismissed after one year.
His older brother, with whom Edgar lived as a young adult, also died at 24 of tuberculosis. Edgar's wife, whom he married when she was 13, died at 25.
Although a prolific and commercially successful author, Poe was an alcoholic. He died at 40, possibly from alcohol poisoning.

The bicentennial of Poe's birth, Jan. 19, 1809, was this year. Next Wednesday, Oct. 7, marks the 160th anniversary of his death. Every year on his birthday, the mysterious Poe Toaster — clad in black with face obscured, with a hood or scarf, and carrying a silver-tipped cane — visits Poe's grave and leaves a partially full bottle of cognac and three red roses.

Trivia: The Baltimore Ravens are named for Poe's poem "The Raven."

Wolfe and Tan

2009-09-23T15:40:00.003-05:00

From an Entertainment Weekly interview, bestselling author Tom Wolfe on his problem meeting deadlines:

"It has been a character defect of mine from early on. When I was unable to do The Bonfire of the Vanities, I had the title and everything, but I didn't know where to start. And I was almost catatonic for eight months. I'd sit in front of the typewriter and nothing happened. I read somewhere that writers as they get older become more and more perfectionist. Which may be because they think more highly of themselves and they worry about their reputations. I think there's some truth to that."

Asked, "It seems like you must enjoy writing. Do you?"

Wolfe replied: "No, I really don't. Every now and then, there's something I know is going well, but I wouldn't call it fun exactly."

From an Academy of Achievement interview with Amy Tan:

"I also grew up, thankfully, with a love of language. That may have happened because I was bilingual at an early age. I stopped speaking Chinese when I was five, but I loved words. Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power."

Writing blogs

2009-09-18T10:48:00.004-05:00

Check out the following blogs:

ETO 22, The Dead Man in Yossarian's Tent
Old Tybee Ranger
Dot Common Sense

The first blog is my son's. A new blog, it offers humor pieces he has written based on his military experience, including his deployment to Iraq.

A sample:
“Sir, I was wondering what funding source you would like me to use in order to pay for all these projects,” he asked.
“The funding sources have all been cut off,” he quickly replied. “I told you, no money as a weapons system. You really need to take notes, LT.”
“Roger, sir, that’s why I was asking. If we have no way of paying these people, then I guess I’m not sure why we are starting these projects.” Lieutenant Ox was attempting to use reason, but Major Schmeis had long since built up an immunity to that nonsense.
“Because nonlethal is the main effort, LT. We do nonlethal, or people die. Is that what you want, LT? For people to die? People are dying every day, LT, and if we don’t do nonlethal, people are going to continue to die. You do love America, don’t you?” He asked.
“I do love America, sir.” LT Ox loved America so much that he volunteered to leave it for 15 months at a time to not do projects in Abu Dahbu. It was about a good a place as any to not do projects, when one thought about it. Why, just now, some of his friends were not doing projects in Afghanistan, others were not doing them in the Philippines, and he was sure that even now, there was some super-secret special forces in Iran or Pakistan right now, not doing projects in some small village, attempting to win the hearts and minds.

The second blog is my brother-in-law's. He's been at it for some time, writing daily on a host of topics from music to science to history to politics. He includes lots of links and visuals. He and my sister, along with another couple, are retracing Lewis and Clark's Voyage of Discovery, and he is blogging daily on his observations.

A sample:
"Today was our first day in western Iowa and under a brilliant sun. We expected to see thousands of acres of corn and soybeans. We also knew the impact of bio fuel development caused farmers to increase their acreage in these crops over the last few years. How does one measure that increase? For those confined to the highways, it is the brilliant reflections of the sun off what must be thousands of new grain storage bins on farms both big and small. The new corrugated steel bins contrast sharply with their older, drab gray neighbors. With a bit of elevation and the correct sun angle, they glitter like gems set in a quilt of tan, green and yellow spreading to the horizon."

The third blogger is an Illinois reader who has decided, after a lifetime of thinking about it, to start writing.

A sample:
"It probably is now apparent that I know very little about Writing, having written nothing more original than Technical Reports for the past twenty five years or so, but I think I'm willing to learn, from experts in the field, those who earn their living on the keyboard, and with the agility of their mind.
"But therein lies the trick. I've said before that I have probably read Thousands of books in my life, so far, and usually add from two or three to six or seven, weekly, depending on the weather and my attention span. I do not regret for one moment reading anything, but I think one danger that I will have to learn to avoid, or at least manage, is letting any one writer influence me in my writing."

Art v. craft

2009-09-11T15:26:00.004-05:00

On the art blog suite101.com, Mary Rayme writes:
"Art is a work that transcends its humble materials to create an original statement or expression in a meaningful and enduring way. Crafts CAN transcend their humble materials as well to become art but it takes an experienced and determined crafter to do this. The elegant and humble quilts of Gee's Bend transcend their craft origins to become modern masterpieces of color and shape. Enjoy looking at these magnificent examples of great art being created out of great necessity."

My sculpture professor in college defined the distinction between art and craft in simpler terms:
"A craftsmen weeps over his mistakes. An artist celebrates them."

Art provides for more of a dialogue between the creator and the creation, where the artist responds to what the work says to him. Craft is a one-way conversation in which the crafter imposes his will on the work, beats it into submission, knows before he begins what the final product will look like and does not deviate.
A fine piece of craftsmanship can be beautiful but is is less likely to be original. Developing into a craftsman requires repetition of the same process time and again.
Art is riskier. Art follows a less-trodden path. It is at least as likely to fail as succeed. But it has greater potential.
The greatest work combines the practiced skill of the craftsman to an original work. The artist who can do that is the true master.

2009-09-09T16:14:00.003-05:00

Correct the error in this AP brief:

Oklahoma tight end Jermaine Gresham will miss the rest of the season after having surgery to repair torn cartilage in his right knee against Brigham Young.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Do you think it's too late to start writing? It's a good thing Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't think that way when, at her journalist daughter's urging, she started writing books at age 65. She wrote about her own adventures as a child in a series of nine children's novels, the Little House books, between 1932 and 1943. And then she lived to see them widely published before her death in 1957 at age 90.

Interestingly, Wilder got an unusually early start on another of her careers — teaching. She was hired to teach in a one-room school at age 15 and taught three years while continuing her own schooling. She quit teaching at age 18 when she married a young but already prosperous farmer, Almanzo Wilder, whose own childhood is featured in Wilder's "Farmer Boy."

Wilder's motivation was largely monetary. A series of misfortunes, culminating in the loss of the couple's investments in the stock market crash of 1929, had made them dependent on their daughter. But by the mid-1930s, both Wilder and her daughter Rose were successful authors, earning substantial income from book royalties.

Wilder's success was due to several factors, including Rose's editing of her manuscripts, but it was absolutely dependent on one of the most basic principles in writing — write what you know. Although she was well read and interested in many things, she did not try to go outside herself in her subject matter.

King on writing

2009-09-04T11:03:00.004-05:00

Stephen King's "On Writing: A Memoir on the Craft" is a guide for aspiring writers combined with a memoir on King's life and work.

Some excerpts:
"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it."

King's maxim suggests that if you don't observe the first part, you'll never get it written, and if you never observe the second part, you'll never get it published. Be protective in the first stage, be open in the second.

It makes me nervous when people ask me to critique their work, not in fear that they won't listen but but in fear that they will. I don't want the responsibility for spoiling someone's art because of my own biases. I always qualify my comments by suggesting that they ask at least three people to look it over and then pay close attention to suggestions they hear from at least two, but to feel free to ignore comments they hear from only one.

More King:
"In truth, I've found that any day's routine interruptions and distractions don't much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters."

I think that reflects the discipline of a seasoned writer. Many artists require isolation (Thoreau), and so they create late at night or physically separated from the confines of their everyday lives in a studio or attic or barn loft.

King:
"The scariest moment is always just before you start."

That's true of every art. Painters are frightened by empty canvases. Actors are frightened just before the curtain opens. Writers are frightened by blank pages (or blank screens with pestering cursors pulsing their impatience). The important thing is to start, even if you start badly.

Elmer Kelton

2009-09-01T16:05:00.004-05:00

Elmer Kelton died Aug. 22. He was 83. Although not well-known outside his native Texas, he was immensely popular in the Lone Star state.

Kelton, who maintained parallel careers as a journalist and a novelist, was the author of 62 books. The most famous was "The Good Old Boys," which was made into a movie starring Tommy Lee Jones. The Western Writers of America voted Kelton "Best Author of All Time." His novel "The Time It Never Rained," which literary critic Jon Tuska called "one of the dozen or so best novels written by an American in the 20th century," is among my all-time favorite novels.

Kelton said he like to take a character, put him in a time of change and transition and see what he did.

Judy Alter, his long-time publisher at TCU Press and author of "Elmer Kelton and West Texas: A Literary Relationship," penned his obituary for the Dallas Morning News Sunday. She wrote: "Elmer's characters were complex, never Western stereotypes, but his authentic voice was the most distinctive aspect of his writing, along with the same wry humor that characterized him in conversation. He shied away from happy endings because, he said, life doesn't work out like that."

Twain on writing

2009-08-27T11:42:00.003-05:00

Reader Dan spotted the error in the AP story (see comments under Sports Talk, Aug. 21).

Mark Twain

With Hal Holbrook's one-man show, "Mark Twain Tonight," coming to the Carson Center in Paducah next month, I thought I'd whet your appetite with some of Twain's words on writing.

"The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say."

"I like the exact word, and clarity of statement, and here and there a touch of good grammar for picturesqueness."

"Anybody can have ideas — the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."

"... use plain simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English — it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them — then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice."

"As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out."

"I am almost sure by witness of my ear, but cannot be positive, for I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules. A generation ago I knew the rules — knew them by heart, word for word, though not their meanings — and I still know one of them: the one which says — but never mind, it will come back to me presently."

Sports talk

2009-08-21T13:56:00.005-05:00

Spot the error in this sentence from an AP story on Usain Bolt's second world record at the world championships:

"For the second straight race — five, if his record-breaking runs at the Beijing Olympics are counted — Bolt's biggest competitor was the clock."

Speaking of sports, a coach in the region said last week that this was his "41th" year coaching. Not 41st. Forty oneth (if that's how you spell it). And that's a hint about the answer to the spot-the-error puzzle.

While we're on the subject of sports, I know a lot of people are tired of Brett Favre and wish he would go away. But I, for one, think it's great that he's back, again, because he provides the best quotes of any athlete since Yogi Berra.

Take this plum: "I consider myself more of a loner now, and I think when you get older, especially in this game, and just talking with other players who have come and gone, I see what they were saying when I was a young guy in the locker room."

And: "I know it's not a one-man team win or lose."

And: "I really believe this team has a lot of potential — whether it's this year or in years to come, I don't know."

If none of that inspired you, then this surely will: "I, most talented players don't always succeed. Some don't even make the team. It's more what's inside."

OK, he still doesn't beat Yogi, who warned, "If you can't imitate him, don't copy him."

And: "You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."

I hope you know where you're going, aspiring writers, and I hope you get there.

Discipline

2009-08-18T16:30:00.003-05:00

The late humor columnist Erma Bombeck described her writing process in an 1991 interview with the University of Dayton Quarterly:

"Discipline is what I do best. I can't imagine any writer saying to you, 'I just write when I feel like it.' That's a luxury, and that's stupid. The same for writer's block. If you're a professional writer, you write. You don't sit there and wait for sweet inspiration to tap you on the shoulder and say now's the time. We meet deadlines. I write for newspapers, and newspapers don't wait for anybody. You write whether you feel like it, you write whether you've got an idea, you write whether it's Pulitzer Prize material. You just do it. That's it. Discipline is what we're all about. If you don't have discipline, you're not a writer. This is a job for me. I come in every morning at 8 a.m. and I don't leave until 11:30 for lunch. I take a nap, and then I'm back at the typewriter by 1:30 and I write until 5. This happens five, six, seven days a week. I don't see how I can do any less."

Bombeck started writing at age 37 when she convinced the editor of a suburban weekly to pay her $3 a column. By the time she died, 32 years later, her columns were syndicated in 600 newspapers and her 10 books had sold 15 million copies.

The hard work of humor

2009-08-14T15:14:00.004-05:00

The late, great southern columnist Lewis Grizzard said humor writing is hard work. "It's like being married to a nymphomaniac. The first two weeks are fun, after that it's work."

Humor writer Dave Barry said (in News Writing Interviews): "It's hard to think of an ending. The beginning is really hard, and the ending is always really hard, and the middle part is also very hard. It's just hard, hard, hard. Kids, don't go into this ...
"I am an obsessive rewriter. I don't even remember how I used to write without a computer because I have to change everything so often. But I write every sentence dozens of times, and that's literally true. ... If they ever had one of those programs that shows all the different versions of a document, mine would be in the thousands for almost every column I write. It's supposed to look the opposite of that. it's supposed to look like it just came out, and you were probably drinking when you did it — in five minutes. But for me it's hour after hour after hour of staring at the screen and just changing, changing, changing."

I am on a self-imposed hiatus from my humor column which appeared most Sundays in The Paducah Sun until earlier this year. The columns were getting a little flat as I found myself with less time to put into them. And a humor column that doesn't make readers laugh is a waste of valuable newsprint.

What P.J. O'Rourke and Dave Barry and Lewis Grizzard all say reflects my own experience. It IS a lot of work and surprisingly time consuming. I might start a column on Wednesday, tinker with it on Thursday, finish it on Friday, then come in on Saturday and finetune it — only to read it in print on Sunday and wish I could change another sentence or two. All that for a piece that is only 600 words long. I usually had it memorized by the time it went to press, and I can quote some columns almost verbatim, including some I wrote years ago, just because I stared at them so long on the screen.

That's not the process I use in editorial writing, which is more straightforward and predictable and routine. I can write two to three editorials in the time it takes to write one humor column.

P.J. O'Rourke

2009-08-12T16:56:00.005-05:00

WARNING: No one who is concerned about his social standing should read P.J. O'Rourke in a public setting.

The communist-turned-conservative humorist isn't the sort whose inappropriate comments force you to suppress a guilty snicker. Instead, they are SO inappropriate (and yet so spot on) that they make you guffaw in spite of yourself, blowing snot on those sitting nearest you, and prompting your wife to say, "If you're going to read that, go in the other room."

I mean, this is the guy whose book titles include "Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism" and "Give War a Chance."

O'Rourke's writing has the effortless quality that comes only with intense effort.

In a 2005 interview with Christopher Gray for the London Telegraph, he described his writing process:

"Writing is agony. I hate it."
"People think writing is easy, but just ask them to sit down and write a thank you note to their aunt or something and they turn purple. I like thinking about writing. I like having written. But actually sitting down and doing it ..."

O'Rourke typically writes from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. each day. "I take the kids to school and then go straight into the office. ... Four typed pages a day is the quota. That's about 1,000 words. I never yet heard of a writer who doesn't work similar hours and have a quota requirement."

He says it doesn't get easier. "Sure, I can look at some of my old pieces and see lapses of taste or clumsiness of construction and think, 'wouldn't do it that way now,' but that doesn't mean the process has become plainer to me. The thing is, when you get right down to it, and it's painful to say this, but, well, few writers get better as they get older. In fact, it's hard to think of one ... On the other hand, maybe it's just laziness. I mean, I only read English in college because I already spoke the language."

Crichton

2009-08-07T15:04:00.005-05:00

Readers Read (readersread.com) interviewed the late novelist Michael Crichton in 2002. Below are excerpts from that interview.

"I don't know why I do what I do. And I try not to analyze it too much."

(How long it takes to write a book, from initial idea to publication?):
"There is no way to say, it varies so much. The Great Train Robbery was three years. Sphere was 20 years. Jurassic was eight years. Disclosure was five years. Usually, an idea 'cooks' in my head for a very long time before I write it."

"I tend to write books that grab me by the throat and force me to write them. I don't usually feel as if I have a choice, or much control of what comes out. Often, I don't want to be writing a particular book, but there I am, writing it anyway."

"Writing a book, you get to have things exactly as you want them, but you are often struggling with yourself, which is a very hard thing to do. And you're alone a lot of the time, which is fine with me, except that eventually I start to be very silent in public settings and I find I've lost my ability to do small talk. I never had much ability at that, anyway. So in a way, writing is anti-social. But when the book is done, it's your book — good or bad, right or wrong, it's you own work. And that can produce a feeling of satisfaction."

Henry the great

2009-08-05T16:00:00.003-05:00

Secrets of success from two great American authors:

"The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night."
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"In the long run
men hit only what they aim at.
Therefore,
though they should fail immediately,
they had better aim at something high."
—Henry David Thoreau

And the lesson, of course, is that if you want to succeed as a writer, your first name needs to be Henry.

Outlines

2009-07-31T10:40:00.004-05:00

Check out "John Grisham, 20 Years of Writing" on the blog "shaffer's notebook" (shaffer'snotebook.wordpress.com).

Blogger Todd Shaffer compiled Grisham's comments on writing from numerous interviews. Grisham describes how he got started, sneaking off for a half hour as often as possible to write "A Time to Kill" while carrying on a modest law practice and serving in the Mississippi Legislature.

Grisham is a great advocate of starting with outlines. Shaffer writes: "Grisham outlines his stories extensively. Sometimes these outlines take longer to write than the manuscript. And at any given time he may be working on several outlines for different stories."

The outline contains two-paragraph synopses for each chapter in the story. Although tedious, outlining cuts down tremendously on the editing later.

"The more time I spend on the outline, the easier it is to write the book," Grisham said in an interview with Borders. And in an interview with Slushpile.net he said, "The outlining process is no fun, but it forces the writer to see the entire story."

Shaffer describes Grisham as a "self-taught writer, driven by instinct and by critical reading."

Grisham was the best-selling author of the 1990s, selling more than 60 million books. Pelican Brief was number one with 11 million copies. Grisham had four other novels in the top 10 (#2 The Client, #5 The Firm, #9 The Chamber, #10 The Runaway Jury).

The next most popular authors were Stephen King (38 million sold), Danielle Steel, Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy.

Grisham did not let up in his second decade as an author. He writes one book a year (he's at 22 and counting). At last count, 235 million Grisham books were in print worldwide, translated into 29 languages. Nine of his novels have been turned into films.

Truthful writing

2009-07-29T14:48:00.004-05:00

"The trouble with bad student writing is the trouble with all bad writing. It is not serious, and it does not tell the truth."
—Eudora Welty

In his book "Telling Writing," Ken Macrorie gives an example of false, pretentious writing from a student essay: "The automobile is a mechanism fascinating to everyone in all its diverse manifestations and in every conceivable kind of situation or circumstance."

It's the kind of writing students turn in hoping the teacher will be impressed by their vocabularies. But it's neither true (EVERYONE is fascinated by automobiles?) nor interesting, even if the grammar and spelling are correct.

Compare that with this passage, written by a fourth grader in a class Macrorie taught (the assignment was to "write freely and truthfully"):
"When I watered the calves I spilted the water on my self becose the two calves made me spell it. And then I wen't to tell my mom. The calves barn steks. And when the like you whith they tung it tikls. And when they kike you it smarts. And when you feel then it fell's like bon's."
(In case you couldn't decipher the words: "The calves' barn stinks. And when they lick you with their tongue, it tickles. And when they kick you, it smarts. And when you feel them, it feels like bones."
Macrorie points out that the child instinctively used parallel construction for "clarity and punch." Despite the bad spelling, the passage conveys more information and is more readable than the wordy passage on automobiles.

I have noticed that college missions statements are, like the automobile passage, unreadable. The committees who meet to write these statements end up with meaningless collections of trendy words placed in arbitrary order.

This one is typical: "Through all of is programs, the college encourages students of varied backgrounds and abilities to realize their full intellectual and personal potential so they may gain understanding about themselves, others and the forces shaping our rapidly changing and pluralistic world." Huh?

As is this one: "(The) University will be respected nationally for outstanding academic programs, global sensitivity and engagement, and a stimulating intellectual community that prepares students for lifelong learning in a diverse and changing world." Snore.

This one might set a record for mind-numbing nonsense: "As an urban research university with strong disciplinary-based departments and a wide array of problem-oriented interdisciplinary programs, the goal of the university is to develop, transmit, and utilize knowledge in order to provide access to quality education for diverse groups of students ..."
Really, a "wide array of problem-oriented interdisciplinary programs"?

You would think that somewhere in the halls of those hallowed institutions they could find someone who can write an honest sentence. If I'm paying tens of thousands of dollars for an education, I really don't care about their global sensitivity. I just want to know they're going to teach me some things I don't already know.

The fourth grader might write: "The kollig shud teech me stuf." That would be an honest mission statement.

Construction v. Creation

2009-07-17T11:26:00.004-05:00

WORD PLAY

My son asked, "Did you want any updog?"
"What's updog?" I responded.
"Nuttin' much. What's up, dog, wit' you?"

I told him that was an old joke. And besides, it was supposed to be "updoc."
He asked, "UpDOC? Nobody says updoc."
Bugs Bunny did, of course. But he didn't know that. Culture evolves, but not much.

CREATING

Charles Dickens: "The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists."

Dickens may not have intended this as theology, but it is sound doctrine. The word of the Lord to Jeremiah (v. 1:5) "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." And David wrote in Psalm 139 (v. 15, 16): "My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body." As created beings, we were loved before we came into being. We existed in the mind of the Creator.

And because we inherited the nature of God, the "spark of the divine" in one theological tradition, we have the ability not only to visualize our creation — art, music, writing, architecture — but to derive intense joy from the creative process and lasting joy from the finished product.

But our work is never seen complete before it is created. I have spoken with many artists and writers who say they don't know where the piece they are working on is going. Fiction writers sometimes find their own hearts racing as they strike the keys in eager anticipation of what will happen next. You might argue that since they dictate the events, nothing that happens can be a surprise. But in fact the writers often DON'T know. They create the characters, and while the characters generally behave in accordance with the traits the author has given them, that leaves plenty of room for suspense and surprise. And sometimes the characters behave in ways wholly unpredictable even to their creator.

Iconic monotony

2009-07-14T16:31:00.004-05:00

Reader Frankie wrote:
"I know we have discussed this before, but if you have any influence at all, I beg of you to plead with your fellow media types to find another word besides 'iconic' to describe anything and everything under the sun. Just within the past couple of days: from Iran, we have Neda, who (appeared) as the iconic video martyr; today, it is Ed McMahon, described on (the) MSN home page as the “iconic” Tonight Show sidekick. Enough already. I know these fads usually fade away (parameters, paradigm shift) but this one seems to have no end.

To which I replied:
"It has become the iconic cliche. But it fits the parameters of newspaper style. You'll just have to wait for a paradigm shift."

To which Frankie responded:
"Gadzooks! How about you initiate the shift by ordering your reporters/editors to obviate the word from their lexicons?"

I couldn't resist:
"Instead I will suggest that they find more opportunities to use the word 'Gadzooks!'"

Ah, but Frankie is right. And he even wrote before the death and subsequent nonstop coverage of the other two "icons," Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.

We in the press do tend to perpetuate word fads. They generally originate on the screen. Writing coach Paula LaRocque addressed the problem of cliches in a column entitled "Fadspeak: Gag me to the max fer sure."
She listed some of the "canned clutter" media writers should avoid:
Get real.
Get a life.
Get over it.
Go for it.
Suck it up.
Deal with it.
Whatever.
The mother of all ...
Yesss!
Your worst nightmare.
Duh.
In your dreams.
The ... from Hell.
Yadda, yadda, yadda.
No-brainer.
Clueless.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist (or brain surgeon).
What's wrong with this picture?
Same old same old.

If you're like me, you probably didn't get through the list without finding a few you've used, and that might make you feel a little embarrassed and self-conscious. What I recommend is that, instead of immobilizing yourself by trying to keep a list of all the words and phrases to avoid in your writing, just strive to keep your writing fresh. Go ahead and use the cliche once to get it out of your system (that's my one shot with "get it out of your system"). But don't let your writing grow stale with the habitual use of any word or phrase. If you know you've used it before, think of something else this time. And don't let it bog you down in the first writing; catch it in the rewrite.

Hemingway's Five Tips

2009-07-02T09:44:00.005-05:00

Ernest Hemingway offered five tips for authors (which might be more accurately called "five tips for authors who want to write like Ernest Hemingway"):

1. Use short sentences.
William Faulkner and Jame Fenimore Cooper don't make the cut.
From A Farewell to Arms: "That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had to learn."

2. Use short opening paragraphs.
From The Snows of Kilimanjaro: "'The marvelous thing is that it's painless,' he said."

3. Use vigorous English.
Show muscle, passion, pain, dirt.
From The Old Man and Sea: "The next shark that came was a single shovelnose. He came like a pig to the trough if a pig had a mouth so wide that you could put your head in it."

4. Be positive, not negative.
This is Hemingway, so the rule obviously has to do with style, not content.
Hemingway would not have written: "She was not entirely devoid of a certain comeliness." He would have written — and did — "She was still a good-looking woman, she had a pleasant body ... she was not pretty, but he liked her face."
Example from In Our Time: "When they evacuated they had all their baggage animals they couldn't take off with them so they just broke their forelegs and dumped them into the shallow water. All those mules with their forelegs broken pushed over in the shallow water. It was a pleasant business. My word yes a most pleasant business."
Note, incidentally, that Hemingway didn't care for apostrophes, reflective of his aggressive, impatient nature. Pauses projected weakness and would have undercut his raw prose.

5. Never have only four rules.
Hemingway here signals that the number of rules, even the rules themselves, are essentially arbitrary. Use or discard his as you see fit.

Further or farther

2009-06-26T09:16:00.004-05:00

Further or farther?

A travel guide offers: "10 tips for trips: How to make money go farther"
A Los Angeles Times travel article is headlined: "Tips to make your budget go farther for less"
A Continental Airlines ad promises: "Make your money go farther."

An error or a play on words? I think it's a clever bit of marketing, even if many consumers don't pick up on it.

Your story

G.K. Chesterton wrote: "With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand." True, but solving the mystery is a powerful motivator. A strong aid for authors in writing stories is recognizing their own stories.

Risk

2009-06-19T10:13:00.004-05:00

Oscar Wilde: "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

Discovering and becoming your true, inner self is fraught with risk. Society affirms conformity. Your place in the culture is determined by the uniform you wear and the language you speak. If it is original it doesn't fit any of the available boxes and people don't know how to interact with you. We have all been conditioned to categorize. And we learn to interact with categories, not individuals. It's safer to accept the limits of our own category than to venture out, to follow our heart.

I generally try to steer clear of politics and theology on this blog, but today's an exception. I have observed that the more individual believers become like Christ, the less they become like one another. That is, the more we discover the unique nature God has endowed us with, the more liberated we become from the constraints of society's boxes. Of course, becoming like Christ is distinct — and sometimes the polar opposite — of becoming more religious. We have all observed the choreography of popular religion, which is the antithesis of freedom in Christ. But I won't risk stepping on any toes by saying anything more about that.

I believe we create — paint, sculpt, build, sing, play, dance, design, write — as an expression of our nature, which is in the image of our Creator. That's true whether we acknowledge the Creator or not. Creativity is at the heart of God's nature. And we reflect His nature in our own creative expression. It is a central part of what separates us from the rest of creation.

It follows logically, then, that the more we find that unique inner voice, the more original will be our artisitc expression. But the more original the expression, the less likely the culture will be to affirm it.

Angela Monet: "Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music."

Still, an original piece — art, music, literature — that is truly honest touches the heart of the open listener or reader or observer. At a subconscious level, we distinguish the authentic from the pretentious. The audience that recognizes the authentic expression shares the joy of the creator in discovering himself, his "nature of God," in his work.

Recognize the danger. Then risk it anyway.

Deadlines

2009-06-17T14:38:00.004-05:00

Deadlines can be a curse ...

Bill Walsh: A harsh reality of newspaper editing is that the deadlines don't allow for the polish that you expect in books or even magazines.

... a blessing ...

Emile Zola: One forges one's style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.
Harry Shearer: I am one of those people who thrive on deadlines. Nothing brings on inspiration more readily than desperation.
Val Kilmer: Without deadlines and restrictions, I just tend to become preoccupied with other things.

... or restrictions to ignore.

Sarah McLachlan: Deadlines are meant to be broken. And I just keep breaking them.
Douglas Adams: I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Some writers are frozen, immobilized by deadlines. Others need deadlines to get their creative juices flowing. A pastor used to call me at midnight or later on a Saturday night to ask if I had any sermon ideas. I've never been a pastor — why was he asking me? I was more stressed over his sermons than he was. One time he STARTED on a wedding sermon two hours before the wedding, while intermittently entertaining guests of the wedding party in his house, a parsonage next to the church. He clearly thrived on deadlines.

I used to be quite a procrastinator, but as I get older I can't stomach the pressure. Now I generally write editorials a couple of days in advance. That gives me an extra day or two to polish them before publication. But, as a result, I'm sometimes criticized for overworking a piece and for writing long. The risk of reworking something too much is that the writing can lose the fluid quality of the first writing.

If you are motivated by deadlines but aren't yet getting published, impose deadlines on yourself. Write them down. Tell your spouse. That might provide the little bit of pressure you need to strike the keys.

Excuses

2009-06-12T12:18:00.003-05:00

The first book Dave Sargent ever read was his own.
Sargent, a prolific children's book author, went through school without ever learning to read. In the military he was diagnosed with inverted-mirrored vision, or severe dyslexia. He finally learned to read at age 20.
A successful entrepreneur, he didn't start writing until he was nearly 50. Because of his dyslexia, he wrote his first books with giant letters on a writing tablet. He has more than 300 books in publication.

And your excuse for not writing ...?

Rewriting

2009-06-04T11:35:00.004-05:00

I told you about the letter writers who don't bother to rewrite from their orginal draft and leave it to us to decipher their scribblings. I have observed over the years that the worse the writing, the more demanding the writers. The letter writers who hand over the most embarrassing pieces are the most likely to insist that we publish it "exactly like it is," with no editing. When I owned a small weekly, I sometimes granted their wish, taking devilish delight, I confess, in allowing them to sound so stupid in a public forum. But as a rule we clean up letters, correcting minor errors, deleting repetition, cutting the superfluous.

Authors also rewrite, sometimes multiple times. Shelby Foote is the one exception I know about. Foote, who wrote his books in longhand, seldom altered a word from the first draft. He never used a computer or even a typewriter. And he had enough clout with the publisher that he was one of the few authors whose work was immune from alteration by book editors.

He is the rare exception. James Patterson rewrites two to seven times. Many, probably most, authors pitch more of their writing than they keep.

Recommendation: Write the first draft quickly to capture the rhythm and flow. Don't rewrite right away (unless you are, like me, writing on a daily deadline and have no choice). Writing coach Daphne Gray-Grant, author of "8 1/2 Steps to Writing Faster, Better," writes: "Self-editing requires tincture of time. If you want to judge how much rewriting your work requires, you need some distance from it. Take a break."

For some that break might be hours, for others it might be weeks, or even months. For letter writers, I always suggest that they sleep on it one night and reread it the next day before submitting it.
When you rewrite, do so carefully to fix the flaws without compromising the flow.

Why & When

2009-06-02T10:17:00.004-05:00

Why write? How about to capture the passion before it dissolves in time?
Charles Frazier (author of "Cold Mountain" and "Thirteen Moons"):
"So of course time is necessary. But nevertheless damn painful, for it transforms all the pieces of your life — joy and sorrow, youth and age, love and hate, terror and bliss — from fire into smoke rising up the air and dissipating on a breeze."

When should you write? Stephen King writes in the morning. As did Shelby Foote. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote late at night. Those two periods of the day seem to be the most common. Afternoon and evening, on the other hand, seem to be when writers live their lives.

And here's a suggestion from Elmer Kelton (author of "The Time It Never Rained" and "The Good Old Boys"):
"I just write whenever I can."

Can't find the time? Hogwash. Not many writers can afford a Walden Pond experience. Waiting for the right circumstances before you begin is only an excuse. If you want to write, write.

Just that

2009-05-29T11:36:00.003-05:00

Writing pet peeve:
Sentences in which the subject and the object are the same word, with "just that" in between.
Example: Knuckleheads who like the Yankees are just that, knuckleheads.
It is understandable how this happens in conversation. You might say, "The genius who first combined chocolate and peanut butter is, well, just that, a genius."
But it is inexecusable in writing. It reflects the worst kind of laziness, refusing to self-edit. It shows up in letters to the editor all the time.
Few letter writers bother to edit their own work. Everyone makes mistakes, of course, but I can't imagine submitting something for publication without editing it first.

Newspaper bloopers

2009-05-22T10:59:00.003-05:00

More from Richard Lederer, author of "Anguished English" — Newspaper bloopers:

The airplane was only a few feet from the ground when it crashed, witnesses said.

With the exception of victimless crimes (which need not concern us here), every single crime committed in this nation of ours involves a victim.

Simon Wynne has been kicked off the ESU basketball team after being arrested and accused of driving a parked car while intoxicated.

Montreal police don't hesitate to use whatever laws, regulations or persuasions they feel they need to control morality in the city and prevent it from getting a foothold.

A college friendship that began a year ago ended in matrimony yesterday.

You don't know Jack

2009-05-15T13:33:00.004-05:00

Reader Jack e-mailed the following in response to last Friday's quiz:

I think the answers are
1. Moby Dick (or the great white whale) H. Melville
2. A tale of two cities, c. Dickens
3. Pride and Prejudice, J. Austin
4. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, S. L. Clements (NDP Mark Twain.
5. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger ( I hated that book)
6. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, in my humble opinion one of, if not the greatest Writer of my Generation
7.The Great Gatsby, F. S. Fitzgerald (college Assignment, hated it)
8. The Old Man of the Sea, E. Hemingway ( I think this was Hemingways best work, many of the others were of the Strong Man, Breast-Beating, Hard Drinking, Courageous, genre (which he belied, by committing a messy suicide rather than show true courage and battle an illness,)(just my humble opinion)
9. 1984, Orwell
10. Absalom, Absalom, W. Faulkner.
Fun Quiz, and challenging, I liked it that you slipped a couple of easy one and a couple of more difficult (read forgettable) ones.

Jack knows his literature. He got 100 percent. Well done.

ANGUISH
If you haven't yet stumbled across "Anguished English: An Anthology of Accidental Assaults Upon Our Language" by Richard Lederer, you ought to get your hands on a copy. A sample:

From a want ad: "Mixing bowl set designed to please a cook with a round bottom for efficient beating."

Lederer has a sequel entitled "More Anguished English: an Expose of Embarrassing, Excruciating, and Egregious Errors in English."

100

2009-05-12T15:40:00.003-05:00

This is the 100th post on this blog. I orginally expected to post every weekday, which would have meant that the 100th post would have been published last August. But reality set in. I now shoot for two posts a week and often settle for one.

Speaking of 100, when the late Isaac Isamov wrote his 100th book, he chose to base it on his favorite subject: himself. At least he admitted it: "Any writer who is a monster of vanity and egocentricity — like myself for instance — would love to write a book like that." He called the book "Opus 100."

The prolific Isamov wrote or edited more than 500 books. And, if Wikipedia is to be believed, his works have been published in nine of the 10 categories of the Dewey Decimal System. Although he wrote on chemistry, astronomy, history and literature, he is best known for his science fiction novels.

He wrote: "I don't indulge in scholarly depth. I don't make creative contributions. I'm a translator. I can read a dozen dull books and make one interesting book out of them."

In a single decade, he wrote 68 books. That's a book every 53 days.

Asmiov is probably the most popular science fiction writer of all time. And the least popular. Critic John Jenkins wrote: "It has been pointed out that most science fiction writers since the 1950s have been affected by Asimov, either modeling their style on his or deliberately avoiding anything like his style."

Opening lines

2009-05-08T13:44:00.003-05:00

QUIZ TIME.

Identify the books that begin with these first lines. Also identify the authors.

1. Call me Ishmael.

2. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

3. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

4. "TOM!"
No answer.
"TOM!"
No answer.

5. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

6. To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.

7. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

8. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

9. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

10. From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in which Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that— a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.

Resume bloopers

2009-05-01T13:34:00.004-05:00

Looking for a job in writing?

One tip: Proof your resume.

Back when I hired reporters, the first task was to narrow the list by eliminating as many applications as possible right away. A sloppy resume is a red flag. I remember one applicant who wrote that she was a part-time, on-call EMT.
She meant to write: I have one eight-hour shift a week.
But she left out the "f" in shift. Either that or she suffered from a chronic periodic bowel disorder. Regular irregularity? At least she knew when it was coming.

The online Resume Dictionary (resumedictionary.com) lists the following actual resume bloopers (with my comments).
* References: Dictionary, Almanac, and the Guinness Book of World Records. (What, no encyclopedias?)
* References will be executed upon request. (Even if they recommend you for the job?)
* Will provide sootable references. (Must be hiring a chimney sweep.)
* References will provide references. (But you have to figure out who they are.)

Application Bloopers —

Please list your past experience:
* I don't believe in reincarnation. (But ask me again in my next life.)
* Did not keep track. (Don't worry, we can call your mother.)
* I have no past. (You're hired, Jason Bourne.)
* I have no experience but I am willing to find some. (Just tell me where to look.)
* I have been clean and sober since college. (And I haven't been to college since last night.)

Reason for leaving last job:
* Maturity leave. (Don't worry, I got over it.)
* Took leave of abstinence. (I'm thinking of making it permanent.)
* The policy manual forced me to. (Something about showing up for work every day ...)
* Didn't need one. (A job or a reason?)
* For a bitter job. (That's why I'm here, to punish myself.)

Ever come across a resume or application blooper? Please share.

Literary Tour

2009-04-29T15:36:00.005-05:00

In case there's a reader of this blog out there, here are the anwers to Jack's quiz:

Williams Faulkner wrote the outline to his book "A Fable" on the walls of his Oxford, Miss., home, Rowan Oak.

I would not have known that had we not stopped to tour the house on our way home from spring break in Florida a decade ago.

On that memorable trip we also drove through the square at Canton, Miss., where "A Time to Kill" was filmed. We saw John Grisham's home in Oxford and toured the town square and the Ole Miss campus. We took the ferry to Dauphin Island and drove through the historic downtown in Mobile.

Oxford is an incubator of literary talent, as is Ashville, North Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. Mississippi, as a whole, has proven fertile ground for great American writers, with Eudora Welty at the top of the list. (You can keep Faulkner.)

On that spring break trip, the last we took with the whole family, we camped on the beach at Gulf Islands National Seashore at Pensacola, where my sister, Mary, once lived and worked as a National Park Service ranger. It was cold and windy, and the beach was deserted. No wonder, the icy wind drove sand particles into your skin. We have a picture of Sam, who was about 5, racing along the edge of the surf with his hands outstretched and his head thrown back, inspired by the seagulls. He was lost in his world. That photo, as grainy as the air that day, captures his nature, approaching life at full tilt and reckless abandon. The youngest of our five and the only one still at home, he is the family exclamation point.

Style

2009-04-22T16:40:00.004-05:00

STYLE

Most newspapers keep their style consistent by adhering to the rules in the Associated Press Stylebook. The Stylebook tells us when to capitalize a title and which months can be abbreviated and how to compile box scores in baseball.

The AP Stylebook also contains some annoying inconsistencies. In AP style, we use the dollar sign ($1) but not the cents (50 cents). We spell out percent (25 percent) and degrees (40-degree temperatures) but abbreviate miles per hour (60 mph). We spell out inches (8 inches tall) but abbreviate milimeters (20 mm).

The most ridiculous entry in the Stylebook might be this:

numerals
A numeral is a figure, letter, word or group of words expressing a number.

AAAAAAAAGH! In the first place, why not just put: "A numeral is a number"? What the heck does "expressing a number" mean?
And if that weren't bad enough, a numeral — to the rest of the world anyway — is a symbol or mark that represents a number.

Numbers may be written out or represented by symbols (one, 2, III, four, 5, VI ...)
But numerals are never written out (Arabic numberals: 1, 2, 3, 4; or Roman numerals, I, II, III, IV).

Three dead white males

2009-04-20T16:11:00.006-05:00

A local reader e-mailed the correct answers to both questions and the bonus from Friday's post.

The three authors who all died 45 years and five months ago Wednesday (if I had given the date — Nov. 22, 1963 — it would have been a dead give-away on one of the authors, who also made his mark in another field) are:

Aldous Huxley: "Brave New World"
C.S. Lewis: "The Chronicles of Narnia"
John F. Kennedy: "Profiles in Courage"
Bonus: The book about their imaginary conversation on the other side:
"Between Heaven and Hell" by Peter Kreeft

Well done, Jack.

Now, can anyone name the three authors' author brothers or anything they authored?

And any thoughts on which author made the most important and lasting impact on civilization?

Here's a case for Huxley, at least for the "lasting" part. Huxley may be the least familiar of the three today, at least in the United States. But he was instrumental in pushing the Darwinian theory of natural selection into the mainstream. He believed it the duty of the naturally superior, such as himself, to engineer the non-survival of the least fit. He advocated eugenics, social engineering to prevent inferior races from procreating. Hitler was in the same idealogical camp; the Third Reich represented the logical outcome of the eugenics movement. The inherent racism in the theory of evolution is veiled today.

Huxley came from a family of intellectuals suffering a serious superiroity complex. But others were not so enamored of the Huxleys as they were of themselves. Here's what other authors had to say about Aldous Huxley:
D.H. Lawrence: "I don't like his books; even if I admire a sort of desperate courage of repulsion and repudiation in them. But again, I feel only half a man writes the books — a sort of precocious adolescent."
George Orwell: "You were right about Huxley's book (Ape and Essence) — it is awful. And do you notice that the more holy he gets, the more his books stink with sex? He cannot get off the subject of flagellating women."
Bertrand Russell: "You could always tell by his conversation which volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica he'd been reading. One day it would Alps, Andes and Apennines, and the next it would be the Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath."

Jack the e-mailer offered his own literary question:
"Now here's one for you: What famous author outlined chapters of one of his books on the walls of his bedroom/writing room?"

I got this one, but I won't give it away yet. Anyone know the answer?
And here are three bonus questions: What is the name of the book? What is the name of the house? And where is it located?

Check it out

2009-04-17T11:58:00.004-05:00

QUIZ BOWL

Three authors died on the same day 45 years and five months ago Wednesday.

1. Name the authors.
2. Name at least one book each wrote.

Bonus: Name the book about their imaginary conversation on the other side of the veil. Name the author.
Double bonus: Tell me where I misplaced my copy.
Triple bonus: All three authors had brothers who were also authors. Name the brothers and at least one each of their books.

Essay: Which of the three authors made the most important and lasting contribution to civilization?

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT SENSE

My friend and frequent critic Frank, an lawyer, said he saw a church marquee that read "Practice resurrection."
"How?" Frank asked. Good question.
"Got me," I replied. "I'm still looking for an attorney who isn't still practicing. At what point do you get it right?"
Not to be outdone, Frank responded, "About the same time that 'caregivers' stop charging!"

CHECK IT OUT

A co-worker told me a book we discussed is available to peruse at the library but can't be taken out of the library. I told her I would check it out. Of course, I'll have to check it out without checking it out.

I met my wife in a library. We were both on work study in college, assigned to the library. I checked her out right away. She was definitely the most interesting thing I ever checked out at any library.

My job for three years was to write -- draw, really -- the titles on the spines of rebound books, usually with white ink. Many of the books were oversize — art books and the like. The library manager hired me for my "artistic" hand. I happened to be back in that library a few weeks ago and found dozens of books that I had marked 30 years ago. It was nice to see some sign, however insignificant, that I had been there.

Kiddie lit

2009-04-10T15:20:00.003-05:00

Do you secretly enjoy reading "children's" books? You are not alone.

C.S. Lewis, author and professor of English literature at Oxford and Cambridge, wrote this about kiddie lit:
"No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty — except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all ...
"I never met The Wind in the willows or E. Nesbit's Bastable books till I was in my late twenties, and I do not think I have enjoyed them any the less on that account. I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story ...
"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up ...
"Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table."

You may not have been able to read Lewis' space trilogy as a child, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the Chronicles of Narnia as much today as you did when your mother first read them aloud to you.

Lewis himself was enchanted by Beatrix Potter's books and illustrations as a child, and they proved a major influence on his fantasy works. And are not A.A. Milne and Dr. Seuss, Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, Beverly Cleary and Laura Ingalls Wilder as delightful today as when you first read them?

Enormity of writing errors

2009-04-03T14:56:00.007-05:00

Fiction

My wife stumbled across a great book for a spring fiction writers. It is entitled, appropriately, The Fiction Class.

Patterned after herself and her own experience as a writing instructor at the Gotham Writers' Workshop in Manhattan, author Susan Breen's main character is the aspiring writer and fiction writing teacher Arabella Hicks. In each chapter, the book moves from her class, where the assignments provide the setting for the dialogue, to the nursing home where Arabella meets with her mother, with whom she has a strained relationship. At the end of each chapter is an "assignment" for the reader that corresponds with the class's assignment in that chapter. Breen teaches the elements of fiction writing in the midst of a published piece of fiction. What better way to teach them?

Preventative preventive

I wish there were one. Even a fine writer like Victor Davis Hanson, in this week's column, refers to "renditions, preventative detentions, wiretapping and summary deportations ..." Some dictionaries include "preventative" as an alternative to "preventive," but it still grates. I even hear "preventative" used occasionally by medical professionals.

Enormity of the problem

Mona Charen's column this week looks at the evolving English language. "Begs" as used in "begs the question," she points out, means "avoids" or "circumvents." To beg the question is to avoid the issue at hand. But because the phrase has been used incorrectly so often to mean "raises (or prompts) the question," it is now acceptable to use it that way, according to some dictionaries, including the New Oxford Dictionary of English.

The same might be true of "15 items or less," which should, of course, be "15 items or fewer." Charen says that one annoys her adolescent child. (I think the lady in front of me in Wal-Mart yesterday thought it read "15 items or more" since her shopping cart contained at least 30.)

Charen still does not approve using the term "enormity" as a synonym for "enormousness." The term "enormity" means "excessive wickedness, passing all moral bounds." But will she accept it to mean "enormousness" in 10 years, when TV news anchors and politicians have said it that way so often that dictionaries permit it?

And not to beg the question, this begs the question: Should we avoid a common usage error until the language experts tell us it's now acceptable to use it in the popular fashion, or should we instead use the error as frequently as possible to hasten its evolution to acceptability?

Charles Frazier

2009-03-27T16:28:00.003-05:00

Good writing requires a certain level of life experience and worldly wisdom to be authentic. It's no wonder so many writers don't start writing, at least for publication, until later in life.

Charles Frazier, whose best-selling first novel, Cold Mountain, won the National Book Award in 1997, wrote:
"Like a lot of people, I tried to write some fiction when I was in my twenties -- college age, just after that. It didn't work out so well. I wasn't happy with what I did; it was sort of pretentious and technically pretty weak. So I put the idea away and decided that I was going to be an academic and that I would study other people's writing rather than write myself.
"But when I got to be forty, I started wanting to write again for some reason and found when I began doing it that what I was doing was very different from what I had done when I was twenty-five. I liked it better and was happier doing it, and it seemed to me to be worth doing suddenly. I think as you get older you get a sense of what is important in life and what is significant enough to write about."

Frazier was 47 when Cold Mountain was published.

Notice also that, by his own account, his early writing was product driven while the later was process driven. He talks about the results of the early writing (pretentious, technically weak), but of his mindset with his later writing (happier, worth doing).

A complete interview with Frazier is found at bookbrowse.com.

M. Scott and E.A. Poe

2009-03-13T16:32:00.005-05:00

Friday the 13th, an appropriate day for my favorite quote from The Office:

"I'm not superstitious. But I am a LITTLE stitious." —Michael Scott

And if you are a little stitious, you might appreciate a few thoughts -- witty, insightful and disturbing -- from Edgar Allan Poe:

"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."

"I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it."

"The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?"

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only at night."

"Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'"

"With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion."

Libertease

2009-03-10T16:45:00.004-05:00

As I've probably written before, the imaginary Washington Post "Mensa Invitational" has circulated in e-mails for 12 years, and it also appears on countless Web sites. It may be an imaginary column, but it is humorous and it does contain actual word entries from the Post's "Style Invitational." The Style Invitational is a weekly contest for wordsmiths to respond to a different verbal challenge each week.

A few weeks ago the contest was to write a diary entry for people throughout history.

The winner was Jeff Brechlin of Egan, Minn., who wrote:
"June 20, '76: Working on draft of document for TJ. I've articulated two unalienable Rights -- Life, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- need a third. Well, it will come to me. -Sally"

Check out the Web site for yourself.

Beverly Cleary

2009-02-27T16:10:00.004-06:00

Beverly Cleary wrote: "Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school."

So how does that happen? Cleary wrote: "My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books."

It didn't have to be travel books. The main thing is that she did it.

I am convinced that the single most effective strategy for molding high achieving kids is to read to them, starting when they are very young, even still in diapers and not yet talking. If a child sits in his mother's lap as she reads to him, and he is allowed to touch the pictures and talk about what he sees and hears, he will develop a love for books at an early age. That will serve him well throughout his life. Reading is, of course, the foundation for all learning, so kids who read well are more likely to achieve in other subjects as well.

Children will continue to read on their own all through school if they see their parents reading. And when everyone in the family reads the same books, it leads to lively discussions. I can't keep up with the reading of my wife and children, now mostly grown, and I feel left out when they are discussing a book I haven't read.

When kids say "I hate to read," what they really mean is they hate reading as a class in school. Leave it to schools to take what is naturally a pleasure and so dissect it that it becomes drudgery.

Cleary, one of the most successful children's authors, described how she approaches a story: "I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start witht he part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there."

Asked what year her books take place, she answers, "In childhood." Great books are timeless. That's why hers are still so popular, even those written a half century ago.

Review review

2009-02-24T14:40:00.003-06:00

A book reviewer writes:
"A mother's blood guilt runs the heart of this powerful novel. When it is at last resolved, a pale flower of happiness blooms, the best any of us can expect late in a rich, complicated life."

I can't figure out the subject-verb-object relationship: "guilt runs the heart." Does the reviewer mean "guilt runs through the heart ..."? That would make sense. Or "blood guilt controls the mother's heart in this novel." The sentence attempts to use the literary device of personification by referring to the "heart" of the novel. But it doesn't quite work because the subject is a fictional character's emotional motivation, or "heart," leaving the reader confused about whom the heart belongs to — the character or the novel.

The reviewer continues by saying "it is at last resolved." The antecedent of "it" is found in the previous sentence, "mother's blood guilt." Guilt might be cured or forgiven or eased or erased, but it cannot be resolved. Conflicts are resolved.

Finally, is "a pale flower of happiness" really "the best any of us can expect late in a rich, complicated life"? What a cynical view. If life is indeed rich, do we not have a reasonable chance at more than a faded version of happiness, however complicated our past?

Eggcorns

2009-02-23T15:36:00.004-06:00

A recent article in the Sun used the term "all toll." Another, more recent, article used the term "all told."

Which is correct?

"All told," of course. But "all toll" and "all tolled," which often appear in print, seem to make sense.

"All tolled" is an example of an "eggcorn," which is, according to The Word Detective, the substitution of a word of words that sound similar to correct words and make sense, sort of. The term "eggcorn" was coined by linguist Geoffrey Pullum after seeing someone write the word "eggcorn" for "acorn." An acorn is an egg-shaped seed, so the error is not illogical.

"Tolled" can mean "added up" or "charged," so "all tolled" makes sense, since the idiom "all told" is used to mean "the total" or "the sum of relevant facts" or "the end result."

The Word Detective gives another example: "for all intensive purposes" instead of the correct "for all intents and purposes." I guess that means an eggcorn can also be a mondegreen (see Jan. 9).

I have written before about the use of "kindly" for "kind of." Instead of "Kind of keep that information under your hat," the speaker says "Kindly keep that information under your hat." It makes perfect sense, but the speaker, at least in rural Arkansas, is not referring to kindness at all. It makes less sense when he says "I'm kindly getting a cold." As opposed to what, crankily getting a cold?

I heard "kindly" used for "kind of" here in Kentucky over the weekend and realized it wasn't a uniquely Arkie eggcorn.

Sturm and Drang

2009-02-06T14:02:00.006-06:00

Sorry I've been delinquent with the blog for the past two weeks. If you live in western Kentucky, western Tennessee or north Arkansas, you understand. But any readers from elsewhere might not be aware of the huge ice storm that hit Jan. 26 and 27 and shut down the region. In Kentucky, 700,000 people were without electricity. Now, ten days later, we are among those still without electricity.

Most folks are using generators while they wait for the power to be restored. Because we live in an apartment, that is not an option. So we are just toughing it out. The temperature has remained below freezing for most of the time since the storm hit, and it got down to 13 degrees two days ago. But today it's is a sunny 58. That brings some measure of relief.

I told my son in Iraq that it looked like a war zone here. He replied, "Oh, you mean trash everywhere, little kids running up to beg and lazy Iraqis sitting around waiting for a handout?" After 15 months in Iraq, he's grown a bit cynical.

Our house in Arkansas, 200 miles southwest of here, was also without power, and many of the beautiful trees surrounding the house were damaged, but the house itself was untouched. Praise be.

A reader e-mailed:

"I've been missing your column. Been somewhat out of touch due to the Sturm und Drang of the ice storm, had to retreat to our son's home ...
Just checked your blog. My wife and I were at that book sale also, but I missed that book (dang).
The amusing epitaphs reminded me of an old epitaph I memorized long ago, about an Irish fellow killed in an automobile accident. It goes;
"This is the Grave of Mike O'Day
Who died maintaining his right of way
His right was clear, his will was strong
But he's just as Dead as if he'd been wrong.

"Oh yes, one more, which you have probably already heard or read:
"Here lies Les Moore
Died of two shots from a forty four
No less no more."

I appreciated the e-mail but was, I'm afraid, unfamiliar with the term "Sturm and Drang."

The term identifies a literary movement of late 18th century Germany connected to the Enlightenment and emphasizing subjectivity and emotional extremes. It is translated to the familiar "storm and stress," (which my German mother-in-law applied to my wife as a child), but it could also be translated "passion and energy" or "rebellion." "Sturm" could also be translated "urge," "longing," "drive" or "impulse."

Wouldn't you like to live your life so that "Sturm and Drang" could be your epitaph?

(Feb. 13 update: Power was restored to our apartment last Saturday, Feb. 7. But at least 8,000 in far western Kentucky are still waiting for power, 17 days after the storm.)

Epitaphs

2009-01-23T14:39:00.004-06:00

Do you long to have your writing not merely published on paper but etched into stone for the ages? You can — for the simple price of a granite slab. Some of the cleverest, pithiest words ever penned, or rather carved, have been on gravestones in the form of epitaphs. (But how disconcerting to know that your life can be summarized in words few enough to fit on a kneehigh stone.)

Although getting your epitaph carved on your gravestone does come with the unfortunate condition that you be deceased, you can take consolation in this: you can write your own. The British collector of epitaphs, W.H. Howe wrote: "Sometimes (epitaphs) were written by their subject, who feared to leave his reputation to his surviving friends and to — truth."

Howe compiled a collection of epitaphs in a little book entitled: "Everybody's Book of Epitaphs: Being for the Most Part What the Living Think of the Dead." My wife found it at the McCracken County Library semi-annual book sale yesterday at our church, St. Paul Lutheran, where she filled a bag for $7.

Some of the epitaphs contained in the collection are lengthy, glorious monstrosities; others morbid condemnations; others touching tributes. The best are humorous quips.

Example:
Here lies interr'd beneath these stones
The beard, the flesh, and eke ye bones
of Wrexham's clerk, old Daniel Jones

An author:
Finis

A photographer:
Taken from life

Dr. Potter, archbishop of Canterbury:
Alack and well a-day
Potter himself is turned to clay

Sir John Strange:
Here lies an honest lawyer:
That is Strange

Brothers:
Here lies 2 brother by misfortun serounded
One dy'd of his wounds, and the other was drownded

Mondegreens

2009-01-09T15:56:00.005-06:00

Mondegreens

A former colleague from Texas sent a link to the Merriam Webster Online page on the topic of mondegreens. A mondegreen is "a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung."

Examples:
"The ants are my friends" for "The answer, my friend (is blowing in the wind)." Bob Dylan
"There's a bathroom on the right" for "There's a bad moon on the rise." Credence Clearwater Revival

Do you have a mondegreen? Ever think you knew the lyrics to a song only to discover later you were wrong? Ever hear your kids singing the wrong words to a song?

Style Invitational

If you enjoy wordplay, I encourage you to check out the Washington Post's "Style Invitational" online, now approaching week 800, with a new call for entries each week. The Jan. 3 edition posted results of week 794's contest "for headlines a la those in the satirical newspaper the Onion.

My favorites
Fourth place: Image of Tortilla Mysteriously Appears on Stature of Virgin Mary.
Second place: "'Liberal Elitist Press' Condemned by Ignorant Lowlife Redneck Hatemongers."
First place: "In Final rip to Beijing, Bush Calls on Premier to 'Tear Down This Wall.'"

Feel. And think.

2008-12-23T15:32:00.006-06:00

Holiday tears

If you want to read a little Christmas tear jerker, check out Rick Reilly's column "There are some games where cheering for the other side feels better than winning" on ESPN.com.

Even if you're not a high school football fan, this story will leave you a little choked up.

It's not great writing, to be honest. Reilly begins his headline with the word "There," a real no-no.

But even if you're as nitpicky as I, you'll quickly stop noticing the flaws because of the compelling story. It IS a compelling story, and Reilly tells it well. That's more important than mechanics.

Critical reading

A Metropolis reader took me to task for an editorial on global warming. He writes: "(L)et me see if I've got your thinking straight: the world is only about 4,000 years old, the planet earth is flat, and global warming really isn't. Oh yes, and we're not in hell and it ain't hot."

The editorial in question was itself taking an AP writer to task for editorializing in a scientific article. I pointed out that the consensus Al Gore and Barack Obama insist exists among scientists — that global warming is caused by human activity — is eroding and a growing number of scientists are publicly questioning the flawed models. But you wouldn't know that from reporting in the major media, where journalists have taken up the cause.

The Metropolis reader sent a series of articles on the subject from The Southern Illinoisan as a means of enlightening me. In the articles a couple of SIU profs insist the debate is over, even while a couple of their colleagues, in the same series, question the popular view. The debate is not even settled at SIU, much less in the scientific community worldwide.

But this blog is about writing, not science or politics. I bring this up because the reader employs a technique debaters use when they've already lost the argument: erecting a straw man. The straw man was accusing me of believing that "global warming really isn't." I didn't assert that global temperatures haven't risen. I merely questioned the anthropogenic causes of climate change — or more precisely, pointed out the shrinking scientific consensus on the matter.

The articles the reader sent confirmed that point. But he missed it. I suspect most readers of the package missed it.

Interestingly, the headline over the series was "America's energy savvy backsliding?" — a classic example of editorializing (injecting opinion into a news article). The first story in the news package, headlined "Activists strive to re-educate public about climate change," begins: "When a passion exists for a cause, those who fight for it don't view any hurdles encountered along the way as being too much of a challenge." Passion? Cause? Fight? Weren't these articles supposed to be about science?

I guess we shouldn't be surprised that readers like the guy in Metropolis have lost the ability to think critically when so many reporters have lost the ability to write objectively.

At one time universities and news agencies were filled with iconoclasts who took pride in questioning conventional wisdom. Those days are gone in both arenas, which are now mired in group-think. Indoctrination has replaced rigorous debate. That's not healthy for a free society.

Punch the keys

2008-12-19T13:33:00.004-06:00

They Should No Better
A local school district posted a message on their Web site informing students that, because of inclement weather, "THERE WILL BE KNOW SEMSETTER TESTS ON FRIDAY DECEMBER 18!!!"

KNOW SEMSETTER?

Ah, it's easy to pick on schools. I guess the fact that they're, you no, the ones who are teaching English makes us expect them to no better.
I confess I was more bugged by the all caps and the triple exclamation points than the spelling errors.

Feed the need

A reader e-mailed me the following:
"I am enjoying reading your thoughts. I particularly enjoyed your post of Oct 24, titled 'Inspiration.' I am one of those poor gonifs who has long wished I could write, in a readable, interesting way, but, barring a few papers and dissertations while I was in college, my wishes have lain, decomposing.
"I am a bit long (73) in the tooth to hope to write for public consumption but have been jotting down a few things, as I recall the somewhat tattered landscape of what has been my life, in case any of our three children should someday be interested in what the Old Man (literally) had been up to in his youth and beyond. In this exercise I have discovered I have absolutely no talent as a writer, barring the odd silliness in e-mails to the editor (Remember?) It would be nice if I could take a course in creative writing but that's not likely to happen. So I'll content myself in reading the output of professionals, such as yourself. Keep up the good writing and ignore the comments from asses such as I."

The reader is wrong about his talent. And he needs to start writing. I sent him this reply:
"I'm still miffed that my own dad never got around to writing his story, or
all the stories that made up his story. He was a talented wordsmith, as are you.
I would have treasured it, and I have no doubt your kids will treasure it.
"The only advantage to writing for publication is the paycheck that makes it
possible to write every day. If you are retired, nothing stands in your way.
"I find the secret to finding your voice is to write, write and write some more.
Write, don't think. Just get the words on the paper (or the screen). Worry
about the editing later."

The fictional author William Forrester, portrayed by Sean Connery in the film "Finding Forrester," said to the young prodigy Jamal Wallace: "No thinking — that comes later. You must write the first draft with your heart. You rewrite with your head. The first key to writing ... is to write, not to think."
Putting it more succinctly, Forrester said: "Punch the keys, for god's sake!"

Christmas letters

2008-12-05T15:49:00.004-06:00

I'm one of those weirdos who actually enjoys reading family Christmas letters. I don't mind the boasting, and I'm not above embarrassing my kids by doing a little boasting myself about their achievements. And if it makes the recipients roll their eyes or poke fun, I really don't care.

Christmas letters serve to keep us up-to-date with family and friends in other places. I might not remember which of your kids plays basketball and which the French horn, I can't recall whether your family vacation was to Yellowstone or Glacier, don't quiz me on whether it was your mother or hers who moved into an assisted living center, but I still like to read the letters. I'm disappointed if I don't receive a letter from someone who usually composes one.

A Christmas letter is a place marker, a snapshot in time. Today's letters often include actual snapshots, printed on the copy paper letter on a home printer.

We don't write letters to loved ones anymore. When Professor Marxhausen told us in college this would happen, I didn't believe him. But then, I didn't anticipate e-mail and the ease with which we can communicate without the bother of paper and envelopes and stamps. Marxhausen recommended preserving the practice by raising it to an art form, and his own letters (and envelopes) were suitable for framing.

Christmas letters are a suitable way to preserve the art of letter writing, even if slightly impersonal since the same letters are sent out to everyone on the list. Just a little handwritten note personalizes it.

I hope you'll send me yours, even if we barely know each other. I promise I'll read every word.

2008-12-01T15:39:00.005-06:00

Reader Bill Osborne writes:
"I've been meaning to send you a thank you note for the excellent piece captioned 'Clout' that appeared in your blog November 12. ...
"While watching the news on WPSD TV this morning, I saw the mother of the slain Little Rock TV anchor being interviewed. She generously referred to the man arrested for that murder as a 'gentleman.' This is certainly not the first time I heard someone, who is so obviously NOT a gentleman, called a gentleman. Please consider writing a piece about the word gentleman.
"You might also consider taking issue with the term 'sleeping with someone' as an appropriate way of saying 'having sex with someone' when anyone knows said couple was certainly NOT 'sleeping.'
"Finally, I think it is way past time for someone who is a respected wordsmith taking issue with TV anchors and others constantly saying, 'You know what?' One particular TV anchor woman must say, 'You know what?' at least four or five times every time she does a newscast. However, this is certainly not a local issue. All kinds of intelligent people nationally have added that meaningless phrase to their vocabulary.
"Here are three ideas for your consideration:
"1) Eliminate calling a man who does not deserve it, a 'gentleman.'
"2) Eliminate calling 'having sex with someone,' 'sleeping with them.'
"3) Eliminate the phrase 'You know what?' from everyone's vocabulary.
"You are one of those folks who definitely have CLOUT and can influence people to change, just as Mike Royko did."

Good points, Bill.
A few thoughts: The term "gentleman" has evolved over the centuries, never more rapidly than in the past generation. The title once meant a warrior trained in arms. Later it defined a man, usually of noble birth, who adhered to a code of conduct. Later it meant a man who used good manners and showed respect for others, regardless of his social position. The term "ladies" evolved similarly.

Today "gentleman" can refer simply to any man and may reflect the speaker's courtesy rather than the subject's character.

I knew a Baptist minister who inserted the word "gentleman" in a racist figure of speech in a way that was humorous, but wrong on so many levels. He referred to suspicious circumstances by saying, "Sounds like there's a colored gentleman in the woodpile." Well, whatever color he was colored, he was no gentleman if he was hiding out in the woodpile. He was obviously sleeping where he shouldn't have been sleeping, and I don't mean sleeping sleeping.

"Sleeping with" as a euphemism for "having sex with" has honest origins: the Bible. It is used frequently, as in Deut. 22:22: "If a man is found sleeping with another's wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die."
If their sleep were literal sleep, that penalty would be a bit severe.

"You know what?" is annoying but not nearly as much as "Guess what?" One of my students used to precede everything he said with it. "Guess what? I have to go to the bathroom!" (That one I might have actually guessed, given the way he was hopping about.)

My son and I count the words or phrases TV news people repeat. A Jonesboro, Ark., meteorologist used to end five or six sentences with "as well" in every forecast ("It will be rainy this weekend as well"). Another weather guy managed to work in "meantime" three or four times (he meant "Meanwhile" ; "meantime" should be preceded with "In the," but "Meanwhile" can stand alone). Another news team is afflicted with "Now." One started using it to begin sentences, and it spread like contagion to the rest of the news crew ("Now, the suspect was apprehended but police are still investigating ...").

Clarity

2008-11-21T17:38:00.007-06:00

An essay in The Masthead, the quarterly journal of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, of which I am a fringe member, begins:
"Growing up in a small town in Arkansas in the '50s and '60s, the Arkansas Gazette was one of the few institutions that earned any credit for our poor state."
Having lived in Arkansas 18 years myself, I learned that the Arkansas Gazette did not grow up in the '50s and '60s. It was already old by then.
But of course, the writer was referring to herself. The only word that should follow the comma after "'60s" is "I," as in "I knew the Arkansas Gazette was ..."
And I have no idea what credit it earned; only its banker knows that. She probably means the Gazette was one of the few institutions that "was a credit to" Arkansas in an era when racism tarnished the state's image.

The author, an editorial writer with the (Lexington) Herald-Leader continues:
"When I was five, that paper and the national news were full of images of ugly people screaming at teenagers who wanted to go to school."
Certainly the actions of the screamers were ugly, but the people were rather average looking. To avoid adding too many words, the modifier "ugly" could be moved in front of "images." That wouldn't mean the photos were of poor quality. Although the photographs were well-framed and clear, they were "ugly" because of the horrible history they recorded — white students taunting and yelling at black students attempting to enter Little Rock Central High School in 1957.

Then:
"I grew up thinking that Orval Faubus, the governor who stood in their way, was wrong, and the newspaper, the Gazette, that called him out was right."
But did Faubus stand in the way of the ugly people or the teenagers who wanted to go to school? The readers might, for a moment, think that Faubus stood in the screamers' way since they are the subject of the preceding sentence. They must surmise from the context that he stood instead in the teenagers' way.
By the way, in the most famous of those photos, the "people screaming" are also teenagers, fellow students at Central, adding to the potential confusion.

Point 1: Most readers would figure what the writer meant in this essay, even though it is not written clearly.
Point 2: Write clearly anyway. Don't force readers to pause to decipher your meaning. That's when you lose them.

Clout

2008-11-12T15:41:00.005-06:00

Sen. Mitch McConnell said repeatedly during the campaign that his position as minority leader in the Senate gave him "clout." He may have chosen that word because the word he really means, "power," has such a negative connotation.

But it reminded me of an old Mike Royko column in which he poked fun of the use of the word "clout" in this fashion.

Royko, the late Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune, quoted a Vogue story:
"'People are talking about ... the rise of the word "clout." Among those with "clout" are President Johnson, the Pope, and Ho Chi Minh of Hanoi.' (Vogue does not want us to confuse him with the Ho Chi Minh of Burlington, Iowa.)"

Royko tells of calling a Vogue editor to ask what the article meant by the word. "She shrieked, 'My God! Everybody knows what it means.'" The editor went on to explain that clout means "the ability and the means and the power to return a blow when somebody has attacked you." Royko was happy to set the smug New Yorker straight.

Clout has several definitions, but the one closest to the meaning in the Vogue article — and in Sen. McConnell's use — is "influence." Some of the senator's supporters might have clout, if they can influence him, but he doesn't have clout any more than Lyndon Johnson or Ho Chi Minh. When you have power, you don't need influence.

Slovenliness

2008-11-04T13:52:00.004-06:00

A Wall Street Journal editorial today quotes George Orwell:
"The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

The context for the WSJ is the shifting vocabulary surrounding the 9/11 attacks, which is now frequently referred to as a "tragedy," like an earthquake, with "no villainy or evil ... no blame ... no remedy." It was instead an act of war, an organized, unprovoked attack on a civilian population from an enemy that intended to continue causing us harm. That's not a tragedy. The tragedy is allowing ourselves to minimize or even forget how that event forever changed our lives.

Slovenliness of language characterizes lazy thinking people who want to keep things simple, who don't want their assumptions or world views challenged.

People judge one another in many ways — appearance, speech, associations, bank accounts. I find people's writing as a way to judge them. Not necessarily the spelling and grammar but their clarity of thought. As one who can't always express myself in speech but who tries to write precisely, I generally assume that anyone with muddled writing suffers from muddled thinking. I admire articulate people, and I'm disappointed when I discover that someone who speaks well cannot collect his thoughts on paper. I want to suggest, "Just write down what you've just said, and it will make more sense than the jumbled words you've just put together."

We all live under the limitations of our individual abilities to express ourselves. The greater our collective limitations, the more our entire culture suffers. And boy is it suffering.

But look at the bright side. At least you can add "slovenliness" to your vocabulary.

Duke's Tips

2008-10-31T15:01:00.003-05:00

From Paducah Sun Managing Editor Duke Conover, a list of words that make writing sluggish. You can add these to the "evil words" list.

and/or — It's either "and" or "or." If it is both, tell the reader why. Also, avoid using a forward slash (/).

by — passive and unnecessary: The congressman was defeated by the newcomer; The newcomer defeated the congressman

community — What is a community? If you are writing about people in a club, school, business, town, city, state, nation, then describe it to the reader, who almost always thirsts for more information but with a compact use of words. "Community" doesn't say anything when the reporter uses it other than "I don't know either."

country — Never use "country" to describe people. People make up a nation; boundaries form a country where a nation lives. Many dictionaries in second and third reference indicate that "nation" and "country" are interchangeable. But actually, they are not.

issue — tell the reader what this is: a concept, problem, matter for (insert name) to handle, etc.

myself — Never use "myself" unless "I" also is in the phrase.

process — Almost everything is a process: the process of opening a business, opening a business; the process of writing a grant proposal, applying for a grant.

there or here — Both words, in any usage, are absolute wastes of space. My recent favorite (from another newspaper): "There are items there that cannot be found here." I knew I had to be in some editor's nightmare. I pinched myself. It hurt. And I was sitting in front of a computer reading a newspaper online.

David here: I'm not absolutist about these rules, but in most cases these words will weaken your writing, and in most cases you can find a way to write it better.

Inspiration

2008-10-24T15:32:00.003-05:00

You say you want to be a writer but you're waiting for the right inspiration? I hope you're comfortable; it could be a long wait.

Or maybe you could take a tip from published writer.

Orson Scott Card, author and columnist, writes:
"Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any."

Willa Cather:
"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."

My sister's favorite western writer, Louis L'Amour wrote:
"If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow."

Jack London:
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."