Fix Your Writing

Where in the world will I go from here?

2010-04-23T18:16:00.000-06:00

As promised yesterday, following is the first draft – rough and still malleable – of the preface to my new book (which itself is barely a work in progress, and hasn't yet got so much as a working title). But I kind of like the preface, so I'll figure out a way to work it in. Hmmm. Kind of a backwards process.

PREFACE
The end of the world, when it came, didn’t arrive with a bang ... hardly even a whimper. Without an instant of warning. The world, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe, simply ceased to exist.

It was, simply, the end.

Those who were awake would have experienced a nanosecond of blackness ... but when that briefest whisper of time passed, not one remained to bear testimony on how it felt to have the very essence of being sucked from the core.

Then nothing. Not the blackness. Not even the consciousness of nothingness. Just

Nothing.

Suddenly.

No horror. No death. No rapture. No white light at tunnel’s end.

No tunnel.

No soul wafting like smoke to heaven. No heaven.

No hell. No devil.

Just the Void – the complete, total, visceral lack of anything at all ....

And God.

My new book

2010-04-22T10:56:00.000-06:00

Hard to believe it's been two months since I've landed here in the Blogosphere.

But the time has been put to good use finishing, packaging and sending of my new book to the publisher.

It's called: When Did I Become the Oldest Person in the Room? ... A practical guide for writers who write about life

The book is available now on Amazon Kindle and soon will be published in paperback, to be sold on the main Amazon site and in bookstores everywhere.

Writing a book was easier than I imagined – well, actually finishing a book, that is. I've been writing a novel for more than 10 years, and it remains today as unfinished as the day I started, practically. I'll finish that Great American Novel one day, but for now, I'm focusing in the non-fiction realm with "Oldest," which basically is a teaching manual for writers.

Successfully marketing a book, is looking as though it will be much more of a challenge than actually writing one. If I plan to continue enjoying myself as an author / editor, though, I'm going to have to make the marketing gig work, and actually sell what I write. ("Please buy my book," he pleaded, shamelessly)

Oh yeah. I've also started a new non-fiction book – as yet unnamed – that will offer up lessons in real life for anyone seeking a high-quality path to their 60th birthday. Now, this is all more or less formulated in my mind, with an outline on paper, but I haven't got a clue yet how I'm going to firmly tie my ambitious foreward into the content of the book.

I'll polish up the foreward this afternoon, and post that tomorrow.

Verbing

2010-02-10T09:38:00.002-07:00

Ever notice that it seems to be getting harder and harder to tell the difference between nouns and verbs these days? Let me shed some light on this timely topic with a few seemingly topical observations ....

The English language, I’m happy to announce, has now become so flexible that we can email an email.

I think I’ll text you about that one after I google up some thoughts.

Do we use funds to fund that project, or can I just forward the money? Because, surely, that will adversely impact progress. Am I making progress here, with this progression of progressively complex examples? Exemplary, my dear Watson!

I suspect I never fathered a child because my parenting skills were suspect. But, creativity is the father of intention.

We should really talk about this: Let’s do lunch. We’ll need a liaison to facilitate that, though; who can we talk into liaising for us? Maybe we should just get lazy and laze around the house while we dine.

I’ll have to access my schedule to make sure I’m free ... but I can probably free up some time in any case. I’ll contact you when I know. I hope our schedules don’t conflict, ‘cause I detest conflict ... most of the time, anyway – I’ve always been a little conflicted about that.

I think I need an organizer to write this all down so I have access to it later ... but I’m not organized enough to locate a retail organization who sells them, so I’m not sure I’m sold on that idea.

(If I stop off at church for a little keyboard practice, will I then be organ-izing? Or at the pastor’s lectern for a lecture ... will I be sternly lectured if I take the lectern to the rear of the church? Or should I just collect the collection plates? Let’s get together and make a decision ... collectively.)

I’ve got a couple ideas about growing your business that might grow on you ... grow, grow grow your boat, gently down the stream (talk about stream of consciousness!), merrily, verily, scarily, warily; strife is jest a scream.

In general – generally, that is – I could be serious when I contend that the flexibility to flip-flop among verbs, adjectives, gerunds, nouns and adverbs is one of the things that makes writing fun in English. Thing is, though, I’m really just funning you.

Seriously. Are we agreed? Because you have the right to object, am I right? If so, what is the object of your objection? Affection? Rejection?

Can you prescribe a prescription to solute a solution for all these convoluted convolutions? Perhaps we need to engage an advocate to advocate our diverse points of view about this pending engagement. Lawyer up, as it were.

Or, we could just man up and decide on our own (our owns?) to salute these various salutations with salutatory indifference. Do you object to my objections? That was the object in the first place – to place the onus on you.

One time.

For we are one.

But I don’t want to single you out. Not one single time.

Ain’t the English language great? Or does it just grate on your ear? Gratefully, I’m done; I’ve done it. Put a fork in me – I’m done abusing y'all with all this verbal abuse.

Next: Disambiguation

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

When did I become the oldest one in the room? – Part 3

2010-02-09T18:20:00.000-07:00

God isn’t done with me yet.

And if God is still editing, there’s hope for me yet.

I wonder whether God, like the writer, starts with a rough draft. If so, does he turn loose of the manuscript before or after we land in the womb?

Before or after we’re torn kicking and screaming therefrom?

Before or after our baptism or bar mitzvah?

Before or after our bones are interred in the cold, cold ground?

I think maybe God turns the rewrite task over at some point in our childhood. Oh, God watches: As I’ve steadily progressed toward becoming “the oldest person in the room,” I’ve felt his hand upon my shaky tiller more than once.

My journey to elder-statesman status was built largely on “wingin’ it.” Rules of thumb. Guesstimates about the best course of action or the way best to avoid embarrassment and defeat.

When I was 12, I learned that residential home lots were 25 yards wide ... I could throw a football 50 yards or so – down to Bob Minnock’s house from my front yard – but 25 was a more comfortable hard-spiral distance.

Then in the 1970s and 80s, they shrunk, and my rules of thumb – which were, after all, only rough guidelines to begin with – shrunk along with them. Older and portlier, I could maybe hit a slow wide receiver at 20 yards ... with no hope of flinging that NFL special more than 40 yards through the air.

Yep, residential home lots shrunk from 25 yards to 20 yards just in time.

Today, with a shredded rotator cuff, such old and comfortable standards no longer seem relevant.

Can’t punt a football anymore. Handsprings and headstands are out. Even hide ‘n’ seek with my grandson is a significant challenge, it seems.

Can’t hit a 7 iron 150 yards anymore, either. That worked out to a little over 150 paces back in the day, when my stride was 2.9 feet on the old pedometer.

Blessed today with a titanium hip, I set the pedometer at 2.2 and still start looking around for my 7-iron shank 150 paces out.

Still, I can accept that. Most things in life now ... I anticipate every day with relish, but have learned to scale back my expectations.

My life as a Writer? A constant revision. And by that, life has taught me about writing:

Do a rough draft.

Edit. Rewrite. Revise.

Revise your expectations, and those of your audience, to fit the vagaries of reality.

God isn’t done with me yet. And I’ve still got a few pages to go on the old manuscript.

Next: Verbing

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

When did I become the oldest one in the room? – Part 2

2010-02-04T18:36:00.002-07:00

What’s newer than an old idea?

It’s one of the perquisites of being the oldest person in the room: Chances are there are at least some jokes I can conjure up old enough that nobody’s heard them before.

The same things we found compelling about Charlie Chaplin drew us to W.C. Fields, Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Johnny Carson, Robin Williams, John Belushi, Gilda Radner and Jerry Seinfeld.

Any one of those 10 people could do a variation of “Take my wife ... please!” and mold it into a memorable moment.

That is the Writer’s charge, for truly, nothing is new under the sun. We all stand in the shadow of past greatness; the mediocrity of the past is in large part forgotten.

Or, as Shakespeare’s Mark Antony so aptly phrased it: “The evil that men do lives after them – The good is oft interred with their bones.”

Good writing is rarely made of sterner stuff.

There ‘tis, fair reader, three paragraphs, and not a fresh thought amongst them.

Whether a writing challenge is fictional (a Great American Novel to rival Billy Budd, no doubt), non-fictional (In Cold Blood) or corporate (“You’ll wonder where the yellow went ...”), the value in a well-turned phrase is perishable.

Andy Warhol claimed every person was due 15 minutes of fame. Assuming a 75-year lifespan, and fame accruing 24/7, each American would have to share that fame with about 150 other people. Throw in India and China and, well, fuggettaboutit ...

Looking at it another way, Americans stand to be demonstrably unique for about 1/150th of 15 minutes ... or roughly 5.7 seconds.

Writing is a way of being remembered for more than 5.7 seconds. Writing extends the hope that a small piece of the good we do can live beyond us.

For it’s not so much dying that I fear, as being forgotten.

Next: Part 3

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

When did I become the oldest one in the room?

2010-02-03T18:06:00.002-07:00

I attended a nonprofit board meeting recently. Looking from face to face at the dozen or more people around the conference table, it suddenly occurred to me:

I’m probably the oldest person in this room.

Over the next 90 minutes, my focus drifted sporadically from the business at hand (probably a function of my newly discovered seniority):

• That guy mentioned Van Halen. The Stones, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd were in my wheelhouse, so gray hairs aside, he’s easily five years younger than me.

• I can’t really ask these people how old they are. Well, OK, maybe the guys, but curiosity killed the cat, and asking a woman her age (at least in my tired old generation) is suicide waiting to happen.

• Wait a minute, Vicky’s crow’s feet are deeper than mine ... and “Vicky” – that’s straight out of the 1940s, isn’t it? ... no, she talked one time about not being able to take early retirement for five years. I’ve got her by a year or two, at least.

Once upon a time, I was a boy wonder. I learned to read at the tender age of 4, and was tackling newspapers, magazines and grownup novels within a couple years.

I was editor of a small-town daily at the age of 23, business editor of a mid-sized paper five years later, and headed national PR operations for a major nonprofit in five more.

Yeah, things drifted after that – a couple recessions, an entrepreneurship that didn’t fly and what-not ... but exactly when did I become the oldest person in the room?

In the car, on the way home from the board meeting, I had a long talk with myself:

“Self,” I says, “you’re getting to be kind of an old fart ... and a curmudgeonly old one at that.

“What could these young people possibly learn from me that has relevance to their everyday existence? Heck, my idea of a new-age band is Black Sabbath, and Ozzy Osbourne’s out doing commercials for Depends these days, isn’t he?”

How in the world can I stay relevant to the huddled masses, when a multi-gizillionaire like Osborne is reduced to passing himself off as an addled old codger with a fried brain and problems with incontinence?

Relevant indeed. Sounds like the kind of a problem a Writer might have to face on a regular basis. Hmmmm.

Next: Part 2

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Writer's Checklist: Make a methodical 10-step check

2010-02-02T13:30:00.000-07:00

Drivers used to know how to check under the hood. It was second nature to check the oil (when did you last do that, personally? Can you even find your dipstick? How about battery levels?)

Today, almost everyone pays a mechanic / computer technician – and, 86 times out of 100, a list of checkpoints covered by a $79.95 diagnostic backs him up.

Thus armed, he verifies the car’s engine, electrical and computer systems are at peak efficiency ... or at least won’t leave us stranded by the side of the road somewhere.

1 – Word count: MS Word, Quark and other word-processing software lets you conveniently spot check wordiness. Make sure that count is appropriate for your format and audience, then rip through your draft, line-by-line, and pare at least 30 percent. Excise extraneous words and phrases, rework verbose passages (look for commas and the word “and”), and focus on redundant content. If that leaves you short of your targeted length, add something fresh – but at 30% off, you’ve likely made your point; it’s just punchier and more readable.

2 – Spell check: Let software regenerate everything you learned in 2nd grade spelling class, and then dig in for “your / you’re” and “their / there” errors.

3 – Grammar check: MS Word, in particular, can at least point to sentences that don’t fit templated algorithms. But here’s where you’ll really start to get your hands dirty. Does what you’ve written make sense, flow and comply to basic rules?

4 – Idiot check: Now it’s time to step back and think things through. Ask questions that will keep readers from thinking you’re the village idiot. Do the level of vocabulary, assumed background knowledge, content and angle fit your audience? Is it politically correct? (Do you want it to be?) Does your exposition / argumentation progress logically?

5 – Verb variety: Study each sentence and make a note – mental or physical – of verb usage. If you use the same verb, over and over, a visit to the bookshelf (or online) Thesaurus may benefit your work?

6 – Action verbs: If your verbs are cobbled into sentences with “have” or “is” or “to” ... chances are your writing is passive (Ooops ... you’re writing passively). If, for example, your product “has passed” peer review (or worse, is “peer-reviewed”), consider writing that it “passes peer review.” Think your copy is good? Not in the big leagues: Your copy sings. Are you accepting an offer to sell? No, you’re accepting a sales offer, or, just “selling it.”

7 – Buddy check: It’s critical that friends, associates, brothers-in-law – whomever – read and critique your copy. Even if your brother-in-law is the village idiot, at least he recognizes idiocy when he sees it – he’s probably an expert.

8 – Recheck: Take all seven steps, review, reorganize, rewrite, edit and re-edit. Did a Step 5 change cause some problem with something you did in Step 2? Even likelier, you probably didn’t do it right in the first place, haven’t noticed it so far, and need the “recheck” to polish the work.

9 – Publish: The point of all writing is that someone reads it. And don’t just “put it out there.” To one extent or another, you need to be a salesman, an advocate, if written work is to have the impact you desire .... whatever that impact may be.

10 – Feedback: In the age of computers, it’s never too late for second-thoughts. If others say they love your work unconditionally, that’s great. But don’t count on it. Even brothers-in-law can be sycophants. Dig in until you really know how others perceive your work – then fix what you can, re-publish as appropriate, and note the lessons learned to guide you on your next project.

These writing checkpoints combine hands-on and computerized evaluation of potential flaws.

Like today’s professional grease monkeys, it’s not wise to ignore the myriad high-tech tools available to assist in their work.

Still, I gravitate toward the service guy who has a little bit of grease on the soles of his shoes ... whose fingernails are three shades shy of neatly trimmed and de-gritted.

After all, it’s still a car, and somebody needs to poke their head under the hood once in a while.

Next: Potpourri

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

President Reagan and the elusive backbeat

2010-02-01T17:03:00.001-07:00

About 25 years ago, a television news piece featured President Reagan in front of a large crowd merrily singing along with a band, happily clapping hands in time with the music.

The blurb was perhaps 30 or 40 seconds long, and it supposedly was a humor piece, poking fun at what clearly was to be perceived as an aging and inept President ...

For, if one looked closely, it became clear that the President (gee, what an idiot!) clearly was clapping out of time with everyone surrounding him – as best as could be seen, out of time with everyone in the huge ballroom.

Yet, if one listens closely to the audio track (which was difficult, due to the guffawing of the announcer), it became clear that several hundred people in the ballroom were clapping on the first beat of every musical measure.

Experienced performers like the musically trained Ronnie Reagan – a song-and-dance man in early Hollywood – know that the clap comes on beats 2 and 4 ... the backbeat!

So ... Ronald Reagan was comfortable enough in his own skin to clap correctly – even though he drew the ridicule of the masses, who didn’t know any better than to clap on the downbeat.

The artist/writer is a performer. He must know what’s correct and appropriate (i.e., clapping on the backbeat), and he must have the self-effacing grace and confidence to place what is correct and appropriate down on paper.

But, we are told: March to the beat of your own drummer. OK, you can do that. But know which drummer you want to make your own.

In President Reagan’s case, he was clapping to the beat of the correct drummer, though it may have been more politically correct to go along with the crowd.

But Ronald Reagan was the kind of politician who had faith that the downbeat-driven audience eventually would come around to the backbeat.

Next: A 10-step Writer's Checklist

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Percy Verantz: The dogged ardor of the artist

2010-01-29T16:52:00.001-07:00

Perseverance. To perseverate, persevere, endure, pursue, trudge on, stay the course ... to last.

Percy Verantz is a good friend. Once a writer has a couple decades of pen-work under his belt, you get to be on a first name basis ... in my case, Percy hasn’t been “Mr.” Verantz since, well, the Reagan Administration at least.

Perseverance often is the quality of a Marine. In the face of the oft-shouted command, “Don’t just stand there ... DO something!” a Marine hears the voice of a wise drill sergeant who shouts, “Don’t just do something ... STAND there!”

Think about it.

Then act with purpose. And invite Percy along for the ride.

Percy is the tortoise, not the hare. Few races are won in the first few hasty steps – particularly if one or more missteps are included in the starting fervor. Percy epitomizes the enduring stick-to-it-iveness that gets the race won – and gets a job done.

Percy knows that a writer must indeed sweat bullets. A writer must think. Create. Re-think. Mull. Shape. Turn the artwork over, figuratively, in the head – the way a whittler turns a block of wood over and over in the process of shaving away the unneeded portion.

A writer must know, in his heart of hearts, that the amazing message he seeks really does exist somewhere under layers of verbiage, grammatical gesticulation and naive disregard for the subtlety required in the process of communication.

Just like the whittler who seeks the hand-carved pony locked within the unwhittled block of wood.

Like the bullied and abused little boy who digs furiously through the fancy-wrapped box of manure – a cruel prank disguised as a Christmas gift – because, well ... “all this manure – there’s GOTTA be a pony down there somewhere!”

Percy is stubborn. Doggedly resolute and tenacious – possessing unwavering commitment; dauntless in the face of daunting challenges. He’s got guts, moxie, ardor, passion.

Percy is Jesus Christ’s Passion on the cross, knowing that to endure the cruelty of a handful of humans for a day would absolve humanity of sin for all time, and place us eternally in the sweet hand of God.

That’s perseverence. Strive for it. Strive for perfection. The end result will not be perfect. But it is for the striving that we are created.

Next: President Reagan and the elusive backbeat

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Cultural literacy and the American writer

2010-01-28T21:45:00.000-07:00

More than 20 years ago now, E.D. Hirsch Jr. authored the indispensible Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.

Hirsch subsequently wrote dozens of works outlining core knowledge critical for students .... but mostly targeted at what parents should be satisfying themselves that their children are learning in school.

This “proper education” is steeped in that core idea of cultural literacy. The writer should place himself in front of each empty page with a solid concept of the likely level of “cultural literacy” his audience possesses.

In working with ESL students – mostly adults who’ve moved to America and are trying to acquire and hone their basic language skills – one of the biggest barriers is simple cultural literacy.

These intelligent, proud and hard-working immigrants can master the basic words, grammar and sentence structures. But every so often, a blank look inexplicably crosses their faces.

Over time, it’s become clear that this most frequently occurs when the English phrase presented doesn’t make literal sense. It might occur, for example, when a speaker unsuccessfully uses “Edsel” as a referent for a failure.

Phrases like “cat nap,” “dog-eared” and “raining cats and dogs” become clear to the foreigner’s ear upon reflection, but that pause for reflection may come at the sacrifice of the next two or three sentences.

“Remember the Alamo!” is likely to have a far different meaning – both literal and cultural – to a Mexican national.

For that matter, try explaining the meaning of the word “slang” to a relatively new English speaker, and you’re likely to find yourself confronting major issues of background experience, ethnicity and cultural variation.

For the writer facing that blank page, even native English speakers pose these kinds of challenges, to one degree or another, and more: Age and generational issues, class structure, political beliefs, sexual preference, work and job biases, for example.

Whether the writing challenge is commercial, personal or educational, the writer has more to contend with than the words he wants to communicate.

He must contend with an audience’s readiness and willingness to be communicated to.

Next: Percy Verantz: The dogged ardor of the artist

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Slang-bashing: The Top Ten English language idioms (Nos. 6 thru 11)

2010-01-27T14:49:00.001-07:00

Lousy-swell – Back in the 1950s, the “I Love Lucy” show was No. 1 in America, featuring the zany antics of Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo. In one episode, Lucy and her Cuban husband, Ricky, agreed to take English language lessons, both to improve her tattered grammar and his often-indecipherable Spanglish. With neighbors Fred and Ethel Mertz joining in, the tutor began the first lesson with the admonition that two words could never be uttered in his class.

“The first is ‘lousy’ and the other is ‘swell,’” he told them.

“Fine,” responded grumpy, bald old Fred. “Give us the lousy one first!”

.... A swell way to get off to a lousy start, no?

Bug – If something “bugs” you, it’s bothersome ... like a gnat buzzing around your nose. But a bothersome associate can be told to “bug off!” meaning to leave (“split,” in the vernacular of the 1960s flower child). Similarly, an Army squadron might similarly “bug out” if an enemy is approaching in overwhelming force.

You can also “plant a bug” without worrying about funeral expenses for a dead fly: A bug is what a spy or undercover police agent plants when secreting an electronic listening device in a bad guy’s hotel room. And, if it’s influenza season, you might “catch a bug,” meaning you’ve caught a virus and are feeling “under the weather.” If you do, your co-workers might “put a bug in your ear” to stay home in bed so they don’t catch it.

Mission – The Alamo is a mission – a church mission – and the “mission” of the soldiers quartered there in 1837 was to defend it as a fortress against an invading Mexican army until reinforcements could arrive. A trip aboard the Space Shuttle is also a mission, conducted, appropriately enough, by mission specialists.

Today, corporations make “mission statements” to define for employee the overarching purpose and goals of the company. But any person who exudes urgency in undertaking a task – simple or complex – is said to “be on a mission.”

Shower – When a mission ends, the sweaty Army officer requires a shower, perhaps rinsing away the celebratory confetti that was showered over his head .... as a bride might be showered with gifts at ... her bridal shower.

A major-league pitcher gets sent to the showers when his manager comes to the mound to substitute a reliever ... at which time the pitcher might be showered with boos from the crowd. Meteor showers, rain showers, snow showers – so many confusing variants, so little time.

Kill time – Finally, when a person “has time to kill,” one, naturally enough, “kills time.” It’s unclear what weapon might be used, as is the potential punishment for the murder. But this phrase, cannily enough, always seems politically incorrect and potentially befuddling. After all, what did time ever do to you that you should want to kill it?

Is it fair to kill time when you’re buried in work? And what is “time-and-a-half,” anyway? If you get twenty years in prison for killing time, do you get thirty for doing in time-and-a-half?

Next: Cultural literacy and the American writer

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Slang-bashing: The Top Ten English language idioms (Nos. 1 thru 5)

2010-01-26T16:01:00.000-07:00

Sharing the conversation and insights about language with immigrants and others who want to bolster their English communications skills is a great joy ... and a great challenge.

One of the greatest challenges is Americans’ seemingly fathomless propensity to set aside formal speech in favor of casual conversation. “Slang” is not unique to Americans, but we seem to elevate the art form constantly to new and confounding levels.

(Doubters: Google the lyrics to pretty much any rap hit of the last 20 years and try to produce a dictionariable definition of every word found there)

Following is a Top Ten list of common slang words and phrases that help mold the distinctive flavor of the English language ... while confusing, amusing and befuddling us on a regular basis:

Top Ten – A catchy way of listing “bests” or “worsts” in myriad categories. Popularized when sportswriters started rating college football teams in the 1950s and 60s, Americans now rate almost anything from one to ten (or in the case of a particularly odious late-night TV host, from ten to one).

OK – The ultimate Americanism, nearly two centuries old, derived from some variant of the German “oll korrect” or from the papers of President Martin Van Buren, who often approved documents with the first letters of his nickname, “Old Kinderhook.” The G.I. Joes who liberated Europe in WWII found kids at every stop who, though they spoke not another word of useful English, had mastered the phrase “OK, Joe!”

Fast food – Not a reference to horse meat or the flesh of rapidly flying birds, but to a wide variety of hamburgers, chicken nuggets and tacos that can be quickly ordered and purchased at chain restaurants. Some will argue that the word “fast” has long since become irrelevant with the evolution of longer lines and ever-slower service as the popularity of fast-food joints has grown over the last 50 years. Others will dicker over whether the sometimes bland or nasty fast-food offerings actually can be considered “food.”

Drive – One of those English words that’s not so much idiomatic as it is rich in variant meaning. To drive is to travel in control of a car – to go for a drive – or to strike a golf ball off the tee. Ambitious individuals have drive, but their driven nature will often drive you crazy. You can drive a mule team, or your team of employees; a baseball player hits a line drive, while a good businessman drives a hard bargain. A bicycle (and various machinery) is propelled by a chain drive. And, a drive can be a political, fund-raising or military campaign.

Fly – Similar to drive, in many ways, the slangish uses of the word “fly” are legion: Obviously, a bird flies ... but so does time. A flag flies, and a door is said to fly open. A man’s fly is the zipper on the front of his pants – and the black insect that flies into the man’s gaping mouth when he realizes his “fly is down.” To fly is to travel rapidly by pretty much any mode of transport. Scenery or actors suspended above a stage are “flown” and the aforementioned baseball player flies out when he doesn’t drive the ball hard enough to make a hit. We fly blind, pick up projects on the fly, fly in the face of authority and into the teeth of the wind; sometimes we fly off the handle and tell a friend to “go fly a kite” (the friend, in turn, lets fly with a barrage of angry words).

Next: Slang-bashing (Part 2)

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

More thoughts about English as a second language

2010-01-25T19:16:00.002-07:00

Think for a moment about the challenges of learning English as a second language.

Two basic issues – vocabulary and grammar – are challenges common to acquiring any foreign language.

Yes, English has a particularly rich cultural heritage supported by something over 200,000 words – each, on average, having about four different meanings (e.g., a “cast” as a noun, covers a broken leg; as a verb one can cast aspersions, cast a play or cast a fishing line).

English grammar can be stultifying – but probably no more dishearteningly irregular for a squirming third-grader than your run-of-the-mill Farsi dialect.

Spelling – ay, there’s the rub.

Through and through, it’s a thoroughly tough nut to crack; though burrowing through alternatives at a buck a throw might yield a pile of dough tall enough to drown skyscrapers in the borough of Manhattan ... but perhaps you’ve bought enough cough medicine and hiccough remedies to last until the next major drought.

Gaught it?

No, English is a particularly difficult challenge, even for the native speaker. But a spark of empathy for non-English speakers stepping boldly onto the road to English fluency is in order.

Bottom line: When writing anything – anything at all – consider the prospects for confusion in your work. Editor would lack paying customers should the English-speaking world suddenly grasp the difference between “principal” and “principle.”

Or learn that “accommodate” has two “m’s” in it.

Or that a “facility” is the shack in the back with the half moon carved into the door (you really can boggle people’s minds by referring to a 25,000-seat facility, when you’re really talking about a large basketball arena – why, back in West Virginny, a TWO-seater was considered quite a luxury).

If you do not write with precision and clarity, you will not be understood.

The general public has altogether too much to read already – too many books, too many sales brochures, quarterly reports, movie reviews and comic books – for you to expect them to decipher poorly conceived copy.

Best-selling novels are translated by professionals when they are to be marketed abroad. No one expects some poor schmuck in Stockholm to translate a Danielle Steele potboiler on his own.

Don’t make your reader translate your badly spelled, poorly worded grammatic disaster.

Write it right – all of it, all right. All right?

Next: Slang-bashing – The Top 10 English language idioms

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

English as a foreign language

2010-01-22T17:42:00.001-07:00

One of my passions is language, obviously, but my passion for foreign languages in particular is a little strange.

Strange, because I am passionate, but not particularly adept: I spoke Russian reasonably fluently 30 years ago, but am radically out of practice. I’ve picked up passable Spanish over the last couple years, but no one would accuse me of fluency.

Still, the passion endures.

The challenge makes me passionate. The opportunity to talk with people I might otherwise ignore makes me passionate. And the lessons that can be learned through cultural and linguistic anomalies makes me passionate.

The ESL program at our neighborhood church invites immigrants, mostly, to gather weekly with English-speaking volunteers. The singular goal is to improve their usually halting acquaintance with English, which they are acquiring as a Second Language (hence the ESL).

In learning English, these brave souls tackle a variety of skills. Invariably, idiom is the most difficult to master.

“Let’s call it a day,” said the ESL instructor, closing the paper-bound text filled with drawings, pictures and translations.

“What else would you call it?” asked a student from Tibet, clearly puzzled ... sparking a 10-minute discussion of five simple words.

Each immigrant/student present clearly understood each of those five words separate and apart from the phrase; it was the phrase that stopped them in their tracks. There was no phrasing, in the various cultures represented, equivalent to “Let’s call it a day.”

And yet, each had a ready translation for “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” In Spanish, for example, it is said that “It is better to have one bird in hand than 100 flying.”

Our new Tibetan friend even realized the similarity to “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.” Be satisfied with what you have. Don’t be a dreamer. Don’t put the cart before the horse.

Writers struggle constantly with the challenge of “being understood.” To several generations of high school students by now, Faulkner’s Sound and Fury seems to require a translator no less urgently than War and Peace in the original Russian.

Even in English, the writer is faced with selecting some appropriate combination of formal and idiomatic language to best express his creative thought.

The study of foreign languages invites the welcoming inclusion of foreign cultures. The aspiring writer who openly “grazes” on alien customs and unconventional ideas has found a pasture rich in excellent brain food.

Graze passionately.

Next: More thoughts about English as a second language

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Even MORE pet peeves ...

2010-01-21T10:37:00.002-07:00

Adjectives / Adverbs. Good / Goodly / Well .... Well!

You say poe-TAY-toe and I say poe-TAH-toe (and Dan Quayle can’t spell it either way ... now is that EE-thur or EYE-thur?) ...

I don’t feel so good.

A pet peeve that comes up less often – it arises fewer times, that is – is the distinction between “less than” and “fewer.”

As a rule, if you can count it, use “fewer.” If not, “less.” As in:

I have less money in my pocket than I had yesterday.
vs.

I have fewer coins in my pocket than I had yesterday.

A person gets “less” sleep, but not after counting “fewer” sheep for “fewer” hours than the night before.

My young bride actually went into a major grocery chain one day and pointed out that the sign over the Fast Lane was incorrect:

“Less Than 10 Items Please”

A couple weeks later, they’d actually changed the signs, replacing the offending “Less” with the grammatically correct “Fewer” (the latter seeming, perhaps, pretentiously less palatable).

A similar pet peeve arises when writers incorrectly choose “between” over “among.” When two people talk, the discussion is between them. When three people talk, they talk among themselves.

If offered candy, a child may choose between chocolate and cherry ... or among chocolate, cherry and licorice.

So much of writing is about choices. A writer will inevitably report a discussion between members of the President’s Cabinet ... which technically describes a discussion between two officials (the Attorney General and Secretary of State, for example), rather than a discussion among the larger group.

But sometimes (especially in politics), one settles for what one reasonably is able to achieve – “Do your best and leave the rest,” as my wife says with fewer words and less officiousness.
Take the Trumans, for example.

The story may well be apocryphal, but the President’s daughter apparently heard Harry S telling some reporters that he was going to throw some manure on the East Lawn to get it to green up.

“Mama,” said Margaret Truman, “can’t you get Daddy to say fertilizer instead of manure ... after all, he’s not a Missouri farmer anymore – he’s President of the United States!”

Bess Truman put her arm around her daughter’s shoulder and calmed her with a wise look:

“Margaret, my child, leave well enough alone. It’s taken me 25 years to get him to say manure!”

Do your best, and leave the rest.

––––––––––

Parting Shot: The devil’s in the details ... Harry “S” Truman is the President’s real name, even though it was widely presented as “S.” It seems Give ‘em Hell Harry’s parents couldn’t decide between two grandparental names – Solomon and Shippe – and compromised on the letter only ... no period. And “Margaret” Truman? Actually Mary Margaret Truman, by birth.

Next: English as a foreign language

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

More pet peeves

2010-01-20T18:15:00.004-07:00

A few subtle twists on yesterday’s discussion of adjectives and adverbs:

It is possible to make the request – of your high school English teacher, even – to close the door tight instead of “tightly.” It implies that you should close it until that closure is tight.

For the same reason, feel free to tell your child to “Sleep tight” as you tuck her in for the night.

She won’t lie there angrily cursing your improvident use of an adjective. It’s colloquial, after all, and probably OK ... besides, how does one commit the act of “tightly” sleeping?

It’s like never ending a sentence a preposition with. It’s something we’ve all gotten over.

And, til the day I die, I’m never going to feel comfortable replying to “How’re you doing?”

Am I “doin’ good” or what? “I’m feeling well” always sounds a bit pretentious, and good grammar (alone) should never do that.

“I feel good” is a simple statement of being (or a No. 1 hit for James Brown, depending). Thank heavens Simon and Garfunkel didn’t write “Feelin’ Groovily.”

To a friend, you feel good. To a doctor, you’re not feeling “well.”

On your college essay, find a way to write around having to make the choice.

That said, you can see why pet peeves can be so much fun ... and extremely challenging at times.

Next: Even MORE pet peeves ...

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Every good writer needs a list of pet peeves

2010-01-19T15:32:00.001-07:00

I’m jealous.

I admit it.

You see, I know the difference between an adjective and an adverb. My kids knew the difference between an adjective and an adverb practically from the time they got out of diapers.

But sportscasters on national television – making six-figure salaries for hanging out and shooting the bull about football games – can’t make out why it grates on the ear when they note that a running back is “playing good this year.”

Drive safe on the way back to the hill country, y’all ... er, safe - LY, that is.

He’s having a good year, or he’s playing well. Make up your mind, please.

Close the door tight.

Lee.

Read that book real close.

Lee-Lee ... really closely.

“Lee” was a more or less constant companion in our household when my girls were young.

Once they learned to be careful and speak carefully, that is.

Someone would caution us about the icy roads outside: “Drive slow!”

“Lee,” the girls would giggle back, and I would, indeed, drive slowly on the way home.

It’s in their blood, in their genes. To this day, they know they’ve slept well and had a good night’s sleep. Be good. Behave well.

The artful writer writes artfully.

Heck, a baseball player can even hit a fair ball a fair piece and get a fair contract from an owner who treats him fair.

Lee.

In a nutshell, an adjective modifies a noun and an adverb modifies a verb. An adverb also modifies an adjective (partly cloudy) or another adverb (fairly quickly).

Someone who runs fairly quickly is, after all, a fairly quick runner.

The girls? Well, they’re good kids and they both write well. And that’s good. Makes me proud to be able to write proudly about it. Proud to be able to say it out loud – to stand up and shout loud ....

“Lee,” comes the peevish echo ... peevishly.

Next: More pet peeves ...

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

A mathematical construct for writers

2010-01-18T17:56:00.000-07:00

Good ideas just sorta happen.

Brainstorm. Churn up the “train of thought” express.

Don’t worry that a good idea is “nothing new.” Google the key words of absolutely any idea, and you’ll find a couple million places where it’s essentially been said before.

Many an oft-repeated phrase exhibits remarkable staying power: Umpires, for example, have cried “Batter Up!” for well over a century, yet our ear never tires of hearing those words for the first time each spring.

It’s the difference between a classic word that fits like a well-pilled cardigan, and a threadbare cliché on a dark and stormy night: If it ain’t right, it must be trite.

Millions of literary works – books, movies, short stories, TV and radio shows, stage plays, you name it – have followed one simple plot line: Boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins back girl’s heart.

But the devil is in the details – the plot line needs a fresh twist somewhere along the line.

Take heart though. The sheer power of mathematics is on the Writer’s side:

    • A word is a word

    • Two words can be rearranged 2 ways, three words in 6, and four in 24 ways.

    • But extend that math to a 25-word sentence, you’ll amaze yourself to discover 15.5 septillion combinations of those 25 words ... in round numbers, that’s a 15 followed by 23 zeroes (1,511,210,043,331,000,000,000,000).

The written masterpiece is constructed one letter, one word at a time. That’s true whether the “masterpiece” is a tire store’s marketing brochure, Hunt for Red October or the Gettysburg Address.

It’s virtually impossible to plagiarize without paying careful attention to reproduction of a text laying open on the desk in front of you. Contemporary prose, after all, is nothing more than a fresh look at an old idea.

It’s true. Cavemen no doubt grew weary hearing the same old tales of the hunt regurgitated around the campfire night after night.

Yet it wasn’t until eons later that a Jewish comic from Brooklyn made a million by scripting that most immortal of comebacks ...

Yada, yada, yada ...

Next: Every good writer needs a list of pet peeves

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

A practical lesson for writers who hate to practice

2010-01-15T16:53:00.001-07:00

“Write what you know.”

Mark Twain famously said it.

Some caveman probably said it first, followed in rough order by Socrates, Buddha,

Solzhenitsyn and some White House speechwriter who stole it for a State of the Union or Inaugural.

But then Twain also said, of speechwriting, that:

              “The best speech is the impromptu. ...
    It takes me a three weeks to put together
      a good impromptu speech.”

So writing can actually be boiled down to a simple mathematical sum: What you know, plus with you can find out in three weeks or less – that is, research.

Actually, a third factor enters the picture. Things you know to be “a stretch,” or “maybe a little bit true.”

I’ve advised often that the Writer can break rules ... as long as he knows what rules he’s breaking. Mark Twain had a great corollary:

“Get you facts first, and then you can distort ’em as much as you please.”

So with Twain’s invitation to outright fabrication, the Writer is armed with:
          • What he knows.
          • What he can discover through research.
          • What he can stretch to fit his own devices.
          • What he can fabricate out of thin air and not get caught at it.

Finally, let’s stir a quote from Ernest Hemingway into the pot: “Prose, he said, is architecture, not interior decoration.”

Two points of instruction fall from there ... that pretty prose is best buried in the garden with the other fertilizer, and that building a document from what’s left requires disciplined construction technique.

The convenient thing about telling the truth is never having to remember which lie you told to whom. But “truth” in literature can have many shades of gray, blue, jade and purple.

So, whether you’re writing a book report or a book, a fictional essay or some fictional promotion of your company’s hottest new product, create an architect’s blueprint first.

List what you know in Column A, your research in Column B, shades of gray in Column C, and jaded lies in Column D.

Column D usually proves to be highly compelling – and utterly unuseable. But it’s good to know it’s there, in any case.

But then again, maybe writing what you know isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
–––––––––––––––––––––
          Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession,
          and therefore are most economical in its use.
                                                                                      – Mark Twain

Next: A mathematical construct for writers

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

A fun lesson for writers who hate to practice

2010-01-14T10:53:00.001-07:00

“Jeopardy” is a great TV show for writers and Writers alike.

It has a surprisingly large writing staff if you consider only that something like 500 words must be written daily to cover 61 clues. Not surprising, though, if you consider the bent of creative, the need for impeccably accurate research and the sheer variety of topics. And none of the content can replicate past shows.

In fact, 500 words, eight terse words at a time, is damnably tough.

Yesterday’s show had a category called “Dumb Down the Cliché,” which is a classic lesson for writers who over-write ... who use three 25¢ words when a nickel’s worth would do nicely, thankyewverymuch.

The novice writer might well practice by rewriting cliches or other well-known passages in order to experiment with combinations and contrasts of clarity and obfuscation – both of which have their place in prose presentations.

Yesterday’s first-round category went like this:

$200 – Retrieve a hare hidden within your beret. (Pull a rabbit from your hat)

$400 – My nostrils detect the aroma of a gnawing rodent. (I smell a rat)

$600 – Spending an interlude anticipating the descent of the additional slipper. (Waiting for the other shoe to drop)

$800 – Seize a male bovine with grips to its forehead protuberances. (Grab the bull by the horns)

$1000 – Pilfer from Mr. Pan in order to enrich Mr. Bunyan. (Rob Peter to pay Paul)

It’s interesting that judges awarded a correct “question” to the contestant who replied by asking “What is ‘Steal from Peter to pay Paul.’ ” The essence of the cliché is present, to be sure, but in the colloquial spirit of the category, “steal” is one of those words you’d want to “dumb down” to “rob.”

Still, it’s only one word different, right? What’s the difference?

After all, let bygones be themselves.

It’s not like it was the star-spangled flag or anything.

But maybe we should run one more idea up the flagpole and see who stands at attention ...

Nah ... Leave well enough by itself.

Next: A practical lesson for writers who hate to practice

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

More lessons for the would-be Writer

2010-01-13T18:22:00.001-07:00

Simple lessons are the best. Lessons we learn and internalize early on are lessons we return to – even years later when those simple skills have been transformed into virtuosity.

When I was eight, Mrs. Alice Manzuetti handed me a book of Hanon exercises. Along with the diatonic and chromatic scales, these exercises formed the core of my piano regimen.

Over the last five decades, I’ve played for pleasure and I’ve played to vent anger and frustrations; as an accompanist to Sunday School choirs, and to accompany drunks around a piano bar.

Never the “Piano Man” that others urged to the piano bench to experience the joy of my virtuosity, I proved competent at an eclectic array of musical styles.

Composer-pianist Franz Liszt once said that if he failed to practice for a day, he noticed; for two days, his wife noticed. If he lapsed his routine for a week, however, the audience noticed.

And whenever my practice lapsed for a week (or a month, as it often does, or even years, as it did once), I return to simple scales and Hanon to warm my fingers and regain confidence and competence at the keyboard.

Writing is like that. Simple exercises help the novice writer. Returning to those simple exercises helps the expert Writer.

The cursive equivalent of diatonic scale rendition is the dictation and expansion of the five-word sentence. Just as with notes on a piano keyboard, repetition and familiarity flow with the outpouring of letters and words and phrases.

And, just as any series of notes offer infinite variety and beauty when interwoven with dynamic and rhythmical variance, the English language provide surprising harmonies as words combine and conflict on the page.

Do this:

• Write a five-word sentence.

• Then write ten words, which offers increased

opportunity for intricacy.

• In twenty words, you’ll observe a seeming increase

in communicated substance, when, in actuality, the

underlying message is substantially identical.

• But understand: Five words suffice.

Each time you expand and contract the word count, rewriting essentially the same content, you’re learning to stretch and compact words to suit the needs of varying circumstance.

Long sentences require lots of commas, usually, and the care to observe that, in adding length and breadth, you don’t stray from the core message, even forgetting it entirely amidst the melody of sing-song words rattling onto the page.

Short sentences enforce discipline. Spareness. They paint a stoic portrait – Napoleon, not Tolstoy.

Medium-length sentences offer a buffer between the desert and the floodplain, a spring morning and a stormy night.

All are necessary tools in your palette. Master them. Use them. And never let it be said that virtuosity strained against measures of talent for lack of necessary practice.

Next: A fun lesson for writers who hate to practice

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Lessons for the would-be Writer

2010-01-12T15:07:00.010-07:00

The Pennsylvania Dutch have a wonderful way with words.

“Outen the light,” someone might say to you. It’s perfectly clear upfront that the speaker isn’t from here (unless “here” happens to be Lehigh County, Pennsylvania).

It’s also perfectly clear, with a little thought, that the speaker would like you to flip the light switch to the “off” position (if you’re in Lehigh County, pinch out the kerosene lamp to satisfy your companion).

The ubiquity of television in the last half of the 20th century eradicated the predominance of quaint linguistic idiosyncrasies of regional spoken English.

Wow. You could say it that way. To make the point, perhaps, that one shouldn’t say it that way.

How about: TV showed Americans how people in other parts of the country spoke, virtually wiping out the “Texas Drawl,” for example, and even softening the “Down East” and “Boston Brahmin” dialects.

Once compelled to listen and speak to “foreigners” from other states, Americans homogenized their speaking patterns (to the detriment of Character Authors everywhere, who now are forced to insert illegal immigrants into plot lines to inject diversity in the conversation).

Does a practical lesson lie in the weeds here, somewhere?

Well, novice writers must decide what they want to “sound” like. At first, this is a wholly unconscious decision: Your writing “sounds” like whatever words have hit the page.

But the wise novitiate studies his completed work (if written works ever can be deemed “completed,” for even when published, their interpretation and historical context is constantly emerging and reemerging).

Like a football coach scouting an opponent, the writer should note his tendencies and observe which tactics seem to produce consistent results.

And, like successful coaches, the writer never gets stuck in a rut, calling upon the same tired strategy, even though it’s long been “defensed.” Readers and commercial prospects, after all, quickly learn to throw up “defenses” against the same tired plots, the same tired sales ploys, the same tired anything.

The writer must be flexible, adapting to new situations, new conditions, new opportunities as they present themselves ... like the dentist in an old Pennsylvania Dutch joke:

A young brunette goes in to see the dentist, who is much

impressed with his young patient's wicked beauty.

"Doctor," she says, "you know I think that I would chust

as soon have a baby as have a tooth pulled."

"Well," replies the good doctor, "Chust let me know, lady,

so I can adchust the chair."

Perhaps it’s lost in the translation, but a little miscommunication sometimes goes a long way.

Next: More lessons for the would-be Writer

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Lessons for the novice writer

2010-01-11T18:35:00.000-07:00

What kinds of skills does a “novice” Writer need?

Regular readers will know that I’ve consistently (more or less) made a distinction between a “writer” and a “Writer” – the former being anyone who commits pen to paper (fingertip to keyboard), the latter, capitalized denotation reserved either for those making a living at writing, or with a superior command of the craft.

A “writer” needs a pen and paper (or pencil, or laptop ... whatever). Being a writer is largely a question of opportunity.

A “Writer,” on the other hand, needs discipline, courage, a strong work ethic, introspection, resilience and a passing acquaintance (at minimum) with inspiration and even genius.

A Writer tends to be experienced, both a writing and at Life. More than an observer, more than even a trained observer, the Writer is an avid observer ... to the point of voyeurism.

A Writer is critical. He looks at the human condition, yes, observes and notates. But he also analyzes the verity of his observation, and the accuracy and completeness of his notation (i.e., he’s an Editor, Copyreader, Proofreader and Critic).

A Writer is realistic – knowing that 500 words do not magically appear on the page each day ... knowing that 2,500 will magically appear on some days ... knowing that 25 words is sometimes better than 250 – even if you really liked the 225 that you have to expunge for reasons of clarity, digression, budget, space or general principal.

A Writer knows how to spell “principle,” and how to spell “principal,” and the difference betwixt the two that shall inevitably meet inside the brain and effect confusion.

A Writer know how to spell “affect,” and uses the word with good effect, eschewing all affectation, no matter how vexingly it affects his creativity.

A Writer knows which words have an impact on the course of human events, and which impact events adversely – no matter how tempting it may be to utilize “impact” as a transitive verb.

“Lessons” in this blog, will generally have practical application to the writer/Writer’s craft. This lesson has only a smattering of such practical application.

But until the “writer” begins to care about these kinds of issues, he will forever remain uncapitalized.

Next: Lessons for the would-be Writer

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

A different kind of Ride on the Reading

2010-01-08T14:18:00.000-07:00

A couple days ago, we took “A Ride on the Reading” as part of our Seven Days of New Years resolutions.

This particular New Year’s resolution contains a double-entendre – but no, it’s not risque ... and not even risky.

Taking a Ride on the Reading, on Tuesday, was all about “Train of Thought” writing – riding on the train out of Imagination Station, with a stream of consciousness plume of stream trailing behind.

Today, “Taking a Ride on the Reading” concentrates on the long-e pronunciation: It’s all about the fine art of Reading – reading a book, for example, a magazine, eZine or blog. Heck, read a billboard if it fuels the creative juices.

I’ve mentioned before several excellent books and authors. I’m old. I tend to read fiction.

Because I find myself with less and less control over the nonfiction world around me, I find it comforting to retreat to the realm of make-believe.

Used to read Time. Ain’t got the time no more.

Used to read Newsweek. Find them weak on news and long on opinion.

Used to subscribe to the Denver Post. Switched to the Rocky Mountain News because they had a better sports page, and I wasn’t reading the news so much any more.

Then the Rocky died, so I try to keep up with the Nuggets, Broncos and Rockies online as best I can. (I used to follow hockey and boxing, but gave that up as the lines between the two began to blur)

As the days and years pass, I suspect more and more subscriptions and interests and illusions about my impact on the world around me will begin to dissolve into the stream of heavenly consciousness that I hope envelopes me at the bittersweet end.

I promised, today, a Ride on the Reading – with a long-e. I implied that a “Fiction Book List” might be at hand, or a list of recommended reading to replace the disappearing sources.

But I lied.

What I’m just completing is a Ride on the Reading – with a short-e. Words that are virtually unreviewed, unedited and unchanged as they’ve rolled from brain to fingertips to computer to blogpost.

There’s too many instances of the word “I” and there’s a bunch of too-personal commentary that needs to be worked out. The point of view dithers, and there are too many “There are” sentence constructions.

It’s not tight, concise, perfectly grammared and grampawed. To be a work of art, well ... this and 99.44% of everything that falls to my fingertips probably needs hours, weeks and years of polishing.

But it does “sound” different to my ear. It’s breezier. It’s a different person, perhaps, that presents himself.

And it does, I hope, illustrate the value of letting words roll onto paper. Because even if they’re not perfect, the words sometimes surprise you.

And that’s a good thing. You can work, as a Writer, with surprise. Maybe I’ll scratch out a book list some other day.

Next: Lessons

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Resolved (Part 7) – Edit

2010-01-07T17:41:00.000-07:00

Here we are. Fans already are piling into the Rose Bowl for the BCS Championship game, and this seven-installment package of New Year’s Resolutions for Writers is nearly complete.

Having discussed “Eye” checks and “I” checks earlier, let’s look today at “Reality” checks.

First, of all, once a document is written, check it. Ask yourself: “Has what I’ve written stayed on track?”

The reality is, the document you started to write may well have “evolved,” and you’re left with a semi-finished product that’s ... well, different.

“Different” may be good or bad – that’s for you to determine. But you’ve hopefully recognized it now, and that’s what reality checks are all about.

Now, edit, revise and rewrite, and then run the next reality check. Ask yourself: “Is what I’ve written worth someone else’s time to read it?”

It’s a shame that this question can’t really be answered until you’ve written, checked, edited, revised and rewritten the document – which still, after all, isn’t a finished product. But do it anyway, and steel yourself to the consequences: You may have to trash the whole kit and kaboodle and start again from scratch.

(Think of this as a Green resolution: It’d probably save a lot of paper if every “writer” ran this particular reality check.)

Polish up, because now it’s time for another reality check. Ask someone else: “Is what I’ve written worth your time to read it?”

That particular reality check can be a real ego crusher. Healthy, but potentially harsh. A sort of “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” sort of test.

But the last reality check is the toughest of all. Ask yourself: “Is what I’ve written going to make money for me?”

Whether you’re selling a freelance magazine article, or writing brochure copy for the boss, America remains the Capitalism Capital of the World. Somebody’s got to make a buck on your work, or you’re just spinning your wheels in the mud.

Next: A different kind of Ride on the Reading

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Resolved (Part 6) – Edit

2010-01-06T17:06:00.001-07:00

The Twelve Days of Christmas have come and gone, and the Seven Days of New Year’s Resolutions are winding down as well.

Previous resolutions advocate making a firm decision to write, and then sitting down to actually do it ... employing the time-honored practice of “Train of Thought” writing, as appropriate, to get something – anything – down on paper ... and then taking breaks from both the physical and mental stress of this deceptively arduous task.

As explained many times over recent months in this space, that’s the easy part. Yes, at the risk of beating a dead horse: Writing is Easy ... it’s the process of rewriting and editing that’s hard.

It’s hard, in the sense that it demands commitment and the sweat from the writer’s brow – and it’s hard because it’s hard to acquire the book-learning, mentor-taught, experience-honed skills required.

We can talk about these valuable skills later.

Leave for another day, a full discussion of the fine distinction between a “new-player list” and his “new player list” (the former being a list of new players, the latter a list that’s new).

... for another time, the rationale for never, ever referring to an item as “extremely unique” (it’s like being a little pregnant).

... for another chapter and verse, a discussion of over-capitolization and mispellings (intended or not).

These skills are much-needed in revising or editing a document.

But like the automobile commercials that caution “Professional Drivers on a Closed Course” or the slapstick clown who warns “Now kiddies, don’t try this at home,” it sometimes is simply best to leave the editing to a professional.

Corporate marketers know that outsourcing a writing project is apt to yield copy that’s wildly off the mark from a content and “voice” standpoint – not to mention a copywriting invoice that rivals the national debt (well, not really ... but BIG).

But how about doing the “writing” in-house (the easy part), and contracting out the hard parts?

Outsourcing only the editing, rewriting and/or proofreading tasks gives the marketing executive substantial control over text and tone, while investing in a much smaller commitment to the professional writer/editor.

Put together a rough draft and send that puppy out for polishing.

You and a writer could spend three hours in meetings just to hash over nebulous options for the language and structure of a “from-scratch” manuscript – and you’d still pay for several hours of the writer’s time. Or, you can lock yourself in a room, compose a substantially complete rough draft in an hour or two, and let the pro spend a couple hours correcting, revising and polishing.

You’ve got the right content up front. You generally like the way it sounds. And you avoid screwing with the corporate identity brand.

The writer? He avoids an aspirin bottle full of headaches, and frees himself up to work with all those other clients who don’t have their collective acts together.

And oh, by the way, should you need a professional, contact me by clicking the link at the top-right of this blog (www.fixadocument.com), or email fixer@fixadocument.com ....

You’ll be glad you did.

Next: Resolved (Part 7)

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Adding tergiversation to the conversation (Supplemental)

2010-01-06T15:32:00.001-07:00

The word “tergiversate” popped up here yesterday. by the way, tergiversate means "to change repeatedly one's attitude or opinions with respect to a cause, subject, etc.; equivocate."

For anyone curious, tergiversate was “dither” on first draft, but that’d already been used several grafs back.

Other options included ruminating, cogitating, brooding, mulling, musing, anguishing over and chafing.

The final choice hinged on two factors: First and foremost, the accurate use of the word; second, its ability to demonstrate an option that no one – I repeat, no one – would ever produce on first draft, but discover only in the tedious process of revision.

In the end, the word did quadruple duty:

• It accurately communicated an action.

• It illustrated the process of revision.

• It taught a new word to you, cherished readers of my blog.

• And it provided a rhythmically poetic title for this
supplemental entry.

Not bad for 25 seconds on Thesaurus.com, wot?

Oh ... and for another word doing double-duty, visit the post coming up Friday for a second reading on the word “reading” (which, after all, can be pronounced with a long “e,” now can’t it?) ...

Resolved (Part 5) – A Ride on the Reading

2010-01-05T14:19:00.003-07:00

A time-tested tactic for wanna-be writers is buying a ticket to “Ride on the Reading Railroad.”

A “Ride on the Reading” is steeped in railroad lore ... get on board at Imagination Station. Take some “Train of Thought” transport.

Train of Thought is all about being impulsive. The Train of Thought engineer doesn’t dither over whether something is silly or trite. Train of Thought writing defies every social convention we’ve learned since, oh, 'bout the age of 2:

“Johnny, be careful. Are you allowed to run off
into the street?”

“Don’t eat that candy! What are you thinking??!”

“I suppose if everybody else jumped off the cliff,

you’d jump off a cliff right after them, wouldn’t you?”

“Marcie, now that’s just plain stupid!”

Remember: Writing is easy. Editing and rewriting are tough.

In order to edit and rewrite, you’ve got to have something down on the page to begin with. And there’s the rub!

I’m tellin’ you: Write something. Anything!

Yes, you have to be careful about what you publish to the world. But for now, you’re just writing. For right now, just write, and worry about being careful when you edit.

Yep, you’re thinking too much. Not allowed. Write. This is train of thought, and your engine’s still back at the station admiring the chassis of some cute caboose.

Yeah, it sounds just exactly like the same old crap everybody else is writing. Get unique later, when you revise this crap. For now, do what every 6-month-old dog has learned to do: Crap on the paper! Now!

And yes, it’s better if it’s pithy and smart, but you’re more apt to write something stupid. So put something stupid down, get over it and move on. You can improve on it later.

Write now! While you tergiversate in search of precisely the right word, three tremendous ideas have gone in and out of your brain before you could jot them down.

Write now! Let your imagination fly across the landscape, white steam streaming back against the powder-blue horizon, parallel to main track; the gnashing of metal gears and wheels a mere click-clack in the distance.

Write now! There’ll be time enough tomorrow for shoveling of coal and clearing the track of fallen debris.

Write now! Get the inspiration down and stir in the perspiration later.

Write now ... and get it right later.

Right now, the Muse won’t wait – and shouldn’t have to ... she’s a passenger on board the Bard Express.

Next: Resolved (Part 6)

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Resolved (Part 4) – Add ‘I Breaks’ to your Writing arsenal

2010-01-04T13:03:00.000-07:00

Let’s talk about “I Breaks.”

Friday, I discussed “Eye Breaks,” simple ways to combat the physical stress of eye strain and other afflictions of the chronically chair-bound.

“I Breaks” are simple ways to combat the psychological and emotional stress that can strike at the heart (literally) of the lonely writer.

Writing is a solitary art. Boarders may scratch to a halt in a public park and watch curiously over the shoulder of some guy struggling in front of a watercolor canvas. The Writer’s pen labors in obscurity.

As tedious as marble sculptor might prove to be, I suspect an artist’s hand looming motionless over a block of Italian Alabaster is high drama compared to the blocked writer’s flop sweat plunking to the keyboard at his fingertips.

The dynamic hum and mold at a potter’s wheel? A Jackie Chan double-feature.

Writing truly is a solitary art (except in the various branches of government, where “writing by committee” is elevated to an art form – much to the detriment of the public welfare).

Vivid scenes of high drama and romance are splashed with silent screams across synapses totally inside the Writer’s brain. The Writer wearies of sound of his own voice ... even if he hasn’t spoken a word aloud since barking at the dog three hours ago.

Solitary confinement can be a problem for writers clad in a metaphorical jumpsuit of neon orange.

That “stand up and stretch” I recommended Friday? Pace into the kitchen a grab lunch. Flop in the armchair and check out the latest goings-on in Mayberry.

If that seems too frivolous, read (nothing too heavy ... it’s a break, remember?), pitch some tunes onto the CD player, or play a game of pocket poker.

Toby Ziegler bounced a pink rubber ball against a plate-glass wall. Rob Petrie had a piano at his beck and call in the writer’s room to help inspire Buddy and Sally whenever ideas dried up.

(FYI: Experimenting with karaoke is ill-advised except to inoculate against intense and otherwise irresolvable inclination toward isolation-induced infirmity.)

Sometimes, though, such comfort food leads only to a counterproductive nap. A stroll to the park might be a better remedy – a heart-pumping, head-clearing jog through the hills, if you’re so inclined (cold, snowy weather is best, followed closely by rankly sweaty climes).

And, as good as these I Breaks may prove to be, a “We Break” can be equally invigorating: Busy yourself with real conversation – the sound of someone else’s voice for a change: Coordinate your admittedly erratic schedule with family and friends. Carve out some quality time with networking colleagues and other members of your adoring public.

Bottom line, all manner of I Breaks can produce long-term benefits for your physical, mental and financial well-being ... unless, of course, it is precisely the madness of your muse that inspires your pen-on-paper / fingers-on-the-keyboard art.

Next: Resolved (Part 5)

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Resolved (Part 3) – Take eye breaks when you write

2010-01-01T01:29:00.000-07:00

As outlined yesterday, the first “tactic” of the successful Writer – Do it – was simple, if time-consuming.

The next, by contrast, is deceptively difficult to master – though it takes but a fleeting second.

Tactic 2: Eye breaks.

Writing, in and of itself, can be a headache. It’s hard work. Stress is involved. Deadlines, self-imposed or elsewise.

So why add to the stress and headaches by failing to pay attention to your eyes?

I was fortunate, most of my career, to have a desk looking out one second-story window or another. My mind is wont to wonder, so it was second-nature to look away from my work and gaze into the distance.

But right now, I’m looking at the wall – barely an arms-length away.

Trust me on this: Don’t spend your day looking at a computer screen and a white wall three feet away. Every minute or two, make a conscious effort to turn you head (and/or body) and shift your focus to an object at least six or eight feet distant.

Changing the focal length of your eyeball exercises the muscles that coordinate the work of your cornea and your retina. Think of it as isometric calisthenics.

Aside from that, listen to your mother: Sit up straight, chin up, feet flat on the floor. If your back, shoulders or wrists are talking to you, stand up and stretch – a good idea every 20 minutes or so even if you don’t have audio hallucinations emanating from various body parts.

One excellent tactic, even if you don’t believe it’s a good idea to drink an ounce of water a day for every pound you weigh: Drink an ounce of water a day for every pound you weigh. Doctors will tell you it hydrates your brain and skin, keeps the bloodstream hydrated, and is a generally good idea.

That’s all well and good. Me, I don’t always wear a watch. If I drink a ton of water, I have too get out of my chair every 20 minutes or so to pee ... offering the untimed but on-time opportunity to stretch a variety of body parts.

Next: Resolved (Part 4)

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Resolved (Part 2) – Writing is work, but DO it

2009-12-31T15:19:00.000-07:00

Once the fledgling writer commits to becoming a Writer, a modicum of discipline must emerge.

Writing doesn’t just happen. It’s crafted. Molded. Cogitated over. Revised, reviewed, reworked and rechecked.

How’s that done? What’s the secret? What does the fly on the wall see when it looks down upon the struggling author?

Probably, in Winston Churchill’s immortal words, a lot of blood, toil, tears and sweat. It’s war. And the words always win.

It’s only a question of whether the author is wise enough to quit fighting the words, and sign on as an ally.

Between now and the end of the kickoff of the BCS Championship Game in Pasadena next Thursday, let’s look at six tactics the wannabe writer can pursue – not tips or tricks or strategies, but physical actions that real-world Writers all embrace.

Tactic 1: Do it.

Yeah, it’s really that simple.

The Great American Novel doesn’t write itself. You’ve got to move the pen. Punch the keyboard. Delete, cut, paste, undo ... but most of all, DO.

Create a benchmark: 500 well-crafted words is a good day – 250 superbly crafted is probably better, but that depends on the sophistication of your audience.

Devote two, maybe three hours a day to the keyboard – more if you’re really on a roll; less if the muse escapes you. And realize that the physical act of typing words into a dumb terminal is only one phase of the writing process.

The rest? Read, research, talk on the phone, network, sell yourself, market, blog, and then read some more. Any time you dedicate the attention of your brain to the writing chore ... well, you’re writing. You can do it standing in line at the movie theater, daydreaming in the park, pumping iron at the gym or stuffing a breaded pork chop in your left cheek.

Doing it, however, is not recommended when you’re doing it, if you catch my drift.

Bottom line, you need only spend half a day working at it to become a successful writer.
What you do with the other 12 hours is your own business.

Next: Resolved (Part 3)

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Resolved (Part 1) – New Year's resolutions for writers

2009-12-30T17:05:00.004-07:00

It’s nearly New Year’s Day. Most resolutions made 363 days ago have (unlike old acquaintance) long since been forgot.

The inside skinny on that diet I committed to? Down 28, up 13; net decline – 15 pounds. Not bad, but it’s near the top of the Friday morning list.

Reading paves the road to Writing, and my Kindle has been burning up. A recently re-discovered library card got renewed usage this year, but a long list of unread classics remains (and the latest James Patterson / Alex Cross thriller sits, unopened, on the shelf).

But 2009 was the year I finally confronted a long-held regret. The resolution came, not in January, but in mid-November.

I transmogrified years of sheepish resolutions into leonine resolve and embarked on a journey in pursuit of the Joy of Writing – a joy that was so much a fixture of my youth.

I left the day-job behind, and plunged into icy waters of dysprosperity.

I built a website (www.fixadocument.com).

I created this blog, religiously posting daily entries (weekends and legal holidays excepted).

And I opened the door to a new adventure as a writer for Examiner.com, an online source of local and national news, features and commentary – a fledgling home for “citizen journalists.”

In short, I have many promises to keep, and many words to write before I sleep. And there’s no turning back.

The single best advice I can provide to a would-be Writer, is to commit. Go out and burn bridges (not in the classic sense of the phrase, of course ... keying the car door of your soon-to-be ex-boss is a bad idea).

Cut the ties to daily routines – no matter how comfortable – that keep you from the creative process. Desperation is not necessarily an unhealthy state of mind.

Climbing out of the well-worn rut may mean quitting a job and investing time and money in the tools you’ll need to succeed – a computer upgrade, perhaps, or membership in writer/sales networking groups (live or online). And, you just may need to drop an hour of TV and 45 minutes of sleep to get the hard work of writing accomplished.

Over the next two days, we’ll look at six ways to get where you’re going – six New Year’s Resolutions, if you will – with an eye toward substantially improving your craft in the coming 12 months.

Next: Resolved (Part 2)

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

PUN-ditry

2009-12-29T13:43:00.003-07:00

The term “bad pun” is at least redundant, if not fully oxymoronic. If it ain’t bad, it ain’t a pun (though I’ve never comprehended why everybody thinks the ox is so dumb).

Shakespeare punned. A flock of doves puns when it stages a coo. W.C. Fields drunkenly professed he’d “rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy” ... a gag further pickled by Dean Martin, who said, “I would rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy.” Even Jesus punned, suggesting He’d build his church upon Peter – a solid foundation – playing on the similarity of the apostle’s name and the Greek word for “rock.”

At Christmastide, when Guinevere saw that Lancelot’s bright new armor had been rent repeatedly with swords, she reputedly bent over the pronate form, lamenting her dying lover: “Oh holey knight!”

The best and worst of writers alike struggle for topics. Puns are definitive proof that a Writer can write about anything – absolutely anything.

As a daily newspaper columnist, I would stare out the window when blocked, and found that a bed of flowers, a fire hydrant, a telephone wire – virtually anything visible – might nurture my sleeping but unquenchable fire to communicate (sorry ’bout that). My own version of the Holy Grail was a column filled with 350-syllable words ... er, 350 salable words (can’t help it).

In college, during Finals Week, I sat with elbows splayed across a dormitory dinner table, my bleary eyes closed in rest, buried in my sleeve. My roommate approached, carb-heavy tray in hand .... “Eddie ... Eddie,” he said, gently shaking my shoulder.

“Are you tired, Eddie?” he asked in a lame Topo Gigio imitation, plucking a paper napkin from the dispenser nearest my left forearm.

“Cause if you’re tired, you know ...” he continued, brandishing the paper catalyst of his somnambulant wit, “When you’re really tired, a napkin help.”

The groans of those nearby assembled stirred me from my reverie. Nap ended. Possibly the worst pun ever.

And proof again that anybody can write 350 syllable words (exactly), if their backs are to the wall.

Next: Resolved (Part 1)

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Your two cents worth

2009-12-28T16:24:00.002-07:00

A 74¢ check arrived in the mail last week from Bank of America.

You remember B of A – the HUGEST holding company on Planet Earth. Borrowed 58 gazillion dollars from the U.S. taxpayer to keep from going belly up a year ago.

Pays its top execs $25.75 a week, plus stock options valued at, oh, $42.7 million annually, give or take a decimal point or two.

B of A sent a cashier’s check for “NO DOLLARS SEVENTY-FOUR CENTS.” Seriously – would you ever pull out a checkbook to belly up 74¢ ’cause you only had $3.24 in your pocket for a $4 draught of Schlitz?

Now, the details aren’t interesting: Suffice to say, B of A inexplicably delayed payment on an insurance claim for three weeks or so ... (but apparently only about 17 hours longer than the bank deemed necessary – interest would have amounted to a little over a buck a day.

Already a month late (in my book), it took ’em six weeks more to write and mail the 74¢ check. Truth be known, nobody here much cared about getting the 74¢ to begin with, but it apparently allowed B of A to close its books on the matter.

The incident offers several telling lessons to the Writer:

• First, meet your deadlines, or there are penalties to be paid (in this case, 74¢ plus a perception of stultifying incompetence).

• Don’t invest in a 42¢ stamp, $2.12 of somebody’s work day, 19¢ worth of perforated check stock, a 9¢ envelope and $24.34 of someone else’s much more valuable time – all just to chip your two cents worth into the general discourse.

• Most importantly, recognize that Joe Sixpack revels at turning a blind eye to the multi-billion-dollar ineptitude bankrupting international coffers ... but he’ll spring from his couch ranting at the idiocy of a 74¢ foible he’s got stuck in his craw.

B of A’s 74 pennies were meager redress for a wound already healed ... scarred, but healed nonetheless. The obsequious proffer of a filching manservant. A nickel tip in a tin ash tray. A condescending nod, regurgitating all the inconvenience, aggravation and suspicion.
If what you have to communicate isn’t enough to put a digit to the left of the decimal point, keep it to yourself.

On the other hand, if you contrive to make it personal, the most trivial of communications can carry a stinging wallop.

Good writing is personal. Bad writing – no matter how grandiloquent – ain’t worth a buck.

Next: PUN-ditry

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

God, the Damned

2009-12-24T09:16:00.004-07:00

Tomorrow is the birthday of God’s only begotten Son.

Jesus – the Christian incarnation of God – been much abused since the middle of the 20th century, when trippy-hippie philosophers proclaimed him “dead.” Holiday marketers began ripping references to God’s son from the public discourse. Nativity scenes and Ten Commandment scrolls seem quaintly out of step with today’s politically correct doctrine.

In schools, “God Damn You” is more readily tolerated than “God Bless You.” A centuries-old doctrine of prayer in the school has been relentlessly trampled by Courts drunk with the new wine pressed from the vineyard of secular righteousness.

When I was in high school, it was fashionable to teach “The Bible as Literature.” I believed then that the nomenclature was a convenient invention to sidestep an inane Supreme Court decree.

In retrospect, however, reducing the Bible to mere “literature” cheapens it. Yes, writers of scripture are placed alongside Shakespeare, Flaubert and Dostoevsky – but also tripists like Vonnegut, Baudelaire, Roth, Chaucer, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Koontz and Krantz.

In short, the pedantic proprietors of academe – landed lords of literacy – condemned The Ten Commandments to cohabitation with The Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV, and let the chips fall where they may.

More than 9 of 10 Americans believe in God – mostly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Writers should avail themselves of the tradition of Christian allusion unabashedly, where appropriate. To ignore it, while fashionable, ignores a wealth of cultural richness dysobviated by Cultural Correctness.

Next: Your two cents worth

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

God Bless Us, Every One!

2009-12-23T13:48:00.001-07:00

Charles Dickens was not one to over-capitalize, or to exclaim with an exclamation mark when a simple declaration and a period would suffice.

Yet, in Christmas Carol, he capitalized each separate word of the signature “God Bless Us, Every One!” and added an exclamation point for good measure. What are we to make of that?

Well, the exception proves the rule ... and the exception emphasizes the new and different element being used. Dickens understood the emotional impact those five words would have on the Reader, who has witnessed the tale lovingly unfold, like a Christmas treasure from a ream of silver paper and bows.

Pacing. Pitter-patter. Words that flow across the page in long and sweeping paragraphs ... and then are suddenly adorned by the staccato flourish of a catch-phrase sentence.

Today, nearly two centuries later, most can readily identify Tiny Tim as the speaker of the prayerful affirmation (though they might lack the perspicacity to reckon those who lectured on the mustard seed, the value of a penny saved, or of peace in our time.

Tiny Tim’s exclamation (Dickens actually characterized it as an “observation”) is variously recorded in source materials, though the five-words version – each capitalized, with a comma and exclamation point – seems most authoritative. But tinkering with the craftsman’s art can leave us far from the mark.

Altering it ever so slightly to “God bless us, everyone” for example, seems to invite a rather mundane and secular blessing – calling for those assembled to take note of the invitation.

“God bless us! Everyone!” sounds like the whole room just sneezed.

The proper “Every One!” places staccato emphasis on you, and you and, most especially YOU, great-uncle Ebeneezer. Capitalization lends an air of formality – even holiness – which might also be inferred from the application of the word “truly” a few words prior in the Dickens script (the Gospels utilize the phrase “Truly I say to you ...” when Jesus wanted particularly to stress a parabolic subtlety).

In any case, it seems clear that Dickens intended to invoke the authority of the Christian God, having previously interwoven an easily recognizable theme of Christian forgiveness and redemption with four rather pedestrian Pagan “spirits.”

It’s fortunate Dickens’ artistry was spawned in the free-enterprise journals of 19th century England. Clearly his profanely “spiritual” message would never survive the blue pencils of the NEA-driven dilettantes churning out contemporary manifestoes.

And such is our loss.

Next: God, the damned

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Bah, Humbug!

2009-12-22T09:23:00.001-07:00

“Bah!” said Scrooge. “Humbug!” he added.

And our English-speaking world was never again the same.

Now, the word “humbug,” in and of itself, predates the Dickens Christmas Carol by nearly a century – an archaic exclamation even then ... the callous utterance of a wrinkled curmudgeon graying of hair and spirit alike.

“Humbug” is variously defined as “Rubbish, pretense, deception, or a sham.” Its documented origin dates to 1751 as student slang for a “trick, jest, hoax, deception ... of unknown origin” ... even referring to a type of British hard candy (though that repugnant name surely negates whatever dulcitude it might possess).

Skulduggery. Buggered. Don’t bug me. Repugnant. Ugly. Somehow the “u-g” (or “ugh”) construction proves onomatopoetical in most of its varied incarnations. But that may just be me, bludgeoning you, tough guy, with curmudgeonly sludge.

The sound of a word often enhances its inherent meaning. Consider how simple rhymes of “power” can mirror the emotion when we speak of “a towering triumph,” for example, a “shower” of gifts, or a “glowering” gaze ... and even “cowering” in a corner seems to carry timidness to a powerful extreme.

You can “plunk” cash on a counter, or plunk away at the keys of a piano – implying a carelessness in dealing with “junk.” The word “fiery” carries so much more impact that “hot.” Words like “aloof” and “benign” look and sound like we shouldn’t pay attention.

And I never cared a lick for hicks like “Tricky Dick” and “Slick Willy” – and I could tick off a hundred reasons they made me sick in their day (yet “Nick” is the devil, and “Old St. Nick” the jolliest of elves ... go figure).

Still, I always find it ironic that “onomatopoeia” doesn’t sound like what it means (else rather than describing a word that sounds like its meaning, it would describe a word that not pronounced the way it’s spelled).

Bottom line: Powerful words can add “pop” to a passage of text – a little “zing” to linger on the lips.

Next: God Bless Us, Every One!

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

You will be visited by Three Ghosts

2009-12-21T09:17:00.003-07:00

A trivia question: How many spirits visited Ebeneezer Scrooge in the Dickens’ classic, Christmas Carol?

Without thinking, most will respond “three!” Cleave to those who correctly reckon “four,” for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Verily, Jacob Marley was the first of four spirits who visited the cowering hermit – telling him to expect three (more) spirits ere the dawn of that Christmas morn.

Christmas Carol is a favorite work of fiction (or of nonfiction, for that matter). Were ever such characters caricatured, before or after? “Christmas Eve Scrooge” is the epitome of the Anti-Christ, the antithesis of the Spirit of Christmas. Likewise, Tiny Tim embodies the innocence of a child seeking something unseen to be believed (a mother’s love, perhaps, or the miracle of Santa Claus.
In my own career as a “ghost writer,” I often have been asked to infuse spirit into the text of greedy and spiritless offerors of products and services as empty and cold as the offices of Scrooge & Marley.

“Please make the writing more stylish and elaborate ... simple and strong,” my taskmaster begs of me.

I may be willing to lay aside, for the moment, the observation that “stylish and elaborate” are pretty much the EXACT opposite of “simple and strong.” And I may even bite my tongue at applying these kinds of attributes to a box of 3-inch wing nuts or a bank’s mundane offering of “free” checking.

But I am forever doomed it seems – without no prospect of reprieve at the rising of the Christmas Day sun – to grasp at some chain that might bind strong and stylish words to some product or service whose benefits are ethereal, at best.

Yes, the English language is gorgeous, melodic. The mere rhythm and pace of well-formulated rhetoric can entertain and even hypnotize.

But if rhetoric is to be more than eloquent pomposity, there has to be some there ... THERE! To write effectively about some commercial product or service, I have to touch, feel, comprehend its essence. And if there is no there there, it’s a ghost, and no measure of elocution blended into the ghostwriting recipe will save the sales campaign.

Fiction and narrative nonfiction writers are faced with the same dilemma. You can write about nothing, and the words may ring admirably in the air ... but they won’t ring true. It is a great exercise to write words simply for their own sway – sound and fury signifying nothing, if you will.

Writers, demand of your employers the substance to ply your craft. For if you are blessed with the tools of a carpenter, yet have no wood to shape, you are little more than a well-meaning spirit wielding no tool of shape or substance.

In the end, substance, and substance alone, begets great writing. The exercise of wordsmithing begets sweat. It is practice. And while it may even be practice worth committing to, you are left, in the end, with an idiotic voice crying in the wilderness at the silent, fallen tree.

Next: “Bah, Humbug!”

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Back to Basics (Part 8) – Love!

2009-12-18T12:25:00.004-07:00

A Writer must have love in his heart, love the craft, love the subject, love the chase for the perfect word, the perfect phrasing, the perfect construction.

If you don’t love to write, give it up. It’s much too hard, much too taxing, the rewards much too elusive and fleeting.

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer recently marked his 25th anniversary as a writer with a column of apologetic self-reflection (see 25 years). He notes that producing a column three times a week “is like being married to a nymphomaniac – as soon as you’re done, you’ve got to do it again.”

Love has to be your mistress (mister?), with all the intrigue of excitement, guilt, ennui, power and hopelessness inherent in such furtive pursuits. Writing is at once a secret pleasure and a secret sin – the kiss of an arrogant mistress threatening more to consume than to consummate.

But if you can embrace the mistress in spite of that, writing is easy. You may not write inspiringly, or even competently … but it is akin to el acto sexual: It cannot be done badly.

The cathartic scrape of pen on paper alone is a productive act of holy – nay, unholy – personality. The act distinguishes our uniqueness, for no one can ever again communicate any precise thought in the same way, with the same history of personality, occupying the same point in space and time.

Like a loving mate, writing completes us and, in making us whole, simultaneously shreds the fabric of the constituent components. Blood, coursing through arterial and venous highways, fills the heart, engorges the organ, and fills us with the breath of life; spilled into the gutter, it is the extinguishment of our being through the dark power of evil and death.

The Writer bleeds on the page, whether in blistered anguish or with wrenching glee – whether with words meticulously crafted or divorced from the subjugation to self-discipline – or whether lighting upon any click of the cosmic compass orbiting between the extremes of infinite straight-line continua.

Truly I tell you, the creation of a written masterpiece is like God’s creation of time. A succession of events move point-to-point in a straight line, yet always circling around to a point of origin as singular and infinite as an atom spiraling into the black hole of universal birth.

And each unique succession of events moves along a parallel orbit to another, and another, and another – smothering us in the entanglements of life.

In a world filled with creation, the expression of our own unique circumstance and perspective contributes, however ponderously, to the whole. The innocuous, the trivial, the venal, the blasphemous all – all – contribute to the continuum in the same manner and breadth as the pompous, the significant, the inspirational and the pure.

As a moth is drawn to the light, we are inevitably drawn to the latter circumstances: We scorn the innocuous to embrace the pompous and the significant; renounce the vulgar in order to court the inspiring purity of holy verse. And yet, the enigmatic juxtaposition of good and evil fuels our very being. Absent the contradiction of black hole and the nova, the universe is less than complete.

Love your writing … love all writing. Learn what you can, while you can, from the good, the bad and the ugly old hag staring back from the page with lust in her eyes. And yes, strive to be better … but embrace every act of creation.

Next: You will be visited by Three Ghosts

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Back to Basics (Part 7) – Practice!

2009-12-17T13:33:00.001-07:00

I’ve been writing professionally since Richard Nixon was President. But I went on holiday for the better part of two decades, and it’s taken me a month to get my mojo back (if indeed I have begun to mojinate) ….

Remember when you were a kid, and you could run barefoot across the fields – all day long, without hardly breaking a sweat? When you got to the high school track team, you shod yourself with metal spikes and accepted mentoring from some quasi-sadistic math teacher wannabe who forced you to practice block bursts, to practice turn technique and to practice elbow stride until they became second nature.

Today, decades later, parallel elbow stride make jogging sessions a little less taxing. No longer do you wear shorts (cutoffs or team-clad), having long since abandoned any thought of exposing hairy legs to the elements in favor of comfy gray sweats. All the practice on the turns makes it a little less likely you’ll slip on a patch of ice on that first Adidas-shod session following proclamation of your New Year’s Resolutions.

The practice of your youth still lends competence and maturity to your stride. But only the tribulatory practice of a quasi-daily regimen would ever again bring you within spitting distance of a 12-flat hundred or a 5-minute mile.

Writing is a marathon.

That marathon consists of nightmarish sprints, hurdles, endless challenges of many miles to go before you sleep … all scrumpled in with the 26-mile, 385-yard curse of the courier – sprint to herald the conquest and then you die – a conjugational, convoluted, convocational marathon convulsion of the author’s yearning to be heard.

Practice writing as you would train for a marathon.

Practice writing as if you were straining to avoid embarrassment at a piano recital.

Practice like the next home game pits you one-on-one with LeBron.

Practice because you know you’ll only get one chance, on bended knee, to sway her with the question you mean to pop.

Practice writing as if your livelihood depended upon it – for if writing is in any way involved with your vocation of choice, it does.

Now, despite what NFL gurus and blue-haired piano teachers may try to tell you, let me debunk a myth about “perfect practice.” Practice alone does make perfect. The written word morphs to the beat of a devil-went-down-to-Georgia fiddler straddling the high-wire demarcation of the space-time continuum. Wait for a thought to be “perfect” and it will never meet with the page in this or any alternative universe.

Get it down. Try it out. Listen to it. Think about it. Parse it. Cull it. Tweak it. Cut it.

But do SOMETHING! That’s practice.

One more word, parenthetically: A piano teacher used to urge me to practice at the keyboard for an hour a day … and to practice in front of a record player for an hour more, listening to masters performing the same Chopin nocturne I sought to passably reproduce.

Listening is practice, he said, and in that same vein I urge you, dear reader, to listen to orators great and small; read the great writers and their flailing imitators. Puddle around the internet. Lurk in chat rooms and boards of every description, pining to hear the fresh turn of a phrase, the newly fashionable word.

On average, True Writers only work half a day – the practicing consumes the other 12 hours.

Next: Back to Basics (Part 8) – Love!

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Back to Basics (Part 6) – Read!

2009-12-16T11:20:00.000-07:00

Reading is the consummation of the Writer’s love affair with the written word.

Reading is as intensely intimate as the sexual consummation of love. A best-selling author repeats this orgasmic sharing of self with millions of total strangers.

Strangers aching for the pleasure to be derived from the printed page.

Strangers whose coin lines the pockets of a Writer who has whored out his innermost sanctuaries.

Strangers who make this rich creation unique to themselves, each filtering it through a lifetime of experiences, prejudices, emotions, actions, inactions, successes, failures and unacknowledged sins.

The art of this Writer – this Lothario, this whore, this genius, this enigmatic dreamweaver – rivals awe inspiring Michaelangelic strokes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel … mirrors the power of the athlete’s churning thighs … fuels the siren-song of the screen actress in her greatest role.

We assume this great art of writing is a super power – the sort of virtuosity reserved for Mozart, Einstein, daVinci, Socrates, Galileo, Curie, Poe, Newton, Goethe, Genghis Khan, Clark Kent or Shakespeare. But another genius, Thomas Edison, famously preached that diligence, hard work and good fortune are as important as inspiration.

How many geniuses have squandered immense God-given talent in favor of drink, lust or sloth? How many relatively inferior minds have created great and lasting works that endure in testament to the sweat of the brow, defying the ravaging winds of history?

Read and learn the lessons of history. Pore through the great works and the mediocrities. Try to discern how the process of thought evolved. Imagine a book unwritten, and the tenacity required to bring it to life. Step by painstaking step, bits and pieces have fallen onto the page, spiriting themselves into a coherent, compelling, then masterful body of work.

Gaining understanding by deconstructing the masterpiece – THAT is the process of reading.

The best example on the streets right now? David Benioff’s City of Thieves. Its plot evolves innocently enough – but quickly proffers layers of subtlety that enfold the reader in the mantle of words spinning from the page. Slowly, the reader recognizes the tale of a book being written, an author being born. It is the story of human talent and will being applied to need … with the inevitable emergence of situational genius.

I’ll say no more, save to recommend it for the next session cuddled in front of the fireplace. And when the page turning reaches Chapter 17, linger awhile to admire the artistry of what is, perhaps, the consummate passage in the literature of the new millennium:

Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She’s beautiful; when you’re with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence: your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening of your week, but some day she will leave you for good. One night, after she’s been gone for years, you will see her on the arm of a younger man, and she will pretend not to recognize you.

Embrace the mistress.

Next: Back to Basics (Part 7) – Practice

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Back to Basics (Part 5) – Speak!

2009-12-15T12:07:00.005-07:00

Peggy Noonan is a remarkable Writer – one who brandishes the aural tools of Terse and Verse with quintessential mastery.

She burst onto the scene in the 1980s as President Reagan’s speechwriter. She sculpted a practice still fashionable major Presidential addresses – notably the State of the Union. Noonan would script Reagan to acknowledge some ordinary citizen in the gallery, having thematically woven that person’s special experience or even some heroic contribution into the text of the speech.

Noonan also is responsible for probably the third-most-famous passage penned (in my lifetime, at least) by a Presidential speechwriter. It concluded Reagan’s tribute to brave astronauts in the wake of the catastrophic 1986 Challenger explosion:

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”

(The most famous? John Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for you … ask what you can do for your country.” Second? Reagan again: “Mr. Gorbachev – Tear down this wall!”)

Now, it should be noted that Noonan’s script was adapted from the words of British aviator John Magee, who was killed at the age of 19, shortly after writing this now world-famous poem. No great writing is truly original; to one extent or another, writers draw on the works and experiences of others.

In the end, the genius of the speechwriter is in writing to the ear. Would “four-score and seven years ago” have ever escaped the blue pen of a newspaper’s city editor? Without the speechwriter’s craft, December 7th, 1941 would simply have been “a date which will live in world history” (as it was in the first draft) – wholly lacking in rhythm, tone and urgency.

But now, the date forever is associated with FDR’s unique elocution as “a date which will live in infamy.” Who, before or since, has ever used the word “infamy” with any effect whatsoever? (and, for that matter, how many speechwriters might have taken the risk, with a lesser orator, to back up the words “in” and “infamy” on the page?)

Superior speechwriting invokes rhythm. Its syntax consists of “Terse and Verse” … weaving short bursts of energy and content among a prosaic lullabye of calming poetry. Speechwriting involves carefully plotted repetition, always scouting for words or concepts that might not be immediately clear to the ear.

Consider a simple example – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s introduction of Daisy in The Great Gatsby. On the written page, it went like this:

Daisy, made an attempt to rise--she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression – then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room. "I'm p-paralyzed with happiness." She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

Suppose that was to be the passage of a speech. It might be re-written like this:

When I first met Daisy, she told me she was paralyzed with happiness. “P-paralyzed” she said. Laughing. Charming. She started to rise, then leaned forward, holding my hand and looking at me with eyes that promised I was the one man in the world she wanted to see. That was her way. Her charm. The balancing girl’s name was Baker, she said. Said? No. No, she murmured. Murmured in a low, intimate voice that made people lean toward her.

Notice the mechanics:

First, the use of the inadvertent stutter to repeat and emphasize the word “paralyzed.”

A wholly ordinary sentence of moderate length followed by a three-word burst and two one-word punctuations.

Then, a lilting 30-word sentence featuring short, common words – easy to spit out in a single breath – but with a splash of character and content – offering the speaker ample latitude to employ a bit of charm or showmanship with the line.

Three terse sentences, then four (three shorts and a long fragment, actually) crafted to explain the important word “murmur” – a word that is hard to enunciate clearly, and one that many people might not be able to define or recognize out of context.

Ever wonder what goes on inside a Writer’s head? Well, fortunately, much of the nitty-gritty passes in a flash – judged by experience against the exigencies of the moment – without much thought to the specifics of craft. The rules have long since been learned, memorized and broken (often … and typically with little consideration devoted to the act).

Next: Back to Basics (Part 6) – Read!

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Back to Basics (Part 4) – Write!

2009-12-14T08:31:00.001-07:00

Writing is easy. So DO IT!

My life has no shortage of regrets. Laying the personal ones aside for now (and maybe for the next decade or two), my greatest professional regret is drifting away from the discipline of writing every single day.

I was a bit of a child prodigy (a very bit). I always got “A’s” on book reports, term papers and such.

The other day, I dug into some old boxes in the basement and found a wealth of materials from those old days – journals, diaries, poems, short stories – all on yellowing paper, most hand-written in fading blue ink. All were dreadfully dreadful by my current standards.

The problem was, I think, I hadn’t really done a lot of living at that point in my life, so the admonition to “write what you know” predictably resulted in relative drivel. Yet my high school and college mentors seemed to always feel I was ahead of the curve, and never let me get frustrated.

In college, I majored in journalism and creative writing, producing hard news, features, fiction, poetry – you name it – virtually every day of my young life.

When I finished school, I spent 12 years in daily newspaper journalism … but as I gained experience, I predictably became a supervisor, an editor, a manager. I wrote less and less. Eventually, I fled professional journalism entirely, in favor of the more lucrative (I thought) PR and marketing departments of some fairly large organizations.

I became Willie Loman – a salesman without a future … and not much of a past, truth be known. My “Great American Novel” was not only unpublished, it was largely unwritten. Life got in the way of writing – and writing was my life.

One month ago today, I cast off those chains. I created an alter ego – The Fixer – and built a website at www.fixadocument.com. I started to blog every day – long blogs, because I was too busy to write short ones.

In the short run, I’ll make enough money to scrape by, writing, editing, blogging, ghostwriting for companies … helping students break down the barriers that poor writing imposes between the great ideas in their heads and the full and complete understanding of their teachers and profs.

In the not-so-short, but still-not-long term, I’ll publish and market a book about writing – I could call it Writing is Easy, but the name’s probably already taken.

Ooohh … just Googled that, and found a cool quote from some guy named Gene Fowler:

“Writing is easy. You just stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”

Blood or no blood, writing makes you immortal (though not necessarily famous or rich). One of these days, I’ll be dead, too. Hope some young punk finds a reference to my novel, my book … heck, even this lonely little blog … and finds something to keep him going on a blustery Monday morning.

With that comforting thought in mind, I’ll continue to stare each day at a blank page, knowing that even if it’s filled with little more than junk by the end of the day, I can always edit it tomorrow.

If you’re going to be a Writer, you’ve got to write.

Next: Back to Basics (Part 5) – Read!

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Towers – An interlude

2009-12-12T11:33:00.000-07:00

On the evening of the fall of the Twin Towers in NYC, September 11, 2001, I sat down to write – completing the following verses some nine days later. The final six lines, with heavy religious and patriotic undertones, have at times been published separately.

Towers

With towering fury, the devil let go,
and the walls came a tumblin’ down;
The sun burned red and the sky festered black,
as the air choked the very soul
    with a stifled gasp, a shriek, a sob
    and the stenching inferno foul.

The noble American spirit was there,
in the aerie-topped monuments tall;
But America slept, she was deaf to the call
’til satan slapped hard at the wall ...
’til satan slapped hard at the wall.

The blow punched a ghastly hole in the wall:
in the smoke satan callously laughed.
    The Innocent blinded
    They wept and They clawed
    through the rubble and chaos of
    hell
    They prayed as the flame
    sucked the air from Their lungs
    and melted the steel in the walls;
    from high up above
    They tumbled and leapt
    to the maw of the hungry mass grave;
    Now buried alive, They wept
    and They clawed
to the waiting arms of their God ...
to the waiting arms of their God.

The temple crashed with pond’rous fury
in the morning’s darkest hour.
With a shaken lip and a teary eye,
the son said “We walk with God.”

I watched him and I thought it odd
Death’s Shadow could make him cower
    (Here where his father had likewise once stood
    with myriad swords, shield and flame;
    to call us to risk a horrible cost
    the devil’s will to tame ...
    The devil’s will to tame.
    With wisdom, restraint and
    much to be lost,
    he drew a line the sand ...
    With sweat and blood risked
    holocaust,
    He drew a line the sand).

Then time unfroze; the son’s eye firmed,
the Shadow coursed his veins with blood;
his grief must wait, tho’ the nation mourn;
his countenance drew morally taut.
With a steely glower the son looked out,
but bridled unsavory power.
Vengeance is His, but justice is ours:
“This act, it shall not stand.”

The Father is cruel, His lesson is harsh,
In our gut He emblazons his brand.
This heinous act, this wound most cruel:
“This act, it shall not stand.”

The son drank the cup with a painful draught
then re-echoed through the land:
“I vow it once again,” he said:
“This act, it shall not stand.”

To the heart of the meek now
may God stretch his hand,
for the cowardly act on these towers.
The world looks to us to replant the flower:
“This act, it shall not stand.”

Retreating again
to the comforting den,
to his harbor of darkness and flame;
satan slept
but was waked
in the night by the din:
    the pealing bells
    the clanging picks
    and roar of cranes and shouts;
still, satan turned to
his naked red bedmate
and hissed as he lovingly sneered:
“Here once again I am safe now, my friend ...
Here once again I am safe.”

But from deep in the chasm
another hushed voice
whispered ten million times strong.
The devil shuddered as
Ice coursed his veins,
and the voice came again from the Light:
“No harbor is yours
’til your own grave is mined,
   and evil forever is banned.
This act, simply never will stand, my friend ...
This act, it shall not stand.”

With fury and vengeance
a mustard seed plant
where fell steel and concrete and soot;
The flower of Freedom will grow once again
in the junkyard at Liberty’s foot ...
in the junkyard at Liberty’s foot.

© 2001, Ed Swartley / Communic-8

Back to Basics (Part 3) – A Tale of Two Sentences

2009-12-11T12:54:00.000-07:00

OK. Reviewing lessons 1 & 2: Keep it simple and write short sentences.

Lesson 3: Put two sentences together (and only two) and your writing usually will look better.

Mark Twain once apologized to a pen pal that he didn’t have time to write a short letter … so he was writing a long one. Nobody really likes to read long stuff. War and Peace is more a double-dare challenge than it is a page-turner designed for cuddling up to a fireplace on a stormy night – it’s not even particularly noble literature. A Tale of Two Cities is a ton better, but I’ll wager less than 1 person in 1,000 has ever actually READ it. Sure, most people, if put on the spot to quote the opening line of a novel, will spout off “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times …” Some significantly fewer in number will be able to expound that it was also “the age of wisdom … foolishness … belief (and) … incredulity.” Those who can actually reach the far end of Dickens’ 84-word sentence (“we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way”) can likely be counted on my two hands … and maybe a toe or two on a good day. (Second place, BTW, on the opening-lines challenge: “It was a dark and stormy night.” … but most people don’t believe that’s the start of any for-reals book.)

But I digress.

Raise your hand if you read paragraphs 1, 2 and 4 above. Skimmed #3, I’ll wager, trying to get to the point. Just like the Writer, apparently. The Defense rests …

(However – readership likely would have spiked had I split paragraph 2 into, say, four of them – same 207 words, you understand, same bulk; just less physically imposing.)

Short paragraphs not only address the challenge of the reader’s “will to read,” but they’re easy on readers’ eyes. Long paragraphs cross the eyes. Two sentences or fewer, please.

Graphic design gurus preach an optimal width for a line of type of 25 to 50 letters. The width of the page you’re reading right now is actually a tweak wider, which means its readability might improve slightly if I pushed the type size up by a point or two (not that big a deal on a large computer screen).

Line-width theory involves the ability of the eye to read a line, right to left, and then rebound accurately to lock on the first word of the next line. Too long, and the eye loses connection; too short and a Ping-Pong game erupts in your eye sockets.

Instructors dictate the parameters of term papers: 12-point, double-spaced, Helvetica font, 1/2-inch margins, etc., etc., etc. (FYI, sans-serif typefaces like Helvetica, Arial and Verdana are actually poor choices for this kind of wide format. They lack the little “serifs” – the hooks characteristic of fonts like Times, Courier or Georgia. If you look at the latter three along a line of text, the sequential serifs create the optical illusion of underlining, which helps keep the eye comfortably on-track.)

But if you control the format of a document, you might want to choose a narrower column (or multiple columns) and/or a larger type size to facilitate easy reading.

Instructors also traditionally dictate paragraph structure: Topic sentence, argument, exposition, exposition, exposition, summary, restatement of the topic sentence, new paragraph. Wow … one seven sentence paragraph, and you’ve easily got a page covered (with at least four or five paragraphs to go), along with a guarantee that NO ONE will actually read your work – not even el prof-bo, who’s long since deferred to flinging papers across the room and awarding “A’s” to the ones that fly farthest.

You’d think tenured professors see enough gray across the dinner table when the go home in the evening, without soliciting a lot of gray text from students. Corporate marketers spend big bucks on full-color design and printing, only to muck up the project with a bunch of gray-looking text. Actually, I'd bet most profs would neither notice nor care if you provided a bunch of two-sentence paragraphs, so long as they were well-researched, full of thought, and to the point.

Use your head. Use narrow columns, big type, headlines, photos, logos, subheads, pullout quotes … whatEVER. But take a cue from the old shampoo commercial and wash that gray right out of your hair … or your written document, as the case may be.

Next: Back to Basics (Part 4) – Write!

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Back to Basics (Part 2) – 25 Words

2009-12-10T14:28:00.004-07:00

Here is something to think about: Write short sentences. This helps avoid confusion for the reader. Limit each sentence to one single thought. Insert a period. Start your next thought off fresh, with a new sentence. It helps the reader understand better.

To illustrate, compare the six-sentence paragraph above to the sentence below:

One thing to think about is writing short sentences, limiting each sentence to one single thought, helping avoid confusion for the reader, who will understand better if you insert a period after each thought and start the next thought off fresh, with a new sentence.

The two passages are almost identical, but the first is much easier to follow. Admittedly, the first paragraph is also a little choppy and unnatural, but if you practice writing short sentences, your “ear” will tell you when mixing in a longer sentence “sounds right.” In fact, your writing gains a pleasing “rhythm” if you vary short and long sentences – like Morse code … maybe two longs and a short, a long, a short, a long and three shorts.

As a rookie reporter, my editor demanded that the first paragraph, or “lead,” of any story not exceed 25 words. In fact, he wisely limited paragraphs to two sentences. (As a practical matter, newspaper type is set in narrow columns – a couple inches wide, at most. Lengthy paragraphs looked gray and daunting without the visual relief of a paragraph-starting indentation.)

Think of it another way: 25 words is about as much as a speaker can utter without stopping for a breath. Do the guy a favor: Serve up a “period” to time his every gasp.

Or, 25 words is about as much as any reader can hold in his pea-brain at any one time. Write longer, and he’ll have to retrace your words to follow along.

A lot can be communicated in only a few words.

About two hours after JFK was shot in 1963, for example, the Associated Press confirmed his death with a stunningly terse “FLASH” alert:

President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. CST.

Moments later, a “BULLETIN” followed – exactly 25 words, depending on how you count compound adjectives:

President John Kennedy, thirty-sixth president of the United States, was shot to death today by a hidden assassin armed with a high-powered rifle.

Books have been written on the subject of the Kennedy assassination. The comprehensive Warren Commission report, not published until the following year, covers 888 pages, and is supplemented by 26 supporting volumes.

Yet first news – history in a hurry – came over the AP teletype mere minutes after shots rang out in Dealey Plaza. They were written under deadline pressure, with a world breathlessly awaiting word – long before the carefully confirmed “FLASH” and precision-crafted “BULLETIN” … even before the President died, before the most basic facts had been confirmed.

In the mellowing light of historical perspective, that very first teletype may be the most poignant 27 words ever penned:

President Kennedy was shot today as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and grabbed Mr. Kennedy. She cried, "Oh, no!'' The motorcade sped on.

Still think you’ve got a thought worth more than 25 words?

Next: Back to Basics (Part 3) – Two sentences

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Back to Basics (Part 1) – KISS

2009-12-09T00:29:00.003-07:00

KISS … an all-American acronym for Keep it Simple, Stupid.

American culture is full of examples of the KISS concept: President Truman kept a sign on his desk that read “The Buck Stops Here” to remind himself (and Oval Office visitors alike) that he alone held THE ultimate say-so.

In practice, that covered everything from complex decisions regarding the military-industrial complex, to the matter of choosing a route for his morning walk. When push came to shove, those four words – The Buck Stops Here – spoke volumes.

President Clinton had a similar sign. The words “It’s the Economy, Stupid” reminded him that, whatever issues he might face, if voters didn’t have jobs or rent money, then HE was likely to be out of a job soon himself.

Traffic signs generally consist of one or two words: “Stop” or “Railroad Crossing.” We’re too busy driving to absorb more. Experience dictates action when we see these simple signs – no need for the Highway Department to ramble on.

Photographers recognize the importance of isolating a subject from the background. Ham radio operators constantly fiddle with their frequency dials to eliminate static and clutter. The recipe for “Aunt Tillie’s Crock Pot Chili” calls for a pinch of salt and a dash of Oregano … to invoke more precision would take the joy out of cooking.

Eliminate the unnecessary. KISS.

Writers should remind themselves of the elegance of simplicity. Don’t use a five-dollar word when a 50-cent special will do. Speak your mind, but limit your thoughts to one idea per sentence.

Read your written word aloud – to yourself, first, just to see whether your tongue gets tangled along the way (if so, edit and revise), and then to a friend, family member or colleague. Pretty soon, you’ll find the ears on the side of your head gradually giving way to the “ears” inside your head … and you’re editing those tongue twisters before they ever hit the page.

When it all comes out in the wash, a writer plagued with Writer’s Block is no different than a baseball slugger in a hitting slump. Nothing is more confounding to Albert Pujols than having coaches “tweak” his stance, or suggest he drop his wrists a bit and cut down on his stride. Later, Phat Albert might be signing autographs, only to be plagued by “helpful” fans suggesting a less open stance, more sleep, an energy drink, a margarita ….

But in the end, El Hombre’s slump is likely to end when he clears his mind of all the garbage … and just swings naturally. No conscious thought. No contrivance. Just instinct and reaction.

Be a Writer. Do the same. Kisses to all …

Next: Back to Basics (Part 2) – 25 Words

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Back to Basics – Intro

2009-12-08T11:44:00.003-07:00

Writing is easy.

But try blogging – five, six days a week, 500 words or so at a throw – and you find out what Honest Abe meant when he said you can’t please any of the people none of the time … or some such thing (I’m sure a good editor cleaned up his rough draft before the quote hit Bartlett’s).

Writing is hard work. It’s inconvenient. It’s easy to postpone.

Poke around the blogosphere and see how many bloggers post one entry … and disappear. A relative few get past the first three or four. It is rare, indeed, to find a daily-active blog, rich with content, alive with the spirit that brings you back – as the followers of Thackeray, Dickens or Eliot might have breathlessly awaited each published episode.

As kids of the Great Depression plunked hard-to-come-by nickels under the Flash Gordon marquee.

As Watergate co-conspirators jerked awake when the Washington Post slapped onto the porch full of the latest revelations of Messrs. Woodward & Bernstein.

To date, “Fix Your Writing” has been two parts coaching, three parts philosophy and four parts specimens of memorable writing. That’s nine parts, and many of you, Dear Readers, have characterized a tenth part – if not the entire effort – as more specimen than memoria.

Perhaps it is time to return to the basics.

Yesterday, I met a man whose 60-something mother is embarking on an adventure … a quest for long-yearned-for college degree. Intelligent, intuitive, the major obstacle (now that said son and siblings have vacated the premises) is a set of writing skills that have atrophied over several decades of disuse.

Like millions of us, she needs a little help with her writing – someone to look over an essay, book report, term paper … whatever. Someone to nosy through pages of text, and make sure her words are as clearly understood as a mother addressing her child by all three names.

For some, a critique of one’s writing is daunting – potentially humiliating. But all of us should be lucky enough to approach a critical challenge with the mindset of this venerable woman. She’s a mother. After decades of romping through the forest of Motherhood, bouncing off the tree trunks and cursing to the squirrels, what could possibly seem embarrassing? Challenging? Novel or unique?

In her honor, let’s tackle eight basic lessons over the next two weeks – lessons every student should master. And since all of us are students of one discipline or another, the advice applies to first-graders, high-schoolers, Freshman English enrollees, interns, managers, CEOs and retirees:

• KISS

• 25 words

• Two sentences

• Write

• Speak

• Read

• Practice

• Love

Grandma (you’ve earned that title and, I’m confident, cherish it dearly) … I know you’ll make this. After all, if the big fella’s boarding-house reach across the Thanksgiving table every November hasn’t pounded your spirit into submission, what’s going to stop you?

Next: Back to Basics – Part 1

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Write It, edit it, re-write it, Ed-It …

2009-12-07T10:02:00.006-07:00

Writing is easy.

The tough part is figuring out what you want to write about, researching it, and then deciding how to say it, editing, rewriting, editing and rewriting again, and then proofing your copy ... and, oh yeah, running it by a couple other people whose opinion you respect and asking them to tell you honestly what they really, really, really think about it.

All the while, remember never to write a sentence longer than 25 words, which is lots easier if you never use the words “and” or “then.” (Count that – the late-great William Safire, the 20th century’s premier authority on effective writing, once said “The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you’re breaking.”)

Among Safire’s other admonitions to amateurs (and to pros who write like amateurs):

• Remember to never split an infinitive.
• The passive voice should never be used.
• Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
• A writer must not shift your point of view.
• Don't overuse exclamation marks!!
• Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in
long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
• The adverb always follows the verb.

That’s a lot to remember right there – yet that’s but a miniscule portion of the advice of one man (who wrote several books and thousands of newspaper columns). You can spend a lifetime and your communications skills likely will never approach competency (let alone brilliance). So why try? Hire a pro (conflict of interest alert: I am one, and would be happy to be hired).

It probably occurs to you that pros are expensive. They’re hard to keep on track. They take their sweet time, particularly when paid by the hour. And did I mention they’re expensive? They cost a lot, and can suffer from redundancy, particularly when paid by the word. (And there’s no guarantee they know what rules they’re breaking.)

The best advice I can offer here goes back to the first three words above: “Writing is easy.” It’s all that other stuff that’s hard ... but if you’ve got a good idea about what you want / need to say, you can short-circuit a lot of shocking costs.

Give your hired gun with a well-thought-out rough draft, and access to research and background. Even if your prose is less than purple, your written input forces you to cull out the irrelevant and focus on the nitty-gritty.

That lets the pro concentrate his $125-an-hour time on the grammatical and stylistic subtleties most business people can’t provide. Chances are, you’ll spend less time writing the draft than you would have spent trying to tell the pro what you wanted ... and won’t have wasted the pro’s time (and your money) in the process.

We all know that every vendor operates best when given superior guidance and thoughtful supervision – that rule doesn’t change just because the vendor is “a creative type.”

––––––––––––––––––––
Parting Shot(s): Two quotes, the first from William Safire (of course!!!): “If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.” The second comes from Conan the Grammarian, the resident language-sculptor of the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers: “If it sounds like Madison Avenue or Congress, it’s bad writing.”

Next: Back to Basics

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

An Interlude

2009-12-05T09:16:00.002-07:00

Back in the day, when my elder daughter was close to the age of my grandson, I wrote a column called “Kids … for Adults Only” for the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper. I hope this 25-year stroll back in time provides a pleasant (and timeless) to the stresses of everyday life – to a time when electronic technology was just beginning to make our lives easier.

_______________________________

Kids … for Adults Only

January 7, 1985

This is supposed to be an era of computer literacy – the start of an eon of microchips, supercomputers and sophisticated sophtware.

No big problem, except that my 3-year-old daughter is in love with computers. And microchips. And electronic games. And the little birthday cards that play “Happy Birthday to You” over and over.

And over.

Ad nauseam.

The attention span of a 3-year-old is supposed to be something between 18 seconds and the time it takes Big Bird to solve a problem for Mister Snuffleupagus. Her dinner captures her attention for about three bites. Unfortunately, her new $372.95 Texas Instruments special occupies her for about the same period – about three bytes, which in computer lingo is just about enough time to get Mommy out of sight before getting back into Jell-o spreading, book-tearing, window fingerprinting and any of three hundred seventy-two and nineteen-twentieths other 3-year-old occupations.

But greeting cards are entirely another matter.

Two years ago, we listened to “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” about 3,412 times between Valentine’s Day and Daddy’s birthday many weeks later. It was “Happy Birthday” throughout much of the spring and a good time after the summer solstice.

The low-level batteries that fuel the electronic tunes never die. I know it. They never die. Nor do the insipid little eight-bar tunes that run through your head three hours after you lay your insomnia-filled brain on the pillow at night.

There is a solution, however.

Last Christmas, “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas” – you know, “lean your ear this way” and all – electronically beeped through the house (all the creatures were stirring and it sounds like a mouse …) through about the 10th day of Christmas before we lost our cool.

Parents know, however, that you just don’t throw away a child’s favorite toy. We tried hiding it. You know, you figure that if the kid really wants it, you can always pluck it up and placate her. Trouble was, we hid it between the couch cushions, sat on it once, and the gig was up.

A few hours later, we hid it again. But for some reason, the battery short-circuited, and Jolly Old Saint Nick began leaning his ear – erratically, but often – over and over again.

And over.

Ad nauseam.

A taint of evil genius suddenly struck me between the ears. The freezer. The sealed-so-it-doesn’t-leak-any-of-that-cold-air freezer; the shut-it-up-so-the-food-don’t-thaw freezer. If the cold air doesn’t get out and the warm air doesn’t get in, neither do the sound waves that bounce around in the air.

Sure enough, tucked away between the Fudgsicles and a breast of chicken, it was a silent night – all was peaceful, all was calm.

One drawback: For three solid days (we’ve got to write the company that makes these things; talk about durable), every time we opened the freezer door, we were greeted by Jolly Old Saint Nick, whose short-circuit was somehow kicked in the pants by the cold. When we reached for a frosty mug, when we reached for the peas, the corn, the broccoli and the leftover barbecue beef that gave us indigestion.

Finally, peace was complete. Three days of near-zero temperatures broke the spirit of the microchip, and the freezer serenades came to an end.

Victory was ours and the kid finally forgot.

….

Oh. An epilogue. Middle of July, we defrosted the freezer. Pulled out the card and tossed it in the trash, pulled the trash bag into the 35-gallon garbage barrel in the garage and closed the door …

You got it. Two hours later I jumped in the car, slammed the door, rolled down the window, and from the trash barrel came … “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas, lean your ear this way. Don’t you breathe a single …

Arrgghh!!

Next: Write It, edit it, re-write it, Ed-It

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Whatever you want them to be

2009-12-04T09:12:00.008-07:00

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: 

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carroll penned those immortal words, presumably in a drug-induced haze, nearly a century and a half ago – in a tome, by the way, not titled “Alice in Wonderland,” but rather Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

It may not seem like it, but 12 of the 23 words in that first quatrain of what is perhaps the best-known nonsense poem ever written actually are words. “Translators” have dissected the work and made sense of the nonsense (“brillig,” for example, being 4 p.m., or the time one starts broiling food for supper), which seems to me quite beside the point. Would anyone have remembered “Jabberwocky” had it started “It was 4 in the afternoon …” and shambled along from there?

(I once asked a poet of some middling fame to describe his feelings, his state of mind, when he wrote the phrase “… pissing gin at 3 a.m.” He replied that, if he could have stated it any better, he’d have written it that way in the first place.)

Brilligwriting illustrates a useful trick in writing: If the appropriate word or phrase doesn’t spring to mind, jot in anything – literally anything – and continue on. Come back to the passage later and see whether that elusive word pops out … and if not, consult a thesaurus, or just sit and ponder it for a bit. It’ll come.

(Mr. Nicolay, take a letter please: “Four score and seven years ago, our borogoves, on second thought, make that forefathers – no, fathers – brought forth upon this land, er, continent …)

A word to the wise: Put the stubborn word(s) in ALL CAPS or something, so you don’t overlook it before signing off on a final draft.

Nonsense writing can be an art form (Dr. Seuss: “There’s a wocket in my pocket), yet few people step back with the perspective of time to see where words actually come from. Shakespeare, for example, coined hundreds of common words (including gnarled, frugal and bump) … some anonymous caveman, presumably, the word “ooof”. Hundreds of new words come into common use each year (e.g., waterboarding, vlog, frenemy …).

See also: 15 Words You Won't Believe They Added to the Dictionary

Me? Guilty.

In the process of writing a term paper in junior high school, I inadvertently misspelled “peruse.” Now, this is “back in the day,” when papers were hand-written in blue or black ink; find a mistake and you recopy the entire page. Valor being the better part of discretion, I cleverly decided to append an asterisk to the offending word, and added a footnote that “petruse” was an Old English word meaning “to look over or study.”

My Social Studies teacher, to my enduring amusement, gave me an “A” on the paper, in part owing to my “effective use of footnotes.”

The world’s babble of languages illustrates the tenacity of man’s urge to make himself understood.

Those who agree, please say “Yes” – or si, da, ja, oui, hai, ken, gee or HISlaH (the last is Klingon, thankyewverymuch – and, parenthetically, fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation fondly remember an episode called “Darmok,” in which an alien captain struggles to the death to communicate in his allegory-based language with Jean Luc Picard).

In short, words can be whatever we want them to be. The writer who chooses an odd turn of a phrase takes a risk. He may be ridiculed for his word choice or, in the rarest of circumstances, revered in history as a master.

Those unwilling to hear the voice of inspiration – to bear the slings and arrows of oncoming criticism – are likely to look back and find that their writing has proved of little or no consequence.

In the end, perhaps the immortal Dr. Seuss said it best:

Be who you are and say what you feel

because those who mind don't matter

and those who matter don't mind.

Accept that mindset, and perhaps your skin will soon grow thick enough to succeed as a Writer.

Next: An interlude

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

The Devil is in the Details

2009-12-03T09:36:00.005-07:00

Writing is easy.

Research is tough. Rewriting is tough. Editing is tough. And most of all, at least in my experience, proofreading is tough.

I’ve learned the techniques – read the copy carefully, two or three times. Read it backwards. Sit back and let your eye bounce down the page like a ping-pong ball, stopping to check whenever some anomaly (real or imagined) catches your eye.

Grizzled ol’ editors find it hard to let a project go to print. It’s the long experience that sees, in the mirror, the gray hairs that bear silent witness to the times the copy didn’t get proofread closely enough. The gut shrieks out at you; there’s a typo waiting to jump up from the page, I know it …

Somewhere in Southern Colorado by now is the grave of a nun who, some thirty-plus years ago, took great umbrage at a headline I wrote for the local newspaper. Sister Frances, a true saint who never quite cozied up to my style, was a venerable elder, a person of some authority at the Catholic school across the street from my newspaper office.

I’m sure I hastened that woman’s trip to that grave, but I’ll swear to the day I enter mine that I really was trying to suck up to the local Catholic community, to get in their good graces, as it were.

The perspective of years has softened the memory. Still, a shudder spills down my spine when I imagine the priest’s consternation later that evening in the Confessional, and the subsequent penance he must have meted out to this benevolent humanitarian in the wake of the tongue-lashing she delivered to me that day.

That morning I had penned a HUGE – hee-yoooo-uge headline over a feature story that I’d written glowingly and twice too long. The story was the newspaper’s coverage of the Catholic schoolchildren’s May 1 celebration of spring – a festive gala involving a crown of flowers arrayed to adorn a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

I swear on all that is holy that I intended all who read that afternoon’s newspaper to vicariously share the joy of those uniformed schoolgirls pictured on the front page reveling in the coming of spring, crowning that marble statue with flowers that might have come from the Garden of Eden itself.

When the afternoon edition hit the newsstands, the old woman quickly and surely strode across the street to go mano-a-mano with El Diablo incarnate – me. But even as the diatribe rose to a crescendo, I was still unclear why this usually gracious holy woman was berating me.

Then my eyes fell to the newspaper splayed across the office countertop. Amidst the good sister’s frantic gesticulations and clamoring, it slowly dawned on me that I’d failed to adequately proofread my own copy.

Inadvertantly – repeat, inadvertantly – and to my eternal dismay, the letter “n” had been omitted from the first word of the headline. In letters nearly an inch tall, I had forged a message for all the citizenry enjoy our newspaper’s coverage of the Crowing of the May Queen.

Still wanna be a Writer?

Next: Whatever you want them to be

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Word Choice (Part 2)

2009-12-02T09:33:00.010-07:00

Ever notice how words that rhyme with “truck” can get a fella in a lot of trouble?

And no, I’m not talking about the obvious “F-bomb” that’s been the downfall of potty mouths like Lenny Bruce and Tiger Woods. I dealt yesterday, for example, with “schmuck” as a potential land mine, but “puck,” “truck” and “suck” all fall into roughly the same category.

Run through the list alphabetically (avoiding the temptation to play “The Name Game” as you do so, please *) and a plethora of ploblems plesent themselves:

Amuck (amok), bullock, buttock, Buck, chuck, cluck, duck, epoch, eunuch, haddock, hillock, huck, lame-duck, luck, muck, mukluk, pluck, puck, roebuck, ruck, truck, tuck, schmuck, shuck, snuck, stomach, struck, stuck, suck, upchuck, woodchuck … even “Norfolk,” when articulated as a proper Southern gentleman would do.

Now, we can cast away some of these words just because they sound ugly (as any ending in “uck” are wont to do), such as amok, haddock, mukluk, pluck and stuck.

Several can evoke anatomical contexts where the writer is just bound to come up with an image that’ll cross the line at some point: Buck, bullock, buttock, eunuch, hillock and suck.

But accuse someone of being “puckish,” and you’re like as not to have a fight on your hands, fact aside that the depiction is wholly innocuous. Similarly, I once casually greeted an acquaintance with “What’s up, Chuck?” only to realize that “upchuck” is the smelly yellow-brown stuff that stains the carpet when your kid’s gotten a bad Tootsie Roll.

In the Flower Power vernacular of the 1960s, a long-haired, hippie-type freak might well have nodded casually to an officer of the law who colloquially advised him to keep on truckin’ – or decided, truculently, that he just couldn’t truck with Mister Piggy’s advice and started a riot.

The 1969 classic movie “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” opened with a long-haired hippie-type political statement: “There is no gravity … the Earth sucks.” A dozen years later, “One Golden Pond” popularized the phrase “suck face,” which seemed to hint at something more anatomically disturbing. Today, any 3-year-old might (innocently or not) acknowledge that “naptime sucks” without fear of parental retribution. Yet the word doesn’t pass muster with Google if placed in the header of an AdWords text box.

Not sure whether I can truck with that contradiction.

A politician bristles at being termed a lame duck, but if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, well …

Never, EVER, intimate that a woman “clucks like a hen,” no matter how accurate the characterization.

Truth is, word usage is as much a challenge of perception as one of precision. It’s difficult to contend that you meant no offense when sloppy word choice testifies to the contrary.

NEXT: The Devil is in the Details

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

* The Songfacts website notes that “The Name Game is a song written by Soul singer Shirley Ellis and her manager, Lincoln Chase (in 1964). In it Shirley proves that she can rhyme any name using just a few simple rules ("Shirley - Shirley, Shirley bo Birley Bonana fanna fo Firley Fee fy mo Mirley, Shirley!"). Shirley used to amaze audiences by taking name game requests. Shirley usually had the good sense to ignore requests for "Chuck" …. This song was also known as the "Banana Song," (and) was based on a children's game she used to play.

Word Choice (Part 1)

2009-12-01T12:40:00.009-07:00

Yesterday, the word “schmuck” erupted from my pen.

For those of you out there who speak fluent Yiddish … yeah, I knew it was dangerous. Technically, “schmuck” is a Yiddish word for a particular part of the male anatomy … though that translation probably has fallen into the realm of the archaic.

For good or ill, “schmuck” has osmosified into the common and polite vernacular of American speakers of English. It’s fairly commonly rendered as a synonym for “fool” or “chump.”

One source offered up “boob” as an alternative. Yeah, that’s helpful.

Back in the 1960s, Lenny Bruce got arrested for saying “schmuck” onstage. A few years later, I watched a small-town city councilman ream out a colleague for calling him a schmuck, feigning great offense at the literal translation.

Even though the word has migrated into the “relatively benign” column over the last 30 years, it’s still a potential land mine for writers.

Yet, trekking among the Claymores is sometimes worth the risk. After all, juggling lessons for “a marginally coordinated fool” fails to impart the same savoir-faire. An ill-coordinated patsy, similarly, lacks the appropriate punch and panache – along with victim, can-carrier, trusting soul and “jestee.”

You can’t just blindly trust a thesaurus for consistently effective word choices. Consider the implications of other thesaurhetorical alternatives, like whipping boy, schlemiel, simpleton, retard, sucker and the aforementioned “boob.”

And I’d be willing to bet, in a politically correct world, an organizations like PETA or the SPCA might find offense in synonymatically speaking derisively of pigeons, turkeys, sitting ducks, goats, lambs to the slaughter, scapegoats, birdbrains, gulls, asses, dumb asses or jackasses.

Bottom line, suck it up and call a schmuck a schmuck.

Truth be known, the brain of the Writer must compile its own internal thesaurus as the years pass by. Read. Talk to people – and not just those who look or think or talk like you. Read some more. Write. Thumb through a thesaurus to experiment with choices … but, in the end, rely on your internal compass to guide you through the minefield.

If you’re going to get reamed out for your choice of words, do the research, and think it through. Get reamed for a choice made consciously – for the effect intended – and not for some careless misuse of a word you failed to understand.

Next: Word Choice (Part 2) … Puck, truck & suck

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

Briefly

2009-11-30T18:39:00.005-07:00

OK, I get it.

“Fix Your Writing” is a writing blog. Clean, clear writing traditionally is short and snappy. Forget the adjectives. No 50-cent words, please.

That can, and will be done.

But November’s entries comprise a philosophical statement. Writing is a mindset. November’s blog is my mindset – the way I look at writing. The way I approach the craft.

At the very core of that philosophy is a contention that “writing is easy.” Research is tough. Rewriting, editing, proofreading: Tough, tough, tough. Fluency – tougher still. Eloquence … dang nigh impossible. The works of the masters, from Aristotle to Wouk? Veritable missives from the gods – to be wondered at, but emulated only by the fewest of the brave.

“Fix Your Writing” is a How To for amateurs and, perhaps, for a few pros who need to get a life. How to …

Consider this: “How to …” anything is a tough challenge.

“How do I get to the Metzger place?”

“Well, I reckon you can take this road a half mile or so, turn left, then south at the big oak. Follow that road til you get to where the big purple barn used to be, and turn right again. Follow that road a piece. You can’t miss it.”

At that point, my next question usually is: “What’s the first thing I’ll see after I miss it?”

How to … JUGGLE! Set me face-to-face with a marginally coordinated schmuck and I can have him pitching three balls perpetually on the fly in a half hour or so. But write out the instructions? Wouldn’t know where to start.

As a young father, many moons ago, it was patiently explained to me that the programming required to make a robot take a step or two across a room would likely fill a book. A big book.

Yet in the first three years of life, a baby’s brain masters the process of one-foot-after-another, of spoon-to-the-mouth, of please-sir-I-want-some-more and hundreds of thousands more … a compilation of complex synaptical-firing sequences that would boggle the world’s greatest supercomputer.

But it’ll take that child 18 years of Dr. Seuss, book reports, essays and term papers to accumulate enough skill to get a passing grade in Freshman English.

Juggling. Riding a bicycle. Jai alai. Square dancing. Those are easy.

Still wanna be a Writer?

Next: Word Choice

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

For Example (Part 4)

2009-11-26T12:12:00.018-07:00

First, to those of you in the U.S., and to Americans abroad, Happy Thanksgiving! I extend special thanks and prayers to servicemen and women around the globe who have left behind the company of family and friends in order to help make all our lives safer and happier…

Yesterday, The Fixer compared alternative drafts of a letter of resignation, noting first that the original draft was “perfectly adequate … better than most.”

But it’s instructive to mention a few simple changes that might have been made to the original draft, without going to the extreme of producing a major revision:

Note that the word “I” is less-emphasized in the revision. Starting paragraphs, sentences or phrases with the word “I” can make the reader feel that the writer is concerned only with himself (* or “herself … see note below). Both versions use “I” four times, by the way. Often sentences can be reconfigured to transform “I” into “my” – a word that doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb in a block of text.

“2 week notice” should be “two-week notice” – hyphenated because it’s a compound adjective, with the numeral spelled out (as numbers 1-10 should be).

Does it make much practical difference if a person is “very” grateful, and not just “grateful?” This mundane adverb can be deleted in almost every instance; it usually contributes little, with the possible exception of pacing – making a sentence “sound” right to the ear. (The late writing guru, William Safire, once wrote that he was instructed, as a young reporter, to insert the word “damn” whenever tempted to use “very” so that editors would automatically delete the profanity, at the same time improving the copy.

About “the past four and a half years” … first, delete the redundant word “past,” since it’s obvious the “next” four and a half years are not what’s being discussed.

Further, refer to either “four” or “five” years. A child can say he’s 4-1/2 years old, but adults don’t refer to themselves as 32-1/2 years old.

And, since most word-processing software butchers the task of printing fractions, either use the “1-1/2” format, or simply round to the nearest full year (alternatively, 18 months might be appropriate).

Finally, I failed to draw attention yesterday to a MAJOR oversight in the original draft that was corrected in the revision: The author redundantly referred to the burden of “my LPN position” and “my commitment to Municipal Hospital” when trying to allude to a job vs. personal-life conflict. How often do we think we know what we’ve written, then find out later (often too much later) that what we’ve written is just totally wrong? Lesson for today: Read important copy, re-read it later with a fresh eye, and then have a friend or associate review it once more. This won’t eliminate errors … just 99.44% of the most embarrassing ones.

Is this an exercise in nit-picking? Well, perhaps. But consider whether this seven-minute “mini-revision” isn’t a marked improvement:

This letter is a two-week notice of resignation. I will miss the nurses and other staff here at Municipal Hospital, but the challenges of being an LPN, student and wife have grown too great. Thank you for the incredible opportunities, knowledge and experience you have provided in my four years here.

* Political correctness aside, when talking about "he" and "she" in the abstract, use the masculine form – a child talks about himself, or a writer thinks about himself unless the child/writer is identified specifically as a female.

Next: Briefly

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

For Example (Part 3)

2009-11-25T16:21:00.007-07:00

Most writing challenges in writing are less literary than those we’ve considered thus far. Take the example of a simple letter of resignation that came across my desk recently. The (soon-to-be-ex-) employee drafted it like this:

This letter is to give you my 2 week notice. I am no longer able to keep up with my LPN position, school and my commitment to Municipal Hospital. I have had many incredible opportunities and will miss the nurses and other staff. I am very grateful for the knowledge I have gained in the past four and a half years.

Truthfully, this letter of resignation could be submitted “as is.” It is perfectly adequate – probably better than most. But it can, like most writing samples, be improved. To wit, consider this revision:

With regret, I am resigning as a Municipal Hospital LPN, effective December 9, 2009.

I will greatly miss everyone – my fellow nurses and managers, as well as the incredible support staff. But I simply no longer can balance a full-time job with my college studies and home life.

Thank you for the practical experience, knowledge and training you have offered in these four amazing years. If I can ever be of assistance to you or the hospital in the future, please feel free to ask.

Structurally, the revision is 20% longer, less direct, less simple. But a letter of resignation is a document in which some degree of formality is expected and appropriate. It states purpose, timing, rationale and gratitude. The tone is complimentary. Its final sentence offers the employer the option to continue the relationship in some less-formal manner (never burn bridges, never close doors behind you). Finally, it is broken into three paragraphs, which will appear more “accessible” to the reader when physically formatted onto a page (studies show readers are more likely to read short one- or two-sentence paragraphs).

Philosophically, the revision attempts to strike a balance between friendliness and professionalism; it appears the working relationship was entirely pleasant, yet it needs to be recognized that the relationship was, at its core, a professional exchange of services for payment.

The letter should, of course, be properly addressed to the appropriate manager or personnel officer, dated (in part to document the two-week notice being proffered), and closed with a simple “Sincerely,” and a name/signature.

Next: For Example (Part 4)

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

For Example (Part 2)

2009-11-24T16:41:00.009-07:00

Shades of meaning. A child quibbles over responsibility for a spilt glass of Kool-Aid, twisting reality around his fear of punishment. An artist alters the mood of a painting by subtly brushing the canvas with delicate refinements of color and shadow detail.

A writer has the ability to shift reality, to set a mood: Word choice, adjectives and adverbs, tense, action and passivity, punctuation – even rhyme, pace and onomatopoeia. These are the tools a writer uses to express shades of meaning.

When I write, and when I edit others’ copy, I prefer to offer “options” because right and wrong answers don’t exist in writing – apt solutions and inept solutions, yes … but no right or wrong. But an “option” serves the purpose of identifying the exact point where a life preserver needs to be thrown into an ocean of words, phrases, exposition and analogies.

Consider this paragraph:

At the age of 22, I was hired at the Trinidad Chronicle-News – and later at the Colorado Springs Sun and Vail Daily – as a reporter. This was the pre-Watergate era. This was before egos of journalists grew so large as to crave the superstardom of Woodward and Bernstein. This was before journalism soured in the wake of supply and demand – too many young reporters willing to work for too little money, placing far to few demands on their talent. Salaries plummeted. Many of the best and brightest writers fled into public relations, advertising and marketing where growing corporations were still willing to pay top dollar for talent. In college (these were the days of flower-powered hippies living in geodesic domes), students pursuing a PR/Advertising track were “selling out to The Man.” A decade later, it got hard to make a living – and harder still to bear the inflated egos – and I, too, swallowed my pride and became a PR flak. I found, however, those PR flacks I’d snubbed all those years did more than write the occasional news release. They worked hard – damnably hard. The reality from the other side of the mirror was a wake-up call … the first of many significant challenges that would follow, in the 1980s and 1990s, to the blindered assumptions of my youth. Still, much of the hard work focused on networking, building relationships, image awareness and “spin.” I found myself spending less and less time doing what I truly loved … writing. But it would be a quarter century – a new millennium and then some – before I would return to that mistress of my youth.

Alternatively, one might write:

Out of college, I became a daily newspaper reporter. When journalism started to sour, I became a PR flak. I discovered a great deal more flesh and substance in the world of media relations than I might have imagined from the outside looking in. Still, I wasn’t doing anywhere near the amount of writing I’d imagined, in the days of my youth, that I would. Today, 25 years later, I have decided to return to those roots.

Two paragraphs. Largely the same take-away: Boy meets career, Boy loses career, Boy realizes what he has lost, Boy returns to his true love. Yet the length, depth and tone of the two paragraphs could hardly be more different.

Two paragraphs, neither right, neither wrong. Just different. But they do share common bonds: Good grammar, good spelling, interesting syntax and pacing along a path from Point A to Point B. Consider whether one passage affects you differently, carries a different impact, or leads you to a different conclusion about the writer and his professions. Each passage follows most of the rules; each violates a few others. But it’s apparent that the writer knew what the rule was, before breaking it. It’s bad grammar? That word doesn’t really exist? The writer knows that, but had a long discussion with himself and decided that writing the phrase the “wrong” way was better than getting it “right.”

These are the sorts of discussions good writers carry on inside them every day. Have some. They’re fun.

Next: For Example (Part 3)

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

For Example (Part 1)

2009-11-23T11:31:00.007-07:00

So … Writing and editing are easy – especially if you pay close attention to “writing for the ear” … and if you write what you know … and if you make the effort to know a lot.

I made those overly simplistic assertion to illustrate a point (well, several). We all know that great writing is tough – damnably tough, else more of us would do it.

But good writing is easy, and “good” is “good enough” for most of us, most of the time. So then, it follows logically to ask: What makes for good writing?

Justice Potter Stewart famously said about pornography, “I know it when I see it.” Similarly, my ear knows good writing when it “sounds” right coming off the page.

See whether this sounds right:

There was a fight.

Perfectly fine English. States a fact. Doesn’t break any rules that I know of.

But neither does it break any ground.

My first formal step on the road to becoming a Writer (taken as a sophomore in Eileen Ghering’s senior English class, shortly after cracking Strunk & White’s Elements of Style for the first time) was to trash “There is” constructions.

There was a fight.

There is a meeting at 7:30 a.m.

There is an answer to the question.

Let those sentences whisper to your inner ear. Not so sexy, huh? But what do you do when you see the words “There is,” or “There were” and variants? The answer is as simple as the Drop the ‘y’ and add ‘es’ adage we all learned as kids: Drop “There is” and add a verb.

There was a fight, was there? Well, strip that four-word construction to its core: “A fight.” Now, just find the appropriate action verb, and you’ve taken your first step to better writing … “A fight erupted” was the best option offered up by Messrs. Strunk & White, if I recall the days of my youth with felicity. But a fight “broke out” or even “A fight was” are improvements.

There also are better ways to have written those last two sentences:

The meeting begins at 7:30 a.m.

There is an answer (no redundancy – what, other than a question, has an answer?) – or “An answer presents itself …” or “The Answer? Don’t do that!”

Got it? Good. Now there is a homework assignment: Fix my phrasing a couple lines previous: “There also are better ways to have written those last two sentences.” (Surely there’s a better way to have constructed that sentence, right?)

There are no right answers. There is just some probing thought to be performed on the structure of your writing. There are times, after all, when a “there is” construction is perfectly OK to use. But there is a limit to how many times you can tolerate its presence, once you know it’s there.

There is, isn't there?

NEXT: For Example, Part 2

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]

The Perfect Words (Part 3)

2009-11-20T12:04:00.005-07:00

Our Father, who art in heaven,

hallowed be Thy name.

Thy kingdom come,

Thy will be done,

on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

and forgive us our trespasses

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

For Thine is the Kingdom

and the power

and the glory.

Forever and ever.

Amen.

The Lord’s Prayer consists of seventy words in its common English translation. Seventy. Yet this seemingly simple expression of faith transcends hundreds of languages and cultures. Around the world, some two billion Christians turn to this compact prayer for comfort, support and inspiration.

But how many appreciate its nuances as a work of literature? These 70 words articulate the astonishing architecture (as well as many surprising subtleties) of a creed spanning more than two millennia.

Whatever convoluted process eventually resulted in the compilation of the Christian Bible over several centuries, reasonable persons can agree that these 70 words are “The Word of God.” This is true, perhaps, literally. It is almost certainly true in the sense that the exact words recorded in the original Greek (or, perhaps, Hebrew – it’s a long story) were spoken or divinely inspired by a man known as Jesus Christ, whom believers (myself included) know as the Son of God within the Holy Trinity.

Wow.

Short take: It’s an amazing prayer.

Consider only the first two words: “Our Father.” To 1st century listeners, the idea of one, single paternal Father was peculiar, at best. Up til now, “gods” had been created largely at whim, and most often resembled a vindictive brute home from carousing downtown bars on a Friday night: Thor, casting bolts; the warrior Ares and the sacrificially worshiped Quetzalcoatl; even the slave-mongering Yahweh of the Old Testament, who scourged the whole human race (save for eight zookeepers floating in an ark). The words “Our Father” introduce a man-god who taught us to turn the other cheek – a gentle innocent who accepted torture and crucifixion for the sins of strangers.

Two pretty good words, no?

The remaining 68 words characterize a New World Order in which sins are forgiven, not punished; in which we receive the precise dosage of our needs – no more, no less – each day, from a glorious, powerful God who does all in His power to shelter us from evil and the devil. And, significantly, God art in Heaven (always has and always will, but right now is in Heaven. God lives!)

That last paragraph alone, which pales in the shadow of the prayer’s eloquence – took 70 words. Corporate statements of mission and goal typically are far wordier in attempting to forge a code of conduct and purpose for a handful of employees laboring for a company likely to be bankrupt or merged away in a decade or two.

The Lord’s Prayer has stood for 200 tumultuous decades as a shining beacon for Christians … and even as inspiration for Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, and even atheists who appreciate its profound logic.

Any wanna-be Writer out there who can top that act? Thought not. It’s Perfect.

Next: A week of Examples

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]