Brain droppings

[felonius]

I really like these next three, but at the same time they make me uncomfortable because I know I've been guilty of them more than once in the past:

6. Do not overwrite.

Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating. If the sickly-sweet word, the overblown phrase are your natural form of expression, as is sometimes the case, you will have to compensate for it by a show of vigor, and by writing something as meritorious as the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's.

When writing with a computer, you must guard against wordiness. The click and flow of a word processor can be seductive, and you may find yourself adding a few unecessary words or even a whole passage just to experience the pleasure of running your fingers over the keyboard and watching your words appear on the screen. It is always a good idea to reread your writing later and ruthlessly delete the excess.

7. Do not overstate.

When you overstate, readers will instantly be on guard, and everything that has preceded your overstatement as well as everything that follows it will be suspect in their minds because they have lost confidence in your judgement or your poise. Overstatement is one of the common faults. A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a single carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for readers, the object of your enthusiasm.

(That one's just awesome. )

8. Avoid the use of qualifiers.

Rather, very, little, pretty - these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. (:lol: ) The constant use of the adjective little (except to indicate size) is particularly debilitating; we should all try to do a little better, we should all be very watchful of this rule, for it is a rather important one, and we are pretty sure to violate it now and then.

[violetblue]

These are really, really, really, the BEST rules ever!!!!!!! I mean, the very, very best. I just can't say enough about them. It's like a little, pretty, flower of prosey goodness.

Maybe this is Wolfspirit's problem, that he has been seduced the click-clack of the keyboard (if there's a TVR story to go with that statement, I don't care to know it). Well, I'd really, really, really, like to go on, clicking and clacking, I mean I'd very, very much like to, but I have to go now.

[felonius]

Pretty true, violetblue.

This next one is pretty rich as well (damn, I've got to stop using pretty, but it's pretty hard to stop):

9. Do not affect a breezy manner.

The volume of writing is enormous, these days, and much of it has a sort of windiness about it, almost as though the author were in a state of euphoria. "Spontaneous me," sang Whitman, and, in his innocence, let loose the hordes of uninspired scribblers who would one day confuse spontaneity with genius.

The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that comes to mind is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day. Open any alumni magazine, turn to the class notes, and you are quite likely to encounter old Spontaneous Me at work - an aging collegian who writes something like this:

Well, guys, here I am again dishing the dirt about your disorderly classmates, after pa$$ing a weekend in the Big Apple trying to catch the Columbia hoops tilt and then a cab-ride from hell through the West Side casbah. And speaking of news, howzabout tossing a few primo items this way?

This is an extreme example, but the same wind blows, at lesser velocities, across vast expanses of journalistic prose. The author in this case has managed in two sentences to commit most of the unpardonable sins: he obviously has nothing to say, he is showing off and directing the attention of the reader to himself, he is using slang with neither provocation nor ingenuity, he adopts a patronizing air by throwing in the word primo, he is humourless (though full of fun), dull and empty. He has not done his work. Compare his opening remarks with the following - a plunge directly into the news:

Clyde Crawford, who stroked the varsity shell in 1958, is swinging an oar again after a lapse of forty years. Clyde resigned last spring as executive sales manager of the Indianna Flotex Company and is now a gondolier in Venice.

This, although conventional, is compact, informative, unpretentious. The writer has dug up an item of news and presented it in a straightforward manner. What the first writer tried to accomplish by cutting rhetorical capers and by breeziness, the second writer managed to achieve by good reporting, by keeping a tight rein on his material, and by staying out of the act.

*gulp*

[felonius]

10. Use orthodox spelling.

In ordinary composition, use orthodox spelling. Do not write nite for night, thru for through, pleez for please, unless you plan to introduce a complete system of simplified spelling and are prepared to take the consequences.

In the original edition of The Elements of Style, there was a chapter on spelling. In it, the author had this to say:

The spelling of English words is not fixed and invariable, nor does it depend on any other authority than general agreement. At the present day there is practically unanimous agreement as to the spelling of most words.

…At any given moment, however, a relatively small number of words may be spelled in more than one way. Gradually, as a rule, one of these forms comes to be generally preferred, and the less customary form comes to look obsolete and is discarded. From time to time new forms, mostly simplifications, are introduced by innovators, and either win their place or die of neglect.

The practical objection to unaccepted and oversimplified spellings is the disfavour with which they are received by the reader. They distract his attention and exhaust his patience. He reads the form through automatically, without thought of its needless complexity; he reads the abbreviation tho and mentally supplies the missing letters, at the cost of a fraction of his attention. The writer has defeated his own purpose.

The language manages somehow to keep pace with events. A word that has taken hold in our century is thruway; it was born of necessity and is apparently here to stay. In combination with way, thru is more serviceable than through; it is a high-speed word for readers who are going sixty-five. Throughway would be too long to fit on a road sign, too slow to serve the speeding eye. It is conceivable that because of our thruways, through will eventually become thru – after many more thousands of miles of travel.

[felonius]

11. Do not explain too much.

It is seldom advisable to tell all. Be sparing, for instance, in the use of adverbs after "he said," "she replied," and the like: "he said consolingly"; she replied grumblingly." Let the conversation itself disclose the speaker's manner or condition. Dialogue heavily weighted with adverbs after the attributive verb is cluttery and annoying. Inexperienced writers not only overwork their adverbs but load their attributives with explanatory verbs: "he consoled," "she congratulated." They do this, apparently, in the belief that the word said is always in need of support, or because they have been told to do it by experts in the art of bad writing.

He's absolutely right, but it was still lots of fun to wage war on said a couple of years back. I've owned this book for years but E.B. White's eleventh rule wasn't the inspiration for that old thread - I was actually just ripping off my seventh grade english teacher. Thanks Mrs. Lowe, wherever you are.

12. Do not construct awkward adverbs.

Adverbs are easy to build. Take an adjective or a participle, add -ly, and behold! you have an adverb. But you'd probably be better off without it. Do not write tangledly. The word itself is a tangle. Do not even write tiredly. Nobody says tangledly and not many people say tiredly. Words that are not used orally are seldom the ones to put on paper.

NO: He climbed tiredly to bed.
YES: He climbed wearily to bed.

NO: The lamp cord lay tangledly beneath her chair.
YES: The lamp cord lay in tangles beneath her chair.

Do not dress words up by adding -ly to them, as though putting a hat on a horse.

overly - over
muchly - much
thusly - thus

(He read the twelfth rule and agreed the author had written it correctedly.)

[felonius]

13. Make sure the reader knows who is speaking.

Dialogue is a total loss unless you indicate who the speaker is. In long dialogue passages containing no attributives, the reader may become lost and be compelled to go back and reread in order to puzzle things out. Obscurity is an imposition on the reader, to say nothing of its damage to the work.

In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the break would come naturally in speech - that is, where the speaker would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The best test for locating an attributive is to speak the sentence aloud.

NO: "Now, my boy, we shall see," he said, "how well you have learned your lesson."

YES: "Now, my boy," he said, "we shall see how well you have learned your lesson."

NO: "What's more, they would never," she added, "consent to the plan."

YES: "What's more," she added, "they would never consent to the plan."

Again, bang on true, if somewhat conventional - the book's showing its age a bit with this one. Lots and lots of contemporary writing has long passages of straight dialogue containing no attributives whatsoever - the reader is able to identify the speakers simply by what is being said.

You're limited to two speakers with this kind of form, of course - once you throw a third character in there attributives become unavoidable. But it's kind of fun, as an exercise if nothing else, to see how long you can go with dialogue strictly on its own, without losing coherence.

[mccormack44]

felonius said:

But it's kind of fun, as an exercise if nothing else, to see how long you can go with dialogue strictly on its own, without losing coherence.

If you are doing this on your own, fine with me. But if you are doing it for others, please, PLEASE have one or more others proofread this before distributing it to strangers (aka publishing it).

I keep stressing that an author "knows" what is intended, but the English language lays subtle traps. Knowing what you mean hides these traps; strangers may fall right into them.

A two-person dialogue containing only 1 or 2 sentences per speaker is often easy to follow. Once you let a longer paragraph get in there the flow is harder. And if one speaker should speak two paragraphs, the flow is frequently broken.

I'm am NOT saying do not do this. I'm saying that WHEN you do this, get outside checks in order to be sure you are being understood. I'm with Strunk/White on the problems of obscurity here.

Sue

[felonius]

This next one is one is a tour de force (if that phrase isn't too fancy):

14. Avoid fancy words.

Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able. Anglo-Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words. In this, as in so many matters pertaining to style, one's ear must be one's guide: gut is a lustier noun than intestine, but the two words are not interchangeable, because gut is often inappropriate, being too coarse for the context. Never call a stomach a tummy without good reason.

If you admire fancy words, if every sky is beauteous, every blonde curvaceous, every intelligent child prodigious, if you are tickled by discombobulate, you will have a bad time with Reminder 14. What is wrong, you ask, with beauteous? No one knows, for sure. There is nothing wrong, really, with any word — all are good, but some are better than others. A matter of ear, a matter of reading the books that sharpen the ear.

The line between the fancy and the plain, between the atrocious and the felicitous, is sometimes alarmingly fine. The opening phrase of the Gettysburg address is close to the line, at least by our standards today, and Mr. Lincoln, knowingly or unknowingly, was flirting with disaster when he wrote "Four score and seven years ago." The President could have got into his sentence with plain "Eighty-seven" — a saving of two words and less of a strain on the listeners' powers of multiplication. But Lincoln's ear must have told him to go ahead with four score and seven. By doing so, he achieved cadence while skirting the edge of fanciness. Suppose he had blundered over the line and written, "In the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and seventy-six." His speech would have sustained a heavy blow. Or suppose he had settled for "Eighty-seven." In that case he would have got into his introductory sentence too quickly; the timing would have been bad.

The question of ear is vital. Only the writer whose ear is reliable is in a position to use bad grammar deliberately; this writer knows for sure when a colloquialism is better than formal phrasing and is able to sustain the work at a level of good taste. So cock your ear. Years ago, students were warned not to end a sentence with a preposition; time, of course, has softened that rigid decree. Not only is the preposition acceptable at the end, sometimes it is more effective in that spot than anywhere else. "A claw hammer, not an ax, was the tool he murdered her with." This is preferable to "A claw hammer, not an ax, was the tool with which he murdered her." Why? Because it sounds more violent, more like murder. A matter of ear.

And would you write "The worst tennis player around here is I" or "The worst tennis player around here is me"? The first is good grammar, the second is good judgment — although the me might not do in all contexts.

The split infinitive is another trick of rhetoric in which the ear must be quicker than the handbook. Some infinitives seem to improve on being split, just as a stick of round stovewood does. "I cannot bring myself to really like the fellow." The sentence is relaxed, the meaning is clear, the violation is harmless and scarcely perceptible. Put the other way, the sentence becomes stiff, needlessly formal. A matter of ear.

There are times when the ear not only guides us through difficult situations but also saves us from minor or major embarrassments of prose. The ear, for example, must decide when to omit that from a sentence, when to retain it. "She knew she could do it" is preferable to "She knew that she could do it" — simpler and just as clear. But in many cases the that is needed. "He felt that his big nose, which was sunburned, made him look ridiculous." Omit the that and you have "He felt his big nose...."

[laurie]

But in many cases the that is needed. "He felt that his big nose, which was sunburned, made him look ridiculous." Omit the that and you have "He felt his big nose...."

Whenever I question using "that", I do a mental "reading out loud" and then check the audience laugh-O-meter.

[felonius]

Whenever I question using "that", I do a mental "reading out loud" and then check the audience laugh-O-meter.

I always seem to type them in first drafts. Then I go back and realize that they aren't needed.

I always seem to type them in first drafts. Then I go back and realize they aren't needed.

It's a strange word.

[Kvetch]

Weird. The sound of the sentences that contain that that all seem the better phrasing to me.

[felonius]

Been busy lately - here's the next couple:

15. Do not use dialect unless your ear is good.

Do not attempt to use dialect unless you are a devoted student of the tongue you hope to reproduce. If you use dialect, be consistent. The reader will become impatient or confused upon finding two or more versions of the same word or expression. In dialect it is necessary to spell phonetically, or at least ingeniously, to capture unusual inflections. Take, for example, the word once. It often appears in dialect writing as oncet, but oncet looks as though it should be pronounced "onset." A better spelling would be wunst. But if you write it oncet once, write it that way throughout. The best dialect writers, by and large, are economical of their talents; they use the minimum, not the maximum, of deviation from the norm, thus sparing their readers as well as convincing them.

"Tell us a story, Grandpa!" said Tommy, as the fire began to lick and crackle upon the fresh log Kate had added.

"Oh, yes!" Kate said, clapping her hands. "You must give us a story Grandpa!"

"All reet then," said Gerald. "Settle doon. Wunst upoon a teem thar wus a wee hoose in yon woodst wi' par o' hinnys named Hansel an' Gre'el..."

Tommy looked blankly at Kate. "What was that?"

16. Be clear.

Clarity is not the prize in writing, nor is it always the principal mark of a good style. There are occasions when obscurity serves a literary yearning, if not a literary purpose, and there are writers whose mien is more overcast than clear. But since writing is communication, clarity can only be a virtue. And although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one. Even to a writer who is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say, "Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!" Even to writers of market letters, telling us (but not telling us) which securities are promising, we can say, "Be cagey plainly! Be elliptical in a straightforward fashion!"

Clarity, clarity, clarity. When you become hopelessly mired in a sentence, it is best to start fresh; do not try to fight your way through against the terrible odds of syntax. Usually what is wrong is that the construction has become too involved at some point; the sentence needs to be broken apart and replaced by two or more shorter sentences.

Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. Think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity, and be clear! When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.

In that last bit what he says and his way of saying it are equally rewarding. Oh, the tragedies rooted in ambiguity indeed. I could probably start a whole new thread on just that. Let's all raise our glasses to being elliptical in a straightforward fashion...

[felonius]

There are five more points to go on that E.B White list, but time out for a second. I wanted to put up this Richard Adams passage from Plague Dogs:

[quote]Some say that deep sleep is dreamless and that we dream only in the moments before awakening, experiencing during seconds the imagined occurrences of minutes or hours. Other have surmised that dreaming is continuous as long as we are asleep, just as sensation and experience must needs continue as long as we are awake; but that we recall – when we recall at all – only those margins and fragments which concluded the whole range of our imagining during sleep; as though one who at night was able to walk alive through the depths of the sea, upon his return could remember only those light-filtering, green-lit slopes up which he had clambered back at last to the sands of morning.

Others again believe that in deep sleep, when the gaoler nods unawares and the doors fall open upon those age-old, mysterious caverns of the mind where none ever did anything so new-fangled as read a book or say a prayer, the obscure forces, sore labour’s bath, that flow forth to cleanse and renew, are of their nature inexpressible – and invisible, therefore, to dreaming eyes – in any terms or symbols comprehensible to the mind of one alive, though we may know more when we are dead. Some of these, however (so runs the theory), floating upwards from psychic depths far below those of the individual mind, attract to themselves concordant splinters and sympathetic remnants from the individual dreamer’s memory – much as, they say, the fairies, poor wisps of nothing, used to glean and deck themselves with such scraps and snippets of finery as humans might have discarded for their finding. Dreams, then, are bubbles, insubstantial globes of waking matter, by their nature rising buoyant through the enveloping elements of sleep; and for all we know, too numerous to be marked and remembered by the sleeper, who upon awakening catches only one here or there, as a child in autumn may catch a falling leaf out of all the myriad twirling past him.

But this as it may, how terrible, to some, can be the return from those dark sea-caves! We stagger up through the surf and collapse upon the sand, behind us the memory of our visions and before us the prospect of a desert shore or a land peopled by savages. Or again, we are dragged by the waves over coral, our landfall a torment from which, if only it would harbour us, we would fly back into the ocean. For indeed, when asleep we are like amphibious creatures, breathing another element, which reciprocates our own final act of waking by itself casting us out and closing the door upon all hope of immediate return. The caddis larva crawls upon the bottom of the pond, secure within its house of fragments, until in due time there comes upon it, whether it will or no, that strange and fatal hour when it must leave its frail safety and begin to crawl, helpless and exposed, towards the surface. What dangers gather about it then, in this last hour of its water-life – rending, devouring, swallowing into the belly of the great fish! And this hazard it can by no means evade, but only trust to survive.

What follows? Emergence into the no-less terrible world of air, with the prospect of the mayfly’s short life, defenceless among the rising trout and pouncing sparrows. We crawl upwards towards Monday morning; to the cheque book and the boss; to the dismal recollection of guilt, of advancing illness, of imminent death in battle or the onset of disgrace or ruin. “I must be up betimes,â€

[felonius]

Back to continue E.B. White's list:

17. Do not inject opinion.

Unless there is a good reason for its being there, do not inject opinion into a piece of writing. We all have opinions about almost everything, and the temptation to toss them in is great. To air one's views gratuitously, however, is to imply that the demand for them is brisk, which may not be the case, and which, in any event, may not be relevant to the discussion. Opinions scattered indiscriminately about leave the mark of egotism on a work. Similarly, to air one's views at an improper time may be in bad taste. If you have received a letter inviting you to speak at the dedication of a new cat hospital, and you hate cats, your reply, declining the invitation, does not necessarily have to cover the full range of your emotions. You must make it clear that you will not attend, but you do not have to let fly at cats. The writer of the letter asked a civil question; attack cats, then, only if you can do so with good humor, good taste, and in such a way that your answer will be courteous as well as responsive. Since you are out of sympathy with cats, you may quite properly give this as a reason for not appearing at the dedicatory ceremonies of a cat hospital. But bear in mind that your opinion of cats was not sought, only your services as a speaker. Try to keep things straight.

Don't get me started on those %#$* cats! I think they should all - *PIANO CRASHES DOWN*

18. Use figures of speech sparingly.

The simile is a common device and a useful one, but similes coming in rapid fire, one right on top of another, are more distracting than illuminating. Readers need time to catch their breath; they can't be expected to compare everything with something else, and no relief in sight.

When you use metaphor, do not mix it up. That is, don't start by calling something a swordfish and end by calling it an hourglass.

Jasper rose and stretched, his joints crackling like a child's fingers moving across a just-turned-off television screen. His head felt clouded - clouded like a goldfish tank that hadn't been cleaned for weeks, maybe months. But goldfish tanks were small - this was big hurt. An aquarium then - an aquarium that hadn't been cleaned in months with scummy fungus clinging to its sides and a putrid stench and sinister shapes lurking in its murk. A searing swordfish of pain suddenly penetrated like a dirty knife through the soft cheese of the depths, sending him reeling across the room, his internal hourglass spinning like a flaming Wheel of Misfortune as the hound of his soul howled forlornly skyward...

[laurie]

Your submission for the Bulwer-Lytton Prize, Felon?

[felonius]

That hadn't occurred to me...might be worth a shot...

19. Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity.

Do not use initials for the names of organizations or movements unless you are certain the initials will be readily understood. Write things out. Not everyone knows that MADD means Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and even if everyone did, there are babies being born every minute who will someday encounter the name for the first time. They deserve to see the words, not simply the initials. A good rule is to start your article by writing out names in full, and then, later, when your readers have got their bearings, to shorten them.

Many shortcuts are self-defeating; they waste the reader's time instead of conserving it. There are all sorts of rhetorical stratagems and devices that attract writers who hope to be pithy, but most of them are simply bothersome. The longest way round is usually the shortest way home, and the one truly reliable shortcut in writing is to choose words that are strong and surefooted to carry readers on their way.

Obviously written some time before the the internet era, IMHO. LOL.

On a related tangent, aspiring screenwriters take note: one very important acronym you should know is CPD, for Convenient Plot Device. One of my personal favourites of these is from Tarantino's old script True Romance, in which the protagonist accidentally leaves his driver's license in the hand of the man he has just killed - thus providing a warm trail for more dangerous baddies to follow. It was preposterous and tongue-in-cheek enough to be completely believable.

If anyone's interested, here's a fun little general list.

20. Avoid foreign languages.

The writer will occasionally find it convenient or necessary to borrow from other languages. Some writers, however, from sheer exuberance or a desire to show off, sprinkle their work liberally with foreign expressions, with no regard for the reader's comfort. It is a bad habit. Write in English.

¿Que?

[laurie]

20. Avoid foreign languages.

The writer will occasionally find it convenient or necessary to borrow from other languages. Some writers, however, from sheer exuberance or a desire to show off, sprinkle their work liberally with foreign expressions, with no regard for the reader's comfort. It is a bad habit. Write in English.

¿Que?

I did that in a poem I wrote for a college creative writing class -- wrote every other line in Spanish.

The prof told me to stop showing off....

(This was at a time when French was still the foreign language of choice for most students.)

[felonius]

Life's been busy lately.

Here's the last one from E.B. White, and then I can get into something else (or someone else can post something!!).

I think this last one is White's pièce de résistance...wait, wait - no foreign languages, sorry!

21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat.

Young writers will be drawn at every turn toward eccentricities in language. They will hear the beat of new vocabularies, the exciting rhythms of special segments of their society, each speaking a language of its own. All of us come under the spell of these unsettling drums; the problem for beginners is to listen to them, learn the words, feel the vibrations, and not be carried away.

Youths invariably speak to other youths in a tongue of their own devising: they renovate the language with a wild vigor, as they would a basement apartment. By the time this paragraph sees print, psyched, nerd, ripoff, dude, geek, and funky will be the words of yesteryear, and we will be fielding more recent ones that have come bouncing into our speech — some of them into our dictionary as well. A new word is always up for survival. Many do survive. Others grow stale and disappear. Most are, at least in their infancy, more appropriate to conversation than to composition.

Today, the language of advertising enjoys an enormous circulation. With its deliberate infractions of grammatical rules and its crossbreeding of the parts of speech, it profoundly influences the tongues and pens of children and adults. Your new kitchen range is so revolutionary it obsoletes all other ranges. Your counter top is beautiful because it is accessorized with gold-plated faucets. Your cigarette tastes good like a cigarette should. And, like the man says, you will want to try one. You will also, in all probability, want to try writing that way, using that language. You do so at your peril, for it is the language of mutilation.

Advertisers are quite understandably interested in what they call "attention getting." The man photographed must have lost an eye or grown a pink beard, or he must have three arms or be sitting wrong-end-to on a horse. This technique is proper in its place, which is the world of selling, but the young writer had best not adopt the device of mutilation in ordinary composition, whose purpose is to engage, not paralyze, the readers senses. Buy the gold-plated faucets if you will, but do not accessorize your prose. To use the language well, do not begin by hacking it to bits; accept the whole body of it, cherish its classic form, its variety, and its richness.

Another segment of society that has constructed a language of its own is business. People in business say that toner cartridges are in short supply, that they have updated the next shipment of these cartridges, and that they will finalize their recommendations at the next meeting of the board. They are speaking a language familiar and dear to them. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; executives walk among toner cartridges, caparisoned like knights. We should tolerate them — every person of spirit wants to ride a white horse. The only question is whether business vocabulary is helpful to ordinary prose. Usually, the same ideas can be expressed less formidably, if one makes the effort. A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning. Not all such words, of course, can be dismissed summarily; indeed, no word in the language can be dismissed offhand by anyone who has a healthy curiosity. Update isn't a bad word; in the right setting it is useful. In the wrong setting, though, it is destructive, and the trouble with adopting coinages too quickly is that they will bedevil one by insinuating themselves where they do not belong. This may sound like rhetorical snobbery, or plain stuffiness; but you will discover, in the course of your work, that the setting of a word is just as restrictive as the setting of a jewel. The general rule here is to prefer the standard. Finalize, for instance, is not standard; it is special, and it is a peculiarly fuzzy and silly word. Does it mean "terminate," or does it mean "put into final form"? One can't be sure, really, what it means, and one gets the impression that the person using it doesn't know, either, and doesn't want to know.

The special vocabularies of the law, of the military, of government are familiar to most of us. Even the world of criticism has a modest pouch of private words (luminous, taut), whose only virtue is that they are exceptionally nimble and can escape from the garden of meaning over the wall. Of these critical words, Wolcott Gibbs once wrote, "... they are detached from the language and inflated like little balloons." The young writer should learn to spot them — words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning but that soon burst in air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.

The language is perpetually in flux: it is a living stream, shifting, changing, receiving new strength from a thousand tributaries, losing old forms in the backwaters of time. To suggest that a young writer not swim in the main stream of this turbulence would be foolish indeed, and such is not the intent of these cautionary remarks. The intent is to suggest that in choosing between the formal and the informal, the regular and the offbeat, the general and the special, the orthodox and the heretical, the beginner err on the side of conservatism, on the side of established usage. No idiom is taboo, no accent forbidden; there is simply a better chance of doing well if the writer holds a steady course, enters the stream of English quietly, and does not thrash about.

"But," you may ask, "what if it comes natural to me to experiment rather than conform? What if I am a pioneer, or even a genius?" Answer: then be one. But do not forget that what may seem like pioneering may be merely evasion, or laziness — the disinclination to submit to discipline. Writing good standard English is no cinch, and before you have managed it you will have encountered enough rough country to satisfy even the most adventurous spirit.

Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once remarked, "Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar." This moral observation would have no place in a rule book were it not that style is the writer, and therefore what you are, rather than what you know, will at last determine your style. If you write, you must believe — in the truth and worth of the scrawl, in the ability of the reader to receive and decode the message. No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.

Many references have been made in this book to "the reader," who has been much in the news. It is now necessary to warn you that your concern for the reader must be pure: you must sympathize with the reader's plight (most readers are in trouble about half the time) but never seek to know the reader's wants. Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living.

Full of belief, sustained and elevated by the power of purpose, armed with the rules of grammar, you are ready for exposure. At this point, you may well pattern yourself on the fully exposed cow of Robert Louis Stevenson's rhyme. This friendly and commendable animal, you may recall, was "blown by all the winds that pass /And wet with all the showers." And so must you as a young writer be. In our modern idiom, we would say that you must get wet all over. Mr. Stevenson, working in a plainer style, said it with felicity, and suddenly one cow, out of so many, received the gift of immortality. Like the steadfast writer, she is at home in the wind and the rain; and, thanks to one moment of felicity, she will live on and on and on.

[felonius]

Ok, here we go. (This one's for you, laurie! )

The Special Subcommitee for the Official Language of Masterbatches Americas has completed its study. The candidate languages under consideration had been English and German. After much debate, English was selected for all future use in North America. However, the European members of the committee have pointed out certain shortcomings of the English language, and the Subcommittee has agreed to phase out these deficiencies over the next few years.

In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c". Sertainly, most silvilians will resieve this news with joy. Also the hard "c" will be replaced with "k". Not only will this klear up konfusion, but komputer keyboards will also have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced by "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20 per sent shorter.

In the third year, publick akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. We will enkourage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, we wil agre that the horibi mes of silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.

By the fourth year, people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be droped from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vill have a reli sinsibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor toubl or difkultis, and everivun vil find it esi tu understand ech ozer.

Guten Tag.

[laurie]

Uh...... right. Gotcha. Danke. I think....


The worst part is I *could* read that last sentence easily......


Felon, I think you need a new hobby.

[voralfred]

After zis fifz yer, ve vill have a reli sinsibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor toubl or difkultis, and everivun vil find it esi tu understand ech ozer.

Guten Tag.

[/quote]

Sham on yu, felon! :smash::smash:

Yu ment "hav", "vil" and "tubl", of cus!

[tollbaby]

I've seen that one before LMAO I love it (Laurie, I didn't have any trouble reading the last sentence either.... what does that say about us?)

[mccormack44]

tollbaby wrote:

.... what does that say about us?

Only that if it is written out the compulsive reader will endeavor to make sense of it—and will usually succeed!

Sue

[felonius]

Another old fave (just watched the film again recently)

"Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one...a moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering. Stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction - and time its only measure."

- Rosencrantz (soliloquy) in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard

Call me a sap, but I still get a lump in my throat whenever I hear these lines - a lump that forms both for Stoppard's words and Gary Oldman's delivery of them.

I can't say I have a specific memory of the realization either. Perhaps others could say differently.

[Ghost]

I can't say I have a specific memory of the realization either. Perhaps others could say differently.

"What do you mean we don't live forever?" - Ghost