Wi yew kant spel gud

I have a spelling checker,

It came with my PC.

It plane lee marks four my revue

Miss steaks aye can knot sea.

We iz tryin hart.

Why, for centuries, have people struggled to spell? Because English spelling is horribly hard, Michael Skapinker writes in The Financial Times.

It is not just that we have “for” and “four”, “stake”, “steak” and “mistake”. We also have “peak”, “peek” and “pique”. “Horrid” has a double consonant in the middle, “timid” a single one. “Prefer” has one “f”, “proffer” two.

Misspelling is not a modern malady, Skapinker writes.

In Spell it Out, David Crystal reproduces a 1910 cartoon from Punch magazine in which a boss berates his secretary for typing “income” as “incum”. “Good Heavens!” exclaims the secretary. “How did I come to leave out the ‘b’?” And in 1750 Lord Chesterfield, the statesman, advising his son to brush up on his spelling, warned: “I know a man of quality, who never recovered the ridicule of having spelled ‘wholesome’ without the ‘w’.”

Why is English spelling such a tangle?

It all started when Latin-speaking missionaries arrived in Britain in the 6th century without enough letters in their alphabet. They had 23. (They didn’t have “j”, “u” or “w”.) Yet the Germanic Anglo-Saxon languages had at least 37 phonemes, or distinctive sounds. The Romans didn’t have a letter, for example, for the Anglo-Saxon sound we spell “th”. The problem continues. Most English-speakers today have, depending on their accents, 40 phonemes, which we have to render using 26 letters. So, we use stratagems such as doubling vowels to elongate them, as in “feet” and “fool”. 

With the Norman invasion in 1066, spelling became more complicated still; French and Latin words rushed into the language. As the centuries went by, scribes found ways of reflecting the sounds people used with the letters that they had. They lengthened vowels by adding a final “e”, so that we could tell “hope” from “hop”.

Read more of this sad, sad history here.

Are you a creative, innovative professional?

Save me.

Linked In has rummaged through your resume and made a Top Ten list of buzzwords.

1. Creative
2. Organizational
3. Effective
4. Motivated
5. Extensive expertise
6. Track Record
7. Innovative
8. Responsible
9. Analytical
10. Problem solving

A year ago LinkedIn put together the same sort of list of overused buzzwords. It’s no surprise that eight of the ten terms are the same this year, and “creative” remains at the top of the list. Two terms that are no longer on the list: “communication skills” and “dynamic. But those were replaced by the equally trite “responsible” and “analytical.”

Here's a look at buzzword use by geography.

The word that makes me the most crazy is "professional," as in "unemployed, do as little as possible professional."

A formula for success

Michael Frayn, one of Britain's best-loved authors:

"Let me say for a start that I don’t think it is a very good idea to write different sorts of things. If I were to give serious practical advice to a young writer about how to succeed I would say, Write the same book, or the same play, over and over again, just very slightly different, so that people get used to it. It takes some time, but if you do it often enough, finally people will get the hang of it, and get familiar with it, and they’ll like it. 

"Then you go on producing a consistent product and you’ll have a market for it. Because the consumer of books or plays, including myself, very reasonably wants to know or have some idea in advance what the book or the play is going to be like. It is the same as buying breakfast cereal: if you buy a packet of cornflakes, you want to be sure it will contain cornflakes and not muesli. It is very irritating if the packet doesn’t contain what you expected it to contain. Similarly it is a reasonable demand from the theatergoer or novel reader that he should get a constant product, which is identified by the author’s brand name.

"If I could have done this, I would have. But I don’t have much control over what I produce. All I can do is to write the stories that come to me. And what a story is, is in part the way of telling it. A story is not an event in the outside world—it consists in the telling. It is only when you think that you have found a way of telling the story that you can start writing it. Different stories naturally suggest different ways of telling them. If I had been better organized as a writer, I would have gone beyond the stories’ dictates and imposed my own central imprint on everything.

Do your sentences make sense?

Maybe not, if you're focused on what you mean to say and not on what you actually put on the page.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, a member of The New York Times Editorial Board, notes that often a writer speaks the language, knows the vocabulary, and tries to honor the rules of grammar and syntax.

Yet he regularly produces sentences of whose literal meaning he’s completely unaware. In its own way, this is fantastic, like setting out to knit a cardigan, producing an armoire, and wondering why it’s so loose in the shoulders.

Here’s an example, written by a student several years ago: “I also had my father’s thick fingers, fingers that I often hid underneath thighs.” You see the problem of course. The author apparently hides his (or her) fingers under anyone’s thighs, not just his (or her) own. This is what the sentence actually says, though not what the writer is hoping it says.

Readers help a bad writer along, Klinkenborg says.

Readers also fail to catch such mistakes because they’re good at guessing what the writer really means. It’s not that they’re under-reading — skipping past the problem in a sentence. They’re nearly always over-reading, alive to the writer’s intention, as if the writer were somehow immanent in the sentence, looking over the reader’s shoulder, expecting the benefit of the doubt. We do this all the time in conversation. And so the sentence ceases to be a sentence — a verbal construct of a certain length, velocity and rhythm with, at bottom, an unambiguous literal meaning. It becomes a sign instead that telepathic communication is about to commence.

What to do?

You’ll need to write, and revise, as if your intentions were invisible and your sentences will be doing all the talking, all on their own. This may be the hardest thing a writer has to learn. Looking at a sentence you’ve made is like looking at yourself in the shard of a mirror. A part of you has to be dreadfully literal-minded (and impervious to self-flattery) in order to do the work of making good, clear sentences. Seeing what your sentences actually say is never easy, but it gets easier with practice. There’s even a certain pleasure in discovering the booby traps you’ve laid for yourself in your prose.

"Inexperienced writers," Klinkenborg concludes, "tend to trust that sentences will generally turn out all right — or all right enough. Experienced writers know that every good sentence is retrieved by will from the forces of chaos."

A quick primer on serial commas

Bill Walsh at the invaluable Blogslot offers guidance on the serial comma:

Newspaper style generally eschews the serial comma. I'm fine with that. Toast, juice, milk and Trix. But sometimes that comma is useful. If I write about a city's departments of housing, parks and recreation and well-being, do I mean there's a department of parks and recreation or a department of recreation and well-being? And what if my series consists of three or four full sentences? For many serial-comma-phobic journalists, the answer to those questions tends to be: Semicolons! Ugly, unwieldy semicolons. Clearly, those journalists did not actually read the stylebook to which they are slavishly devoted. AP specifically says that the serial comma is needed in those cases.

IN A SERIES: Use commas to separate elements in a series, but do not put a comma before the conjunction in a simple series: The flag is red, white and blue. He would nominate Tom, Dick or Harry. 

Put a comma before the concluding conjunction in a series, however, if an integral element of the series requires a conjunction: I had orange juice, toast, and ham and eggs for breakfast. 

Use a comma also before the concluding conjunction in a complex series of phrases: The main points to consider are whether the athletes are skillful enough to compete, whether they have the stamina to endure the training, and whether they have the proper mental attitude. 

So, Walsh writes, it's The departments of housing, parks and recreation, and well-being, notthe departments of housing; parks and recreation; and well-being. Once one of the elements in a series includes a comma, then you want those ugly, unwieldy semicolons: The committees on appropriations; health, education and welfare; and labor.

Elmore Leonard's10 rules of writing

1. Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."

3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" ... he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

5. Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "Ameri­can and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you'reMargaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

George Orwell's rules for writing

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

She might be cut out of cabbage

Today is the 303rd anniversary of the birth of that quintessential 18th-century curmudgeon Dr. Samuel Johnson, the literary lion of Georgian London for much of his lifetime (1709-1784). A poet, critic, lexicographer, and wit, Johnson compiled the first respectable English dictionary between 1747 and 1755, following several years of writing critical articles for London magazines such as The Idler.

He was the master of the insult:

Of Polly Carmichael, a member of his household:
I took to Poll very well at first, but she won't do upon closer examination... Poll is a stupid slut. I had some hopes for her at first, but when I talked to her tightly and closely, I could make nothing of her. She was wiggle waggle: and I could never persuade her to be categorical.

Of Lady Macdonald of Sleat:
...she was as bad as negative badness could be, and stood in the way of what was good; that insipid beauty would not go a great way... and such a woman might be cut out of a cabbage, if there was a skilful artificer.

Of a man hired to sit with him during a convalescence:
The fellow's an idiot; he is as awkward as a turn-spit when first put to the wheel, and as sleepy as a dormouse.

Of Thomas Sheridan:
Why, Sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in nature.

What's the best word ever?

Blogger Ted McCagg has been hosting a "Best Word Ever contest." That there seemed to be no rules, no criteria and apparently no "contest" except for Mr McCagg's own choice is no matter.

Brackets of competing words like like whirligig and scalawag and zydeco and angina have faced off in a gradually narrowing contest over the course of months. The entrants seemed to be chosen for the sheer fun of saying them.

Now we have the winner ... dipthong.

Darn. I kinda like kerfuffle myself.

As we all know, a diphthong, literally "two sounds" or "two tones", also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel. In most dialects of English, the words eye, hay, boy, low, and cow contain diphthongs.

A sure winner.

Check out the runners up here.

Somebody fact check this

"Stewardesses" is the longest word typed with only the left hand and "lollipop" with your right.

I have issues with that ... no problem!

"In his Studies in Words, C.S. Lewis remarks on our 'responsibility to the language,' and adds that 'it is unnecessary defeatism to believe that we can do nothing' about language change. Lewis affirms that 'language which can with the greatest ease make the finest and most numerous distinctions of meaning is the best.' The question for Lewis is always does a new word add to the richness of the language or does it diminish it. He also cautions his readers to be on the qui vive for words that suggest 'a promise to pay which is never going to be kept,' which applies to three-quarters of the language of psychology and fully half that of contemporary social science.

"Inspired by Lewis, I am for putting a 20-year moratorium on the use of the inflationary word icon to describe anything other than a small religious painting. Nothing to be done about it, I realize, but it is worth noting that the perhaps perfunctory phrase 'You are welcome' has now been replaced with 'No problem,' which does not seem a notable advance in elegance or manners. I'm for banishing the word workshop—which is also available as a verb—to describe what is little more than a classroom discussion of undergraduate poems or stories; 'workshop' used in this sense, Kingsley Amis once remarked, implies all that has gone wrong with the world since World War II. 

"Allowing the word issue to stand in for problem—'I have issues with that—is as pure a case of verbicide as I know: a useful word, issue, distinctly different in meaning from problem, describing a matter still in the flux of controversy in a way that no other word does.Impact and focus deserve a long rest from overuse, and process is surely one of those words that never keeps its promise. Perhaps, too, the time has come to call a halt to people describing people as 'highly literate,' given that literate means no more than that one can read and write; what they really mean, presumably, when they say literate is 'literary' or possibly "cultivated," which is not at all near the same thing. 

"Or consider the word disinterested, with its core meaning of impartiality or above personal interest, which has now all but melted into the condition of a pathetic synonym for uninterested. If we lose disinterested do we not also lose the grand ideal that it represents? I fear we may already have done so, at least insofar as I find it impossible at present to name a single disinterested figure on the stage of world politics. Ideas Have Consequences is the title of a once famous book, but words, being the substance out of which ideas are composed, turn out to have even greater consequences."

-- Joseph Epstein

An adjective! Yikes!

"When you catch an adjective, kill it."

-- Mark Twain

"The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech."

-- Clifton Fadiman

"The adjective is the enemy of the noun."

-- Voltaire

"If the noun is good and the verb is strong, you almost never need an adjective."

-- J. Anthony Lukas

"Don’t say it was 'delightful'; make us say 'delightful' when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers 'Please will you do my job for me?'"

-- C.S. Lewis

"Forward motion in any piece of writing is carried by verbs. Verbs are the action words of the language and the most important. Turn to any passage on any page of a successful novel and notice the high percentage of verbs. Beginning writers always use too many adjectives and adverbs and generally use too many dependent clauses. Count your words and words of verbal force (like that word “force” I just used)."

-- William Sloane

Getting a sentence straightened out

Look at this sentence:

He had told her that his illegal drugs were actually vitamins for months.

What's wrong? Mark Nichol explains:

This sentence, like many others that include a misplaced modifier, suffers because it reads as if the perpetrator had told someone that the illegal drugs in his possession were vitamins intended as nutritional supplements for the periods of days known as months, after which they were not so intended. This is a “You know what I meant” mistake, which is still a mistake. A better rendition — one that appropriately positions the modifier directly after the verb it modifies — places the key detail in the final position: “He had told her for months that his illegal drugs were actually vitamins.”

And consider this:

It’s not just losing in the regular season that strengthens your core, but losing in the playoffs as well.

Isn’t “losing in the playoffs,” rather than “losing in the regular season,” the point of the statement?

Actually, as demonstrated in the previous sentence, contrasting phrases are best positioned together in the midst of a sentence. The key detail is what the two types of losing have in common: “It’s not just losing in the regular season, but losing in the playoffs as well, that strengthens your core.”

More ailing sentences at the link.

Some tips on the craft

Mary Jaksch, Chief Editor of Write to Done, offers these.

Use simple, declarative sentences.
Avoid passive voice.
Limit your use of adjectives and adverbs.
Keep it simple.
Cut the crap.
Don’t overwrite.
Go easy on descriptive narrative (settings, people, etc.).
Re-examine every word that’s three syllables or longer and see whether it could be replaced by a simpler word.
If you have a sense of where you want your piece to wind up, start there instead and see what happens.
Avoid these three weak words – unless absolutely necessary: Ifs, Buts, and Can’ts.
Never rescue your hero.
Practice monotasking. Set a timer for uninterrupted writing.
Work on brilliant headlines.
Start with metaphors and stories.
Write the opening sentence or headline last.
Write solely from the heart and shun copying others.
Think before you include an expletive.
Ask, “Can it be turned into a list?” Think of at least five things you can list about it.
Use the mini-skirt rule: Make it long enough to cover everything, but short enough to keep it interesting.
Write in small paragraphs in order to get to the point immediately.
Visualize the person you are communicating with: What do their eyes reflect as they read this? What will the first thing they might say in response?
Do what works for you.
Always call a spade a spade. It’s never a long-handled gardening implement!
Try writing without accuracy. Not worrying about errors (left brain) allows for easier flow of thought (right brain).

Is anyone checking their speeches?

"Grammar and style were problems for most speakers at both party conventions, alas, but a bipartisanship of low standards is not good. The president said, for example, “when you pick up that ballot to vote [what else would you do with it?], you will face the clearest choice of any time in a generation.” Strike “of any time,” please. I’m reminded of his speech a few years ago when he hailed ordinary Americans’ “doing their business.” He meant “attending to.” Has he never walked that expensive dog of his?"

-- Charles Kesler

It's not a sin to make a living

"Don’t be content just to call yourself a writer and then bitch about the crass publishing world that won’t run your stuff. We’re still a capitalist country, and writing to some degree is a capitalist enterprise, when it’s not a total sin to try to make a living and court an audience…

"I think that maybe what young writers have lost is the sense of writing as a trade. When I was young it was still a trade. There were enough magazines — middlebrow magazines, so-called general interest magazines — they ran articles but also fiction, and you felt that there was an appetite out there for this sort of fiction. The academic publications run fiction, but I don’t think they have quite replaced them in this sense. Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it. 

"So I don’t sneer at writers like Stephen King who have managed to capture the interest of a large audience. Any way that you can break through. I figure if you don’t have any audience you shouldn’t be doing this. Tom Wolfe, the journalist, has spouted off very eloquently about the failure of the American writers to galvanize readership the way he thinks Zola and Dreiser and some others did. I think you can force this. We can’t do Zola now exactly. Somehow it just doesn’t sing. So you’re sort of stuck with being a — whatever — post-modern…"

-- John Updike

What makes it easier for the audience

“I mean, if I’m not writing for the audience, if I’m not writing to make it easier for them, then who the hell am I doing it for? And the way you make it easier is by following those tenets: cutting, building to a climax, leaving out exposition, and always progressing toward the single goal of the protagonist. They’re very stringent rules, but they are, in my estimation and experience, what makes it easier for the audience.” 

– David Mamet, interview with The Art of Theater, Spring 1997

Aks your relator if the house is perty

Metathetically speaking.

When you speak that way you are engaging in metathesis (mê-tæ-thê-sis), the switching of one sound or letter in a word with another.

Linguistic metathesis most often involves R and L, the "liquid" consonants: flimsy was created from filmsy by metathesis, linguist Robert Beard writes.

When we say perogative forprerogative or perscription for prescription, we commit metathesis, switching the positions of the R and E. In some dialects of English ask is metathesized to aks and another common speech error is the pronunciation of foliage as foilage, switching the L and the I. Southerners love metathesis: their pronunciations of pretty as perty, and difference [di-frêns] as differnce all reflect this proclivity.

In use: We have our choice of metathetic or metathetical for the adjective, and -ly may be added to the latter for the adverb:metathetically. The verb is a predictable metathesize, as two sounds might metathesize in a word.

History: Metathesis is a Late Latin noun based on the Greek verb metatithenai "to transpose". This verb consists of meta "beyond, over" + tithenai "to place". Meta comes from the same source as English mid and middle. Apparently, it originally meant "between", for that is the meaning of Russian mezhdu, which comes from the same word. Tithenai comes from an earlier form dhe-ti-, the source of English deed and do.

Why quotes get misquoted

Beam me up, Shakespeare.

"Methinks the lady doth protest too much." -- not Shakespeare
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks." -- Shakespeare

"Beam me up, Scotty!" not Star Trek
"Beam us up, Mr. Scott!" -- Star Trek

"Play it again, Sam." -- not Humphrey Bogart
"If she can stand it, I can. Play it." -- Humphrey Bogart

Why do we change famous quotations?

Have you noticed how incorrect quotes often just sound right—sometimes, more right than actual quotations? There's a reason for that. Our brains really like fluency, or the experience of cognitive ease (as opposed to cognitive strain) in taking in and retrieving information. The more fluent the experience of reading a quote—or the easier it is to grasp, the smoother it sounds, the more readily it comes to mind—the less likely we are to question the actual quotation. 

Those right-sounding misquotes are just taking that tendency to the next step: cleaning up, so to speak, quotations so that they are more mellifluous, more all-around quotable, easier to store and recall at a later point. We might not even be misquoting on purpose, but once we do, the result tends to be catchier than the original.

So how do you spot that misquote?

There's (sadly) no effortless way to go about it. The most we can do is to always be skeptical of ourselves, especially if something sounds too right or fluent or spot on. Because the better it sounds, the more likely it is to be a little off. That, and check quotes before we perpetuate them in cyberspace or print. Otherwise, we might end up like Bob Dylan, who once remarked, "I've misquoted myself so many times, I don't know what I've said." (He totally could have said that, right?) 

Just remember: A quote in time must rhyme.

When a plane crashes ...

... where should the survivors be buried?

If you are considering where the most appropriate burial place should be, you are not alone.

Scientists have found that around half the people asked this question, answer it as if they were being asked about the victims not the survivors.

What makes researchers particularly interested in people’s failure to notice words that actually don’t make sense, so called semantic illusions, is that these illusions challenge traditional models of language processing which assume that we build understanding of a sentence by deeply analysing the meaning of each word in turn.

Instead semantic illusions provide a strong line of evidence that the way we process language is often shallow and incomplete.

When volunteers read or listened to sentences containing hard-to-detect semantic anomalies -- words that fit the general context even though they do not actually make sense -- the researchers found that when a volunteer was tricked by the semantic illusion his brain had not even noticed the anomalous word.

What to do. The researchers suggest:

We process a word more deeply if it is emphasised in some way. So, in a news story, a newsreader can stress important words that may otherwise be missed and these words can be italicised to make sure we notice them when reading. 

The way we construct sentences can also help reduce misunderstandings. It’s a good idea to put important information first, because we are more likely to miss unusual words when they are near the end of a sentence. Also, we often use an active sentence construction such as 'Bob ate the apple' because we make far more mistakes answering questions about a sentence with a passive construction -- for example 'The apple was eaten by Bob'.

We are lazy listeners. And lazy thinkers.

And the wiener is ...

Eyelash mite.

The winner of the 2012 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, for the worst sentence in fiction, is Cathy Bryant of Manchester, England.

Here prize-winning entry:

As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.

And the Grand Panjandrum’s Special Award goes to Greg Homer of Placerville, CA.

The stifling atmosphere inside the Pink Dolphin Bar in the upper Amazon Basin carried barely enough oxygen for a man to survive – humid and thick the air was and full of little flying bugs, making the simple act of breathing like trying to suck hot Campbell’s Bean with Bacon soup through a paper straw.

Nice work, girls.

Stay out of the shower

Just read this blog.

Today is the birthday of director Alfred Hitchcock, who was born in London in 1899.

His father was a greengrocer — and a strict man. Once, when the five-year-old Alfred misbehaved, his father sent him to the police station and they locked him in a cell for a few minutes to teach him a lesson. Hitchcock was so terrified that he was afraid of the police for the rest of his life, and he rarely drove a car so that he could not be pulled over.

Hitchcock directed great suspense and horror films, including Rebecca (1940), Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). He said: "A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it."

Hitchcock understood the difference between mystery and suspense.

Alfred Hitchcock once told the French film critic Francois Truffaut to imagine a couple having lunch at a restaurant. Everything appears normal when suddenly boom! A bomb underneath the table explodes killing each patron. Rewind the story. This time you know the bomb is there and it will detonate at 1pm. A clock in the restaurant reads 12:55. 

The couple asks for the check. The slow service builds tension. We want to warn them: “Pay the bill, there’s a bomb!” For Hitchcock, it’s not surprise, but suspense that pushes our pleasure buttons. Of course, Hitchcock left plenty of room for surprises. But he reserved them for the very end – only then was a surprise better than suspense. This is why we return to Psycho: we love reliving the feeling of suspense even when the cover is blown.

Still, I never get in the shower unless I'm armed.

When your smart phone plays editor

The autocorrect function can create some real howlers. Here's how Google intends it to work.

If you type “kofee” into a search box, Google would like to save a few milliseconds by guessing whether you’ve misspelled the caffeinated beverage or the former United Nations secretary-general. It uses a probabilistic algorithm with roots in work done at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the early 1990s. 

The probabilities are based on a “noisy channel” model, a fundamental concept of information theory. The model envisions a message source — an idealized user with clear intentions — passing through a noisy channel that introduces typos by omitting letters, reversing letters or inserting letters. 

“We’re trying to find the most likely intended word, given the word that we see,” Mr. Paskin says. “Coffee” is a fairly common word, so with the vast corpus of text the algorithm can assign it a far higher probability than “Kofi.” On the other hand, the data show that spelling “coffee” with a K is a relatively low-probability error. The algorithm combines these probabilities. 

I guess if you try to tweet that you're having coffee with Kofi Anan you're in real trouble.

Putting a dollar value on a story

Here's a fascinating story from a review of the book Fascinating Objects.

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser famously remarked. Hardly anyone can back this bombastic proclamation with more empirical conviction than Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn.

In 2009, the duo embarked upon a curious experiment: They would purchase cheap trinkets, ask some of today’s most exciting creative writers to invent stories about them, then post the stories and the objects on eBay to see whether the invented story enhanced the value of the object. Which it did: The tchotchkes, originally purchased for a total of $128.74, sold for a whopping total of $3,612.51 — a 2,700% markup.

The most highly valued pairing in the entire project, bought for $1.49 and sold for $197.50, was a globe paperweight with a moving handwritten story by the magnificent Debbie Millman, with proceeds benefiting 826 National.

Not sure I've ever seen the value of story monetized.

Will a computer replace you?

Algorithms are producing a growing number of articles for newspapers and websites, such as this one produced by Narrative Science:

"Wall Street is high on Wells Fargo, expecting it to report earnings that are up 15.7 percent from a year ago when it reports its second quarter earnings on Friday, July 13, 2012," said the article on Forbes.com.

While computers cannot parse the subtleties of each story, Phys.org reports, they can take vast amounts of raw data and turn it into what passes for news.

"This can work for anything that is basic and formulaic," says Ken Doctor, an analyst with the media research firm Outsell. And with media companies under intense financial pressure, the move to automate some news production "does speak directly to the rebuilding of the cost economics of journalism," said Doctor.

Scott Frederick, chief operating officer of Automated Insights, another firm in the sector, said he sees this as "the next generation of content creation."

The company generates news stories from raw feeds of play-by-play data from major sports events. The company generates advertising on its own website and is now beginning to sell its services to other organizations for sports and real estate news. 

To mimic the effect of the hometown newspaper, the company generates articles with a different "tonality" depending on the reader's preference or location. For the 2012 Super Bowl, the article for New York Giants' fans read like this: "Hakeem Nicks had a big night, paving the way to a victory for the Giants over the Patriots, 21-17 in Indianapolis. With the victory, New York is the champion of Super Bowl XLVI." 

For New England fans, the story was different: "Behind an average day from Tom Brady, the Patriots lost to the Giants, 21-17 at home. With the loss, New England falls short of a Super Bowl ring."

Not much different than human sports writers.

Take a vow of chastity

If you write non-fiction using the techniques of fiction you need to know where to draw the line. Roy Peter Clark, who has taught writing for 30 years, begs you to take his vow of chastity.

I've broken some of these rules, and would again, but they are excellent reminders.

 1. Any degree of fabrication turns a story from non-fictionin to fiction, which must be labeled as such. (A person cannot be a little pregnant, nor a story a little fictional.)

2. The writer, by definition, may distort reality by subtraction (the way a photo is cropped), but is never allowed to distort by adding material to non- fiction that the writer knows did not happen.

3. Characters that appear in non-fiction must be real individuals, not composites drawn from a number of persons. While there are occasions when characters can or should not be named, giving characters fake names is not permitted. (They can be identified by an initial, a natural status “The Tall Woman,” or a role “The Accountant.”)

4. Writers of non-fiction should not expand or contract time or space for narrative efficiency. (Ten conversations with a source that took place in three locations cannot be merged into a single conversation in a single location.)

5. Invented dialogue is not permitted. Any words in quotations marks must be the result of a) written documents such as trial transcripts, or b) words recorded directly by the writer or some other reliable source. Remembered conversations — especially from the distant past — should be rendered with another form of simple punctuation, such as indented dashes: — like this –.

6. We reject the notion in all of literature of a “higher truth,” a phrase that has been used too often as a rationalization in non-fiction for making things up. It is hard enough, and good enough, to attempt to render a set of “practical truths.”

7. Aesthetic considerations must be subordinated — if necessary — to documentary discipline.

8. Non-fiction does not result from a purely scientific method, but responsible writers will inform audiences on both what they know and how they know it. The sourcing in a book or story should be sufficient so that another reporter or researcher or fact-checker, acting in good faith, could follow the tracks of the original reporter and find comparable results.

9. Unless working in fantasy, science fiction, or obvious satire, all writers, including novelists and poets, have an affirmative duty to render the world accurately through their own research and detective work. (The poet should not create a piano with 87 keys unless intending a specific effect.)

10. The escape clause: There may be occasions, when the writer can think of no other way to tell a story than through the use of one or more of these “banned” techniques. The burden is on the writer to demonstrate that this is so. To keep faith with the reader, the writer should become transparent concerning narrative methods. A detailed note to readers should appear AT THE BEGINNING OF THE WORK to alert them of the standards and practices of the writer.

If you're a Mark Twain fan

Samuel Clemens and Hellen Keller.

which I am, you'll enjoy a Facebook page devoted to him. It was set up by a friend and local historian, Brent Colley, who also runs this blog about Twain. This site, the history of Redding, CT, has a good bit of Twain material, including notice that his relationship with Helen Keller will be showcased at the Mark Twain Library in Redding this October.

Here from the Facebook page is a letter Clemens wrote to Keller.

Hopefully you will read this

Because I had to memorize The AP Stylebook when I joined that organization a lifetime ago, I perk up when I see references to it. Seems The AP has yielded to the great unwashed on the meaning of "hopefully."

Grammatical purists have insisted that the correct meaning is: “In a hopeful manner.” As in, “ ‘Surely you are joking,’ the grammarian said hopefully.”

Now, according to the AP, it's okay if we use it in this sense: “It is hoped, we hope.”

The battle is joined. Monica Hesse of The Washington Post asserts: "The barbarians have done it, finally infiltrated a remaining bastion of order in a linguistic wasteland."

Maeve Maddox, who has taught English and blogs as the American English Doctor, counters: "When it comes to crimes against the language, using hopefully to mean “it is hoped” is a long way from the equivalent of murder."

Maddox says we should keep our powder dry for such offenses as:

• I’ve made reservations for Megan and I.
• The chancellor will talk about he and his wife’s relationship with the governor.
• Why don’t you let your father and I talk.
• Me and my friends attend Cal-Tech.
• The suspect told police that him and another man shot the store owner.
• They’re 100% identical as theirs.
• This is something we probably should have did right after 9/11.

I'll grant that those are worse. But hopefully if we draw the line at hopefully we won't be forced to relent on those.

Think like an actor

Andrea Chalupa, a writer, journalist and TV producer, believes that acting can help a writer.

Writers can spend days, weeks holed up in a room, churning out words, not knowing if their work is any good—engaging, or just shallow “busy work.” Actors, on the other hand, have the benefit of the mirror, studying recordings of themselves, or the reaction of any sized audience to immediately know whether they’re being honest. In this regard, it’s better to be an actor than a writer. The instant feedback—communicating with the energy your spoken words, movements, and choices are creating—improve a craft faster than being confined to a desk and chair. On the rare occasion someone asks me for writing advice, I always say to take an acting class.

Shakespeare was an actor. 

And Charles Dickens too studied the craft and wrote his stories to be performed on stage. From an 1883 article published in the New York Times over a decade after his death, it is written of Dickens: “Nor could he ever relinquish his old fondness for the actor's art; for he scarcely did himself justice when he spoke of the stage as being to him but a means of getting money. 

He obtained great applause as an amateur actor, and he became famous as a public reader of his own books; his readings, in truth, closely resembling actings, or suggesting rather the readings of an actor than of an author." The stories he read on stage, the article says, had as many stage directions written on the pages as one would expect to find on the script of a play.

Something I learned at Reader's Digest, where dramas in real life were so important: In the construction of stories, even true stories, it helps to imagine the characters as actors on a stage. This will help you keep point of view and everything else straight. For example, characters not on stage  can't say anything. We don't know how they're reacting to the action or what they're thinking. You're writing what's on stage and only that.

Oxymoron is oxymoronic

oxymoron / ahk-si-mo-rahn / noun

A phrase or compound word containing two words that are ostensibly semantic opposites, such as "a long brief" or "hot ice."

Linguist Robert Beard: The adjective for this word is oxymoronic and the adverb oxymoronically. Try using the pedantic plural oxymora instead of oxymorons; it really impresses people.

Oxymoron, Beard writes, is most appropriately an oxymoron itself; it least it was in Greek. 

Greek oxymoron is made up of oxys "sharp, acid" and moros "dull, stupid", the source of the English word moron. Greek oxys is also found in oxygen. It is akin to Latin acus "needle", whose root we see in acute, acuity, and acupuncture. 

The original Proto-Indo-European root ak- "needle" came to the Germanic languages as something like agjo, which developed into Old Norse eggja "to needle, egg on". During one of the friendly Viking visits to England from the 9th through the 11th centuries, English borrowed this word for its verb to egg (on). The word was already in English, but with a different pronunciation: today's edge.

 Those Vikings were fun-loving guys.

Make writer's block work for you

"Writer’s block is a tool — use it. When asked why you haven’t produced anything lately, just say, “I’m blocked.” Since most people think that writing is some mystical process where characters “talk to you” and you can hear their voices in your head, being blocked is the perfect cover for when you just don’t feel like working. The gods of creativity bless you, they forsake you, it’s out of your hands and whatnot. Writer’s block is like “We couldn’t get a baby sitter” or “I ate some bad shrimp,” an excuse that always gets you a pass. The electric company nagging you for money, your cell provider harassing you, whatever — just say, “I’m blocked,” and you’re off the hook. 

"But don’t overdo it. In the same way the baby-sitter bit loses credibility when your kids are in grad school, there’s an expiration date. After 20 years, you might want to mix it up. Throw in an Ellisonian “My house caught fire and burned up my opus.” The specifics don’t matter — the important thing is to figure out what works for you."

-- Colson Whitehead

Look for an editor, writer

If you’re in doubt about the role serendipity plays consider the curious case of Thomas Wolfe, Jason Gots writes.

His Look Homeward, Angel, among the most critically acclaimed novels in American history, almost never got published. In 1927, the original manuscript appeared in the office of Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Scribners. It filled six cardboard boxes and was a non-linear, experimental attempt to capture “the strange and bitter magic of life.” The writing was powerfully poetic – a bold new voice – but the book was a sprawling, tangled mess.

Any other editor would have passed on the project as hopelessly unmarketable. Had the book been published in its original form, it would likely have been dismissed by critics as promising yet unreadable. But Perkins saw something in it, and was an editor of unusual energy and creativity. After a protracted, fierce (yet good-natured) battle with Wolfe over every word, sentence, and paragraph, he completely restructured the novel and cut the manuscript by 66,000 words, co-producing a literary classic and launching Wolfe’s career.

Look Homeward, Angel was the outpouring of a passionate, obsessive soul. Its genius lay in Wolfe’s ability to translate the ebb and flow of his powerful intellect into a new kind of lyrical prose – or perhaps more accurately, in his inability not to. A more market-savvy author might have crafted a better-constructed book on her own, but it wouldn’t have possessed the idiosyncratic beauty and power that makes Wolfe’s epic endure.

Those editors don't exist anymore.

Hand me that datum there, would you?

So is data plural or singular? The Wall Street Journal has declared itself in this matter, as The Economist notes:

Most style guides and dictionaries have come to accept the use of the noun data with either singular or plural verbs, and we hereby join the majority. 

As usage has evolved from the word’s origin as the Latin plural of datum, singular verbs now are often used to refer to collections of information: Little data is available to support the conclusions. 

Otherwise, generally continue to use the plural: Data are still being collected. 

(As a singular/plural test, try to substitute statistics for data: It doesn’t work in the first case — little statistics is available — so the singular is fails to pass muster. The substitution does work in the second case — statistics are still being collected – so the plural are passes muster.)

 You need quite a bit of staminum to keep this agendum alive.

What new words say about society

"The language most likely to continue long without alteration, would be that of a nation raised a little, and but a little, above barbarity, secluded from strangers, and totally employed in procuring the conveniencies of life; wither without books, or, like some of the Mahometan countries, with very few: men thus busied and unlearned, having only such words as common use requires, would perhaps long continue to express the same notions by the same signs.

"But no such constancy can be expected in a people polished by arts, and classed by subordination, where one part of the community is sustained and accommodated by the labour of the other. Those who have much leisure to think, will always be enlarging the stock of ideas, and every increase of knowledge, whether real or fancied, will produce new words, or combinations of words. When the mind is unchained from necessity, it will range after convenience; when it is left at large in the fields of speculation, it will shift opinions; as any custom is disused, the words that expressed it must perish with it; as any opinion grows popular, it will innovate speech in the same proportion as it alters practice."

-- Samuel Johnson

(Johnson)

How to write good like Papa

Ernest Hemingway's five rules for writing:

1. Use short sentences. Hemingway was famous for a terse minimalist style of writing that dispensed with flowery adjectives and got straight to the point. In short, Hemingway wrote with simple genius. Perhaps his finest demonstration of short sentence prowess was when he was challenged to tell an entire story in only 6 words:

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

2. Use short first paragraphs.

3. Use vigorous English. Here’s David Garfinkel’s take on this one:

It’s muscular, forceful. Vigorous English comes from passion, focus and intention. It’s the difference between putting in a good effort and TRYING to move a boulder… and actually sweating, grunting, straining your muscles to the point of exhaustion… and MOVING the freaking thing!

4. Be positive, not negative. Since Hemingway wasn’t the cheeriest guy in the world, what does he mean by be positive? Basically, you should say what something is rather than what it isn’t. This is what Michel Fortin calls using up words: By stating what something isn’t can be counterproductive since it is still directing the mind, albeit in the opposite way. If I told you that dental work is painless for example, you’ll still focus on the word “pain” in “painless.”

• Instead of saying “inexpensive,” say “economical,”

• Instead of saying “this procedure is painless,” say “there’s little discomfort” or “it’s relatively comfortable,”

• And instead of saying “this software is error-free” or “foolproof,” say “this software is consistent” or “stable.”

5. Never have only 4 rules. Actually, Hemingway did only have 4 rules for writing, and they were those he was given as a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star in 1917. But, as any web writer knows, having only 4 rules will never do. So, in order to have 5, I had to dig a little deeper to get the most important of Hemingway’s writing tips of all:

“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

What a waste of paper.

Nation's poets issue statement

84 Percent Of Poets Said, ‘The Shimmering Moon Is On Nigh, And The Dance, The Dance Will Be A Luminous Bright!’

What's the deal with all these tats?

I don't get it. I'm green enough as it is. And don't you think I'm pretty enough as is? Don't answer that.

Tattoo actually has several meanings, just like me.

1a. An evening drum beat or bugle call signaling soldiers or sailors to return to their quarters.

  b. A military march accompanied by music and other sound effects such as volleys of gunfire.

  c. A continuous tapping or drumming sound.  

2. A permanent design made on the skin by injecting dyes beneath the skin.

You didn't know that, did you?

There are, in fact, two words tattoo, as the meanings above and word history below indicate, the linguist Robert Beard writes at his excellent site, alphaDictionary. 

This implies that there are, as well, two verbs tattoo. The first means to drum or thump successively, as to tattoo the table nervously with your fingers. The second verb tattoo means simply to implant a graphic tattoo under the skin. A person who makes such implantations is a tattooist. In the following sentence, it is difficult to tell which of the two tattoos is intended: "When the rear wheel of Harley's motorcycle spun in the mire, it tattooed his back with mud spatters.

History: Tattoo in the first sense comes from Dutch taptoe "tap-shut", where taprefers to the beer spigot in a tavern. The Dutch bugle call, therefore, not only calls soldiers back to camp, but lets tavern owners know that it is time to halt the flow of beer. That same Dutch word tap is the origin of the final bugle call of the evening or the one played at military funerals, known as taps. The second tattoo, like the like-sounding taboo, is a Marquesan word brought to England from the Polynesian islands by Captain James Cook. This is why tattooing was first seen in the West on sailors. Today, of course, the craze to imitate the Polynesians has spread pretty much throughout the entire industrialized world.

How to write

Iconic businessman and original “Mad Man” David Ogilvy sent the following internal memo to all agency employees, titled “How to Write”:

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well. Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches. Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. 

Here are 10 hints: 

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification,attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.
8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

The power of fiction

"Until recently, we’ve only been able to guess about the actual psychological effects of fiction on individuals and society. But new research in psychology and broad-based literary analysis is finally taking questions about morality out of the realm of speculation.

"This research consistently shows that fiction does mold us. The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape.

"But perhaps the most impressive finding is just how fiction shapes us: mainly for the better, not for the worse. Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds. More peculiarly, fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place."

-- Jonathan Gottschall

François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld: eloquence

"Eloquence lies as much in the tone of the voice, in the eyes, and in the speaker's manner, as in his choice of words.

-- François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Hopefully you won't read this

On Tuesday morning, the venerated AP Stylebook publicly affirmed (via tweet, no less) what it had already told the American Copy Editors Society: It, too, had succumbed. “We now support the modern usage of hopefully,” the tweet said. “It is hoped, we hope.”

Previously, the only accepted meaning was: “In a hopeful manner.” As in, “ ‘Surely you are joking,’ the grammarian said hopefully.” 

This is no joking matter.

You know these kinds of arguments. 

You know them well. Linguistic battlefields are scattered with the wreckage left behind by Nauseated vs. Nauseous, by Healthy vs. Healthful, by the legions of people who perpetuated the union between “regardless” and “irrespective,” creating a Frankensteinian hybrid, “irregardless.” 

These are the battles that are fought daily between Catholic school graduates, schooled in the dark arts of sentence diagramming and self-righteousness, and their exasperated prey. They are fought between prescriptivists, who believe that rules of language should be preserved at any cost, and descriptivists, who believe that word use should reflect how people actually talk. 

“It was an unconscious mistake,” say the descriptivists. 

“You mean subconscious.” 

“Well, anyways — ” 

“You mean anyway.” 

“That begs the question. Why do you care about grammar so much?” 

“No. It doesn’t! It doesn’t beg the question at all. It raises the question. It raises the question!” 

“I’m going to beat you subconscious.”

Hopefully, you will bite me.

Who am I? Why am I here?

Constance Hale, a journalist based in San Francisco, writes that there are two types of verbs: static (to be, to seem, to become) and dynamic (to whistle, to waffle, to wonder). These are also referred to as passive and active.

Here's what she says about the static verbs:

Static verbs themselves fall into several subgroups, starting with what I call existential verbs: all the forms of to be, whether the present (am, are, is), the past (was, were) or the other more vexing tenses (is being, had been, might have been). In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” the Prince of Demark asks, “To be, or not to be?” when pondering life-and-death questions. An aging King Lear uses both is and am when he wonders about his very identity:

“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

Jumping ahead a few hundred years, Henry Miller echoes Lear when, in his autobiographical novel “Tropic of Cancer,” he wanders in Dijon, France, reflecting upon his fate:

“Yet I am up and about, a walking ghost, a white man terrorized by the cold sanity of this slaughter-house geometry. Who am I? What am I doing here?”

Drawing inspiration from Miller, we might think of these verbs as ghostly verbs, almost invisible. They exist to call attention not to themselves, but to other words in the sentence.

Another subgroup is what I call wimp verbs (appear, seem, become). Most often, they allow a writer to hedge (on an observation, description or opinion) rather than commit to an idea: Lear appears confused. Miller seems lost.

Finally, there are the sensing verbs (feel, look, taste, smell and sound), which have dual identities: They are dynamic in some sentences and static in others. If Miller said I feel the wind through my coat, that’s dynamic. But if he said I feel blue, that’s static.

Static verbs establish a relationship of equals between the subject of a sentence and its complement. Think of those verbs as quiet equals signs, holding the subject and the predicate in delicate equilibrium. For example, I, in the subject, equals feel blue in the predicate.

Verbs can make or break your writing, Hale concludes, so consider them carefully in every sentence you write. Do you want to sit your subject down and hold a mirror to it? Go ahead, use is.

Clip and hang on your refrigerator

(Grammarly. Thanks, Carolyn.)

Politicians do this

obfuscate / ahb-fê-skayt / verb, transitive

1. To dim or darken, to obscure by light deprivation or other means.
2. To make confusing, to obscure the meaning of, to make less comprehensible.

The spelling of this word is rather easy since there is a sound corresponding to each letter except the silent E at the end, the linguist Robert Beard writes. 

However, remember that the silent E makes the preceding A long, so even it has a function. The noun is obfuscation and anyone known for his or her obfuscation is an obfuscator. The adjective meaning "tending to obfuscate" is obfuscatory. There is, however, another rather rare and dated adjective with the same meaning, obfuscous. Use it if you like to live on the edge.

The basic meaning is "to darken", as in, "Closing the blinds to cover his activity had obfuscated the pantry to the point that Les Hyde could not find the chocolates." The metaphorical extension of this word applies to either intentionally or unintentionally confusing matters: "Ivan Oder's explanation of the reasons for the new heat-activated bidets in the restrooms only led to further obfuscation."

History: Obfuscate is the English adaptation of Latin obfuscatus, the past participle of the verb obfuscare "to darken". This verb is built of ob- "over, toward, against" + fuscare "to darken", a verb sharing a root with fuscus "dark." The prefix ob- was subject to the process of "assimilation" whereby a linguistic sound takes on the properties of a contiguous sound. So obfuscare later became offuscare and this spelling, too, slipped into English as offuscate but did not gain enough traction to remain.

How to write a great story

Kurt Vonnegut's tips:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

What's your time?

(Thanks, Thomas)

Prez speaks, press jumps

From Best of The Web Today:

If you're not a Supreme Court justice, that doesn't mean Barack Obama doesn't want to tell you how to do your job. RealClearPolitics notes that in his speech yesterday to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the president lectured reporters that he expects more favorable coverage even than he's received:

"This bears on your reporting," President Obama said to journalists. "I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing then they're equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. And an equivalence is presented which I think reinforces peoples' cynicism about Washington in general. This is not one of those situations where there's an equivalency." 

"As all of you are doing your reporting, I think it's important to remember that the positions that I am taking now on the budget and a host of other issues. if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago or even 15 years ago . . . would've been considered squarely centrist positions," Obama said a few moments later.

Some journalists agree as The Atlantic Wire reports:

It's a message The Atlantic's James Fallows has been championing for awhile now and happily acknowledged in the president's remarks yesterday. "From the commanding heights of our government, the 'false equivalence' problem seems to be coming into view," Fallows wrote.

Hey, Fallows! C'mere! Fetch! Aww, good boy! What a cute little lapdog!

Let your sentence tell a story

Constance Hale, a San Francisco journalist, says a sentence is a mini-narrative.

For a sentence to be a sentence we need a What (the subject) and a So What (the predicate). The subject is the person, place, thing or idea we want to express something about; the predicate expresses the action, condition or effect of that subject. Think of the predicate as apredicament — the situation the subject is in.

I like to think of the whole sentence as a mini-narrative. It features a protagonist (the subject) and some sort of drama (the predicate):The searchlight sweeps. Harvey keeps on keeping on. The drama makes us pay attention.

Let’s look at some opening lines of great novels to see how the sentence drama plays out. Notice the subject, in bold, in each of the following sentences. It might be a simple noun or pronoun, a noun modified by an adjective or two or something even more complicated:

• “They shoot the white girl first.” — Toni Morrison, “Paradise”
• “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” — James Joyce, “Ulysses”

Switching to the predicate, remember that it is everything that is notthe subject. In addition to the verb, it can contain direct objects, indirect objects, adverbs and various kinds of phrases. More important, the predicate names the predicament of the subject.

• “Elmer Gantry was drunk.” — Sinclair Lewis, “Elmer Gantry”
• “Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.” — Ha Jin, “Waiting”

 The best sentences, she concludes, bolt a clear subject to a dramatic predicate, making a mini-narrative.

A sign of the times

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.

Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said. 

In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project. 

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

Gutenberg first used moveable type 573 years ago. The World Wide Web opened for business 21 years ago. I got all of this post from the Web. You will read it on the Web.

The year of the blatherskite

Here's a word that will be particularly useful in this election season.

blatherskite / blæ-dhêr-skayt / noun

1. A blustery, talkative person, a blabbermouth.

2. Stuff and nonsense, gobbledygook, codswallop.

The linguist Robert Beard notes: Blather (or blether) means the same as today's word in its second meaning above. Skite is probably a Cockney or Australian pronunciation of skate which, among all its other meanings (fish, foot vehicles), at one time meant "a mean, contemptible person". Skate has retained this sense only in cheapskate. A dramatic increase in blatherskites and blatherskiting has been known to occur just before political elections.

I was to define blatherskite as "a politician stumping for (re)election", but decided that this definition was too narrow. Still, 'tis the season of blatherskiting in the US, so why not: "The amount of blather coming out of Washington and the state capitals is ordinarily breath-taking, but the blasted blatherskites lose control of themselves just before elections." Of course, today's word has a much wider application; I'm sure you know someone the word fits: "The meeting was run by a blatherskite so full of himself and codswallop that nothing was accomplished."

History: The original word blatherskite began its life in Scotland. However, during the American Revolutionary War, the Scottish song Maggie Laude, in which this word occurs, became a favorite among Americans, so blatherskite became a familiar colloquialism in the 18th century. The original Proto-Indo-European root, *bledh- "to blow (hard)", went on to become bladder in English and bladhra "bladder" in Old Norse. However, when used as a verb in Old Norse, it meant "to prattle on", so English borrowed the Old Norse version back, giving us today's blather.