The decline of the American novel

D.G. Myers, a critic and literary historian on leave from Texas A&M University, writes about the contemporary American novel at his delightful A Common Place blog:

It is hard to imagine a living American novelist writing a passage like the last four paragraphs of The Great Gatsby, summoning up the “fresh, green breast of the new world.” American novelists by and large do not identify with ordinary Americans any longer, nor with the American dream (“the last and greatest of all human dreams”), but with their intellectual class—the people with whom they went to school, whose minds are furnished with the same authorities and assumptions, who share a similar understanding of the world. The American continent no longer compels them into an aesthetic contemplation they neither understand nor desire. What moves them are the envies and ambitions, the disdains and irritations, of their class.

Thus all their characters sound like literary intellectuals. Thus they cannot even imagine what their own non-writing spouses, nor anyone else for that matter, do every day at work. Thus the world outside literature and academe is a vague blur, if not entirely invisible. Thus human decency is identified with the correct (and partisan) political opinions. Thus fiction becomes little more than an occasion for ventilating anti-American grievances.

And thus the American novel, once a lively voice in the national debate to specify the American idea, has devolved into the voice of a homogeneous intellectual class. It is just another means, like similar work, training, and lifestyle, for promoting class solidarity.

We should borrow Martin Luther's secret

Martin Luther's 1534 Bible

Martin Luther (1483 - 1546) was a German priest and professor of theology who initiated the Protestant Reformation. His translation of the Bible into the language of the people (instead of Latin) made it more accessible, causing a tremendous impact on the church and on German culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language.

His secret?

Luther had to compromise between the many different “Germans” that filled the German lands in those days, hundreds of years before there was a single German state,  Ruth Sanders, a professor of German Studies at Miami University in Ohio, writes in her new book, German: Biography of a Language. Luther borrowed an emerging standard used by the Holy Roman Empire, “chancellery German”, as a base with some currency in different regions.

From a review in The Economist:

Luther’s genius was to infuse his translation with the words he heard on the street in his bit of Saxony, in east-central Germany. He obsessively asked friends and fellow scholars which dialectal words would be most widely understood. The common touch was so successful that a Catholic opponent complained that “even tailors and shoemakers…read it with great eagerness.” It was the bestseller of the century and remains the most popular German translation. Rarely has a single man had such a mark on a language. The German of Luther’s Bible was nobody’s native language in his day. Today it is so universal that it threatens Germany’s once-vibrant dialects with death by standardisation.

How much proof do we need before we start using the words and phrases most people use?

Is this the future of news?

Using Twitter as a source of news? Like the look of an old-fashioned newspaper? A Swiss startup called Small Rivers has taken that idea and turned it into a service called Paper.li. Here's how it works:

The site takes your Twitter stream and extracts links to any news stories, photos, videos, etc., which it then analyzes using what the company calls “semantic text analysis tools” to determine whether the stories are relevant. It then displays the links and related content in sections based on the context of the link.

The service also creates themed pages based on specific topics using hashtags, such as #privacy or #climate, in much the same way that newspapers create special sections around an event or topic. Paper.li also automatically creates topical sections like Technology, Arts & Entertainment, Photos, Politics and Business. If you hover over the source of each link or photo, you can reply, retweet, follow or unfollow and favorite that user. Users can also now create papers using a Twitter list.

You can see several of these here, courtesy of Gigaom:

• Jeff Nolan (technology blogger and VC — @jeffnolan)
• Umair Haque (director of Harvard’s media lab — @umairh)
• Ross Mayfield (co-founder of Socialtext — @ross)
• Wired magazine (the Wired Daily account — @wired)
• Stowe Boyd (online consultant — @stoweboyd)
• Alex Howard (O’Reilly correspondent — @digiphile)

What’s interesting about using Twitter for such a service, Mathew Ingram notes, is that you don’t have to explicitly say which articles you like, or wait for the software to learn what you’re interested in; you choose the people you follow and those people choose the links they want to share, and that constitutes your newspaper.

How language shapes our thinking

The language we speak does affect the way we think. This is because of what our language habitually obliges us to think about, Guy Deutscher, an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester, writes.

Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.  

English imposes obligations as well.

English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.

Even colors and the perception of art are affected.

Recently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue. There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are considered shades of the same color in many languages. And it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.

Deutscher has put all this in a new book, from which this article is adapted: Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, to be published this month.

How to write a book proposal

The slush pile

Gerard Van deur Leun, keeper of the American Digest blog, has been a book editor (200 titles), a magazine editor (1,000 + articles) and, briefly, a literary agent.

Here is his advice on book proposals:

Most failed to even engage my attention because they failed to tell me what I, as an editor, really needed to know.  Typically, writers get bogged down in creating a long, drawn out monster that was too turgid and too worked over to be of use.

A writer new to the game of publishing (and it is a game and a clumsy and ugly one) would always spend far too much time getting to yes or no. My writers would have a lot to say about their subjects and they seemed to feel that by saying a lot in the proposal they were improving their odds. Wrong. Less is more in this game, trust me.

And besides, a proposal is just that. A proposal. There's no sense in investing a huge amount of time in something that isn't going to be published and for which a writer is not going to be paid.

Here we go:

The 330 Word Book Proposal Schematic in 5 Parts

1) What the Book is About (1 -2 Pages)
Start with the title and subtitle. Make these two elements as attention grabbing as possible. They will be the "handle" the editor uses for pitching the book to the acquisition committee. Single-spaced, this section sets out the condensed form of the book. Think of it as expanded jacket copy. What's it about? What's its point of view. What is the arc and shape of the book? What patterns will it reveal? How will it educate, illuminate, amuse or inspire? Why is the book important now?

Function: This section gives the acquiring editor reasons for recommending the book for publication.

2) Chapter by Chapter Outline of the Book
Each chapter is given a title and then one or two paragraphs that set out what will be covered in the chapter when written.

Function: The allows the editor understand the structure of the book.

3) Sample Chapter
Pick one chapter from the outline and write it start to finish.

Function: This allows the editor to know how the author will write the book and, indeed, if the author can in fact write.

4) Core Market for the Book (1 Page)
Who is going to buy the book? Who are the people who will be interested in the book? Be fairly specific here. It's not a "There are 300 million people in the United States and they all eat, therefore my cook book...." argument. Editors want to have some idea of the "hard-core" market of buyers' the people who have to have it. Indicate other similar and/or complimentary books and influential magazine / web articles on the subject.

Function: Helps the editor identify and quantify the possible market for the book.

5) Why the Author is Qualified to Write This Book. (1 Page)
Why you? What are the author's particular qualifications for writing this book? Include degrees, writing experience, web credentials, background.

Function: Allows the editor to know that the author has the expertise to write the book.

W. Somerset Maugham: physical labor

"I like manual labor. Whenever I've got waterlogged with study, I've taken a spell of it and found it spiritually invigorating."

-- W. Somerset Maugham

Happy birthday, Deliverance

Dickey had a cameo role in the movie

James Dickey's lone novel, Deliverance, turned 40 this year, and New York Times book critic Dwight Garner remembers with insight for writers today.

“Deliverance” is the kind of novel few serious writers attempt any longer, a book about wilderness and survival whose DNA contains shards of both “Heart of Darkness” and “Huckleberry Finn.” It tells the story of four mild, middle-class men from suburban Atlanta who embark on a canoe trip, snaking down a remote Georgia river that will soon disappear beneath a dam. In the woods they find boiling rapids and two sinister mountain men. Before the novel is over, the carnage is nearly complete: three men have been crudely buried, one has been raped, and the survivors have had the bark peeled from their modern sensibilities.

These days our culture takes these kinds of narratives, about masculine midlife longing and regret, and de-fangs them, turning them into films like “Wild Hogs,” the benign John Travolta motorcycle trip movie. The novelists who take us into the woods and wilds, Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane invaluably among them, bring along slapstick and irony as critical mosquito repellent. (Was it Robert Bly, in his “Iron John” phase, who made it impossible for American men to walk purposefully into a forest without feeling as if drums and self-awareness needed to be involved?)

Dickey wrote about men, neither dudes nor (although they were fathers) dads. The men in “Deliverance” meet real monsters and recognize their ability to become, in Dickey’s phrase, countermonsters. 

“Deliverance," Garner concludes, "has its narrative eddies, and moments where its backwoods mysticism is ripe. But Dickey’s moral awareness infuses this book with grainy life; guilt and blame are not easily assigned. The book presents a quagmire none of its characters escape. In 2010, it’s lonely work looking for its serious successors."

The single best blog post ever

The public editor of The New York Times, Arthur S. Brisbane, starts a new blog with a post on superlatives. He discusses a news article about medical research that used the term "100 percent."

There's a red flag, Junior Editor Man!

My take is that danger awaits stories that venture into the land of 100% — or any other absolute, for that matter. Stories that report on something that is a “first,” a “biggest,” an “only”; stories that employ “never,” and stories that predict with absolute certainty are often headed for trouble. Yes, sometimes an absolute is absolutely right, but many, many times there is a crack of imperfection there.

Good point. There's only one bestest mostest of anything, as this blog proves, and you have to be sure you've got the real McCoy.

When you want someone to listen to you

Speaking before a group, one of our worst fears, becomes less threatening when you realize that your audience cares a lot less about you than you think. Behind the faces out there are a lot of thoughts: the grocery list, the anxiety over a funny look from the boss that morning, the kid's grade in algebra, and the like.

If you feel better, don't: the same thing makes it harder for you to get your ideas in their heads.

Nick Morgan, president of a communications consulting firm, has two simple rules. 1. Know thy audience. 2. Tell them one thing, and one thing only.

Presentations are about their audiences, not their speakers. Before you write anything down, or commit anything to a Power Point slide, you must give some thought to your listeners. So ask yourself obvious — but easy to forget — questions like, what time of day am I speaking? How many people will be in the audience? Will they just have eaten, or will they be looking forward to a meal? Will they have heard a number of other speeches, or is mine the only one? The answer to each of these questions should affect the length, style and content of your presentation.

People have more energy and more ability to hear complex ideas early in the day; later in the day their energy flags and they don't want to entertain as many new ideas. Larger audiences demand more energy from the speaker and want to laugh more than they want to cry. The worst audience (from the speaker's point of view) is a tired, fed, slightly inebriated audience.

At one stage in my career, I delivered a number of after-dinner talks to audiences of advertisers in the publication where I was an editor. The host, our publisher, and I had an agreement: I would speak after the salad course. That allowed me to enjoy my dinner -- my primary motivation -- but it also meant the crowd wasn't as sleepy as it would be after a full meal.

Here's a way to remember this rule. Imagine that you speak only English and your audience speaks only Mandarin. How effective are you going to be? Now imagine what other barriers exist between you and them. Your business jargon, your point of view (you think environmentalists are nut jobs, and this is the monthly meeting of the local chapter of Greenpeace).

In my case, I represented The Reader's Digest, and my audiences were young, hip wear black and take your dog to work Madison Avenue types. If it Reader's Digest had any meaning to them, it was the thing that sat on the back of the commode at Grandma's house. So I turned that to my advantage, making fun of the magazine, which I could, given my standing there, and gradually bringing them around, I hoped, to an appreciation of it. Using their point of view, their language, their interests.

You can remember the second rule this way. Imagine a conversation with someone in which he or she is telling you far more than you can absorb. TMI. An electrician came the other day to fix a circuit that was out, and he was explaining what he was doing, and it was a tangle of neutral this, and breaker that, and I was lost. Don't do that to your audience, Morgan says.

The oral genre is highly inefficient. We audience members simply don't remember much of what we hear. We're easily sidetracked, confused, and tricked. We get distracted by everything from the color of the presenter's tie to the person sitting in the next row to our own internal monologues.

Keep it simple, stupid. TMI bad. KISS good.

How people get quoted in the news

Reporters use quotes in news articles for various reasons. Sometimes the person being quoted expresses an idea in a clever way. When I was reporting for The Associated Press we used quotes as credibility: newspaper editors who didn't know us personally might relax if some knowledgeable person were quoted. So very often a quote went right into the second paragraph, or "graf" as we called it.

One of The AP's top writers saved his career with a quote. He wrote: "A nuclear missile was launched tonight in New Jersey." The career saver: the sentence ended with, "state police said." They said it. No matter it wasn't true.

Michael Kinsley, an editor at Atlantic Media Company and former editor of The New Republic, addresses the matter of quotes in an excellent piece in The Atlantic. Even if you don't report the news, you can learn something about how the sausage is made.

Quotes from outside experts or observers are also a rich source of unnecessary verbiage in newspaper articles. A New York Times story from the November 8 front page provides a good example here. It’s about how the crackdown on some Wall Street bonuses may have backfired. Executives were forced to take stock instead of cash, but then the stock went up, damn it.

This is an “enterprise” story—one the reporter or an editor came up with, not one dictated by events. And the reporter clearly views the information it contains as falling somewhere between ironic and appalling, which seems about right. But it’s not her job to have a view. In fact, it’s her job to not have a view. Even though it’s her story and her judgment, she must find someone else—an expert or an observer—to repeat and endorse her conclusion. These quotes then magically turn an opinionated story into an objective one. And so:

“People have to look at the sizable gains that have been made since stock and options were granted last year, and the fact is this was, in many ways, a windfall,” said Jesse M. Brill, the chairman of CompensationStandards.com, a trade publication. “This had nothing to do with people’s performance. These were granted at market lows.”

Those are 56 words spent allowing Jesse M. Brill to restate the author’s point. Yet I, for one, have never heard of Jesse M. Brill before. He may be a fine fellow. But I have no particular reason to trust him, and he has no particular reason to need my trust. The New York Times, on the other hand, does need my trust, or it is out of business. So it has a strong incentive to earn my trust every day. But instead of asking me to trust it and its reporter about the thesis of this piece, The New York Times asks me to trust this person I have never heard of, Jesse M. Brill.

Of course this attempt to pass the hot potato to a total stranger doesn’t work, because before I can trust Jesse M. Brill about the thesis of the piece, I have to trust The New York Times that this Jesse M. Brill person is trustworthy, and the article under examination devotes many words to telling me who he is so that I will trust him. (By contrast, it tells me nothing about the reporter.) Why not cut out the middleman? The reason to trust this story, if you choose to do so, is that it is in The New York Times. What Jesse M. Brill may think adds nothing. Yet he is only one of several experts quoted throughout, basically telling the story all over again. 

Reporters have always done it that way. "Quotes from outside experts or observers are also a rich source of unnecessary verbiage in newspaper articles," says Michael Kinsley, an editor at Atlantic Media Company and former editor of The New Republic.

The word that isn't a word

Do you use irregardless to mean regardless?

Trouble is, regardless already means something isn't worth regard, so adding the "ir" to it means... it's worth regarding again? Who knows.

"This is one of those words used almost exclusively by people trying to sound smarter than they are," Tim Cameron writes.

Dictionary.com, using the Random House Dictionary, notes:

Irregardless is considered nonstandard because of the two negative elements ir-  and -less.  It was probably formed on the analogy of such words as irrespective, irrelevant,  and irreparable.  Those who use it, including on occasion educated speakers, may do so from a desire to add emphasis. Irregardless  first appeared in the early 20th century and was perhaps popularized by its use in a comic radio program of the 1930s.

Wikipedia digs deeper:

The origin of irregardless is not known for certain, but the speculation among references is that it may be a blend, or portmanteau word, of irrespective and regardless, both of which are commonly accepted standard English words. By blending these words, an illogical word is created. Another possibility is that when people say "irregardless" they are following the pattern of words like "irrelevant", "irrational" and "irregular". "Since the prefix ir- means 'not' (as it does with irrespective), and the suffix -less means 'without,' irregardless is a double negative." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Irregardless was first acknowledged in 1912 by the Wentworth American Dialect Dictionary as originating from western Indiana. Barely a decade later, the usage dispute over irregardless was such that, in 1923, Literary Digest published an article titled "Is There Such a Word as Irregardless in the English Language?"

So there.

Confucius: the heart

"Words are the voice of the heart."

-- Confucius

The Writer

The Writer

In her room at the prow of the house

Where the light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My dauughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door, We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder. 

-- Richard Wilbur

Richard Purdy Wilbur (born 1 March 1921) is an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989.

Warning: blog post ahead!

A blogger at The Economist's Johnson blog -- R.L.G. are his initials -- quotes Tom Scott on the need for warning labels in journalism:

"The media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language — but there's no similar labeling system for, say, sloppy journalism and other questionable content." He supplies some rather useful cautionary flags, like "Warning: to ensure future interviews with the subject, important questions were not asked."

R.L.G. then tries his hand:

WARNING: The journalist writing this article, though adept with language, does not know nearly as much as he thinks he does about language, and does not know that he does not know this. He will pass on and over-interpret, with no critical faculties brought to bear whatsoever, the findings simplified in a press release about some recent linguistic research, simply because the press release has a university's name at the top. For best results, skip the article and the press release and go to the original research.

And then a warning on blog posts:

WARNING:  Written in minutes and fact-checked in seconds via Google. May contain unsafe levels of self-righteousness. Past cleverness is no guarantee of future results.

I would add: stolen shamelessly from someone else.

Make some effort with your resume, for crying out loud

Michael Hess, a blogger at BNET, writes about the terrible cover letters and resumes he receives from people wanting a job. Among the most common abuses in his mind:

No cover/introductory letter — I am a realist. I accept that the days of handwritten and snail-mailed cover letters and résumés are over, and for the most part that’s OK. But even in the era of e-mailed job applications and online résumés, the lack of a proper introductory note — no matter how brief — is inexcusable. A good cover letter can be as valuable as the résumé itself, since the cover is the “personal” part of the application, while the rest is the same work history that every other employer will receive. If I get a blank e-mail with a résumé attached, or an e-mail with nothing but a link to someone’s information online, the chances I’ll look any further start at zero and go down.

Terrible cover letter — An atrocious introductory note is almost as bad as no letter at all — and  sometimes even worse. I have received e-mails written in text-speak (”u sound like an awesome company, and I think I’d b an awesome employee, LOL”). I’ve gotten short notes that read as cavalier or arrogant (”my info attached, call for more info and interview”). And I’ve been sent e-mails that were short-sighted turn-offs (”what are the pay and benefits of the job?  If they are what I am looking for I will send my résumé”).

Bad résumé – Despite all of the resources available, quality résumés are very rare. I’d be surprised if one out of 20 that I read even comes close to what I consider “well done.” My feeling is that if someone can’t do a good job with the most important document he may ever write, what does that say about the work I can expect from him? When I wrote my first résumé, I had everyone I know read it to make sure there were no typos, that it flowed well, was well-written, honest and concise, showed me in the best possible light, raised no red flags, and so on. I knew I had exactly one, fleeting chance to get and keep an employer’s attention. No room for error in that.

I will chide Mr. Hess: I could not discover his company on the BNET site.

A fairly unique post at this moment in time

University of Oxford researchers have compiled a list of the Top 10 Most Irritating Expressions in the English language.

The scholars keep track of linguistic mangling and overused buzzwords in a database called the Oxford University Corpus. The voluminous record keeps track of books, magazines, broadcast, online media and other sources, watching for new overused, tiresome phrases and retiring those that fade from use (or misuse).

Here are the top ten:

1 – At the end of the day
2 – Fairly unique
3 – I personally
4 – At this moment in time
5 – With all due respect
6 – Absolutely
7 – It’s a nightmare
8 – Shouldn’t of
9 – 24/7
10 – It’s not rocket science

The list appears in a new book, Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, by Jeremy Butterfield.

John Steinbeck on writing: getting it on paper

Steinbeck

John Steinbeck once said that writers are "a little below clowns and a little above trained seals" and that the writer "must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."

When the comedian Fred Allen asked Steinbeck's advice on writing an autobiography, the master replied:

Don't start by trying to make the book chronological. Just take a period. Then try to remember it so clearly that you can see things: what colors and how warm or cold and how you got there. Then try to remember people. And then just tell what happened. It is important to tell what people looked like, how they walked, what they wore, what they ate. Put it all in. Don't try to organize it. And put in all the details you can remember.

You will find that in a very short time things will begin coming back to you, you thought you had forgotten. Do it for very short periods at first, but kind of think of it when you aren't doing it. Don't think back over what you have done. Don't think of literary form. Let it get out as it wants to. Over tell it in the manner of detail--cutting comes later. The form will develop in the telling. Don't make the telling follow a form.

Steinbeck echoed this advice in one of his final interviews: "Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on."

-- Richard Nordquist

Do you perceive this post?

An interesting word that describes a concept:

liminal / LIM-uh-nul / adjective

1 : of or relating to a sensory threshold

2 : barely perceptible

3 : of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition : in-between, transitional

I supposed people don't use it often: the Blogger spellchecker doesn't recognize it.

Merriam-Webster discusses:

 

The noun "limen" refers to the point at which a physiological or psychological effect begins to be produced, and "liminal" is the adjective used to describe things associated with that point, or threshold, as it is also called. 

 

Likewise, the closely related word "subliminal" means "below a threshold"; it can describe something inadequate to produce a sensation or something operating below a threshold of consciousness. 

 

Because the sensory threshold is a transitional point where sensations are just beginning to be perceptible, "liminal" acquired two extended meanings. It can mean "barely perceptible" and is now often used to mean "transitional" or "intermediate," as in "the liminal zone between sleep and wakefulness."

 

Think of the word "cat"

Alix Spiegel at NPR asks us to think about symbols:

In order to have language, any language, you need to be able to think symbolically.
Think of the word "cat."

Even though the written word C-A-T looks nothing like a cat, and the spoken word "cat" sounds nothing like a cat sounds, when someone says the word out loud, you're able to conjure up an image.

Language, says Alison Brooks, an anthropology professor at George Washington University, is entirely composed of these arbitrary symbols.

"Every sound that comes out of my mouth has some kind of arbitrary meaning assigned to it," she says. "I could just as well be talking to you in another language and making totally different sounds and saying the same thing."

The miracle is that these arbitrary sounds — these symbols — allow us to see what's going on in other people's minds and also allows us to share what's going on in ours.

For example, if I say the word "bead" you immediately have a picture in your mind of what I'm talking about. If I said beads, you'd generate a slightly different picture in your mind, that I have made your mind form. If I said glass beads — using an adjective to modify the concept — you'd immediately see something different than if I said gold beads. In this way, I make you think in your mind of a thing that I have in my mind.

And once we have this ability for symbolic thought and language then all kinds of things become possible. Through language we can pass down what we've learned, organize larger and larger groups of people who can do more and more complex things like build bridges and schools and computers and practically everything else in modern life.

On the page it's like Frankenstein's monster

Danny Rubin is a screenwriter whose credits include "Hear No Evil," "S.F.W.," and the cult classic "Groundhog Day," for which he received the British Academy Award for Best Screenplay and the Critics' Circle Award for Screenwriter of the Year. He has taught screenwriting at a variety of universities and organizations, and is currently the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on Screenwriting at Harvard University.

His take on the art of screenwriting:

Writing a screenplay is not so hard.  That’s all about knowing where the margins are.  Writing a good screenplay is almost impossible.

Part of it has to do with being original, trying to do something that feels fresh when there have been so many movies made and also particularly in Hollywood, a tendency to try and remake the same movies over and over again.  So, it’s writing a movie that’s original that becomes really difficult and there's something very formal about the enterprise of writing a screenplay.  It can’t be longer than two hours. 

So, the kind of story you tell, whatever it is, it has to be as engaging and as exciting as possible within that one and a half to two hour period and that forces certain kind of conventions on you.  Places where we really want to have them gripped in the story by here or else they’re going to leave or change the channel or walk out of the theater.

There's a certain kind of efficiency built into screenwriting that’s very elegant, but that makes it as hard to craft as a very finely crafted piece of sculpture, furniture, something like that.  And making it all come alive when you just start putting together all the pieces of things that you visualize that would wonderful.  It all seems in your mind to be wonderful, but then when you look at what you’ve created on the page it’s like a Frankenstein’s monster.  You’ve got a head, you’ve got the hands, you got the feet, you’ve got the body.  You’ve thought of everything and when you look at it, it’s still just a bunch of dead meat lying there on the table and you're trying to get a pulse to go through the thing.

Hemingway's writing studio

The room where Papa wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls and Death in the Afternoon. Ernest Hemingway lived in this house in Key West, Florida for more than 10 years. Needing a place where he could drink a glass of scotch, smoke a cigar, and write about men being men, Hemingway turned the old carriage house on the property into his personal writing studio. The main features in the room are the Cuban cigar-maker’s chair and his Royal typewriter. Throughout the room, Hemingway placed mementos he collected from his manly adventures in Africa and Cuba.

(Art of Manliness) 

(Thanks, Jeremy)

Charles De Secondat: an hour of reading

"I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage."

-- Charles De Secondat

The most popular marketing buzzwords

Adam Sherk did a bit of research on the press releases at PRWeb and found the number of uses for these buzzwords:

1	leader	161,000
2	leading	44,900
3	best	43,000
4	top	32,500
5	unique	30,400
6	great	28,600
7	solution	22,600
8	largest	21,900
9	innovative	21,800
10	innovator	21,400
11	award winning	11,800
12	exclusive	11,000
13	premier	10,700
14	extensive	10,500
15	leading provider	10,100
16	innovation	9,570
17	real-time	8,030
18	fastest	7,420
19	easy to use	6,850
20	dynamic	6,460
21	state of the art	6,400
22	smart	6,020
23	flexible	5,660
24	cutting edge	5,520
25	biggest	5,460
26	world class	5,340
27	amazing	5,320
28	next generation	4,860
29	revolutionary	4,830
30	sustainable	4,720
31	best practices	4,680
32	leverage	4,600
33	thrilled	4,530
34	robust	4,380
35	delighted	3,560
36	cloud	3,260
37	user friendly	3,190
38	extraordinary	3,090
39	breakthrough	3,010
40	savvy	2,900
41	ROI	2,860
42	transform	2,700
43	seamless	2,540
44	groundbreaking	2,440
45	empower	2,390
46	scalable	2,170
47	one of a kind	2,160
48	proactive	1,810
49	best in class	1,650
50	return on investment	1,570
51	market leading	1,560
52	turnkey	1,450
53	mission critical	1,370
54	strategic partnership	1,360
55	ground breaking	1,320
56	dashboard	1,310
57	iconic	1,220
58	industry standard	1,190
59	never before	1,150
60	re-purpose	1,050
61	ecosytem	1,020
62	win-win	963
63	best of breed	941
64	enterprise class	926
65	empowerment	909
66	magical	853
67	synergy	838
68	out of the box	790
69	feature-rich	757
70	stack	673
71	cross-platform	524
72	value proposition	519
73	well positioned	489
74	disruptive	470
75	hit the ground running	451
76	disruption	417
77	mindshare	415
78	space-age	386
79	bleeding edge	373
80	exit strategy	373
81	customer-centric	369
82	sea change	331
83	sticky	326
84	silo	272
85	synergistic	246
86	client-centric	244
87	outside the box	226
88	paradigm shift	206
89	peak performance	205
90	perfect storm	162
91	organic growth	155
92	top-down	155
93	next-gen	121
94	never been done	110
95	bottom-up	108
96	solution-driven	102
97	secret sauce	91
98	low hanging fruit	69

I would have thought that "low hanging fruit" would have done better. I feel kind of sorry for it.

It's "its," or is it?

It's said to be the most frequent error in language usage: its vs it's. And your spellcheck thingy won't catch it.

Neoneocon reflects:

The error almost always goes in one direction only: the use of the apostrophe, as in “it’s,” for the possessive form of the word, when it should only be used for the contraction “it is.”

In this, however, we’re following another rule (are you still with me? or have I already bored you to tears?), that of the possessive personal pronoun: hers, his, theirs, ours, yours, for example. All lack apostrophes. But they’re not confusing, somehow—perhaps because, unlike “its,” they clearly refer to people, and are never given an apostrophe because they never become contractions.Why do we do this?

Are we all just stupid! No, no, a thousand times no! We are actually very smart, because we are extrapolating a general rule to include this word, and that is the rule about forming possessives. Usually we do this by adding an apostrophe and an “s,” as you no doubt well know. But with the words “it’s” and “its,” we choose to reserve the apostrophe for the contraction, and that leaves the possessive hanging out there, alone and forlorn and apostropheless.

Oh man, hate it when that happens.

I make the mistake only by sloppy typing: the fingers are working but not the brain.

You be the editor

James Taranto, who writes the Best of The Web Today blog for The Wall Street Journal, points out the coverage of two presidents by The Associated Press. If you were the editor at The AP, what would you do?

Remember "accountability journalism"? As we noted in 2007, this was an Associated Press innovation designed "to report whether government officials are doing the job for which they were elected and keeping the promises they make." It started in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, and was exemplified by stories like these:

WASHINGTON (AP)--The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes. The economy is booming. Anybody who leaks a CIA agent's identity will be fired. Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn't match the public's view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast.

WASHINGTON (AP)--The fatally slow response to Hurricane Katrina unleashed a wave of anger that could transform people's expectations of government, the qualities they seek in political leaders and their views of America's class and racial divides. It's a huge opportunity that neither party seems poised to exploit.

Nearly five years later, we have a different president, facing a new crisis in the Gulf of Mexico after having promised in 2008 that his winning his party's nomination would be "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." And how is the AP reporting whether he's keeping that promise? Here's a Saturday dispatch from the wire service's Ben Feller:

President Barack Obama keeps reassuring the nation that stopping the Gulf oil spill and limiting the fallout on the region are his top priority.

Yet so is protecting the country against attack. And getting people back to work.

Presidencies usually don't allow for a dominant priority--just a list of priorities. . . .

Like presidents before him, Obama is having to work through unforeseen problems: offshore drilling and an environmental disaster, mine safety, the earthquake in Haiti, piracy off the Somali coast. . . .

Obama's ability to calmly handle many competing issues simultaneously is viewed as one of his strengths.

He has tried to let everyone know that what's unfolding in the Gulf is more than a momentary crisis. The spill, he said Friday from Grand Isle, La., is nothing less than "an assault on our shores, on our people, on the regional economy, and on communities like this one."

The president is also fond of saying he will not rest until the problem at hand gets fixed. The trouble is that there's always more trouble.

I don't recall this kind of writing when I was working for The AP way back when. Then again, I have trouble remembering yesterday.

Taranto's point, of course, is that The AP has a political viewpoint. I think it does, which historically the wire service was not supposed to have, since it provided news to all manner of publications.

What bothers me more is that the last piece on Obama says nothing at all. "It's just words," as my editor at AP Newsfeatures once said of a less than stellar piece I turned in. It's just drivel.

OK, you're the editor. What do you think?

Proofreeder available

Click to enlarge

Why newspaper articles aren't news

Do you still read newspapers?

If you don't, it may be because there is too much verbal noise in the writing.

Michael Kinsley, an editor at Atlantic Media Company and former editor of The New Republic, addresses this in an excellent piece in The Atlantic. Things have changed since I was committing daily journalism at The Associated Press, but I recognize in what he says the artificial tone of newspaper writing.

Take, for example, the lead story in The New York Times on Sunday, November 8, 2009, headlined “Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House.” There is nothing special about this article. November 8 is just the day I happened to need an example for this column. And there it was. The 1,456-word report begins:

Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement.

Fewer than half the words in this opening sentence are devoted to saying what happened. If someone saw you reading the paper and asked, “So what’s going on?,” you would not likely begin by saying that President Obama had won a hard-fought victory. You would say, “The House passed health-care reform last night.” And maybe, “It was a close vote.” And just possibly, “There was a kerfuffle about abortion.”

You would not likely refer to “a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system,” as if your friend was unaware that health-care reform was going on. Nor would you feel the need to inform your friend first thing that unnamed Democrats were bragging about what a big deal this is—an unsurprising development if ever there was one. 

There are a couple of explanations. One is that everything in a newspaper is old in Internet time: you've already seen it online or on TV, and so the paper thinks it needs to wrap the facts in "meaning." Another reason is that these highly-paid, well-educated national reporters feel that they are above mere fact-typers. They're smart enough to tell us how to think.

I suspect we've trained ourselves to tune this stuff out, as we tune out annoying ads.

A writer discovers story

Scott Turow gave up writing for the law and then reversed himself. He describes here what he learned as a prosecutor.

I was hired as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago. There I was astonished to find myself facing the same old questions about how to address an audience. The trial lawyer's job and the novelist's were, in some aspects, shockingly similar. Both involved the reconstruction of experience, usually through many voices, whether they were witnesses or characters.

But there the paths deviated. In this arena the universal trumped; there were no prizes for being rarefied or ahead of the times. The trial lawyer who lost the audience also inevitably lost the case.

Engaging the jury was indispensable, and again and again I received the same advice about how to do it: Tell them a good story. There were plenty of good stories told in the courtroom, vivid accounts of crimes witnessed or conspiracies joined. The jury hung in primal fascination, waiting to find out what happened next. And so did I.

Thus I suddenly saw my answer to the literary conundrum of expressing the unique for a universal audience: Tell them a good story. The practice of criminal law had set me to seething with potential themes: the fading gradations between ordinary fallibility and great evil; the mysterious passions that lead people to break the known rules; the mirage that the truth often becomes in the courtroom.

The decision to succumb to plot and to the tenacious emotional grip I felt in contemplating crime led me naturally to the mystery whose power as a storytelling form persisted despite its long-term residence in the low-rent precincts of critical esteem. I was certain that an audience's hunger to know what happened next could be abetted by some of the values of the traditional realist novel, especially psychological depth in the characters and a prose style that aimed for more than just dishing out plot.

That epiphany led to Presumed Innocent, a best-seller. "I worked on that book for eight years on the morning commuter train and was staggered by its subsequent emergence as a best seller," Turow writes. "My only goal had been finally to publish a novel. I didn't even like most best sellers, which I deemed short on imagination."

If you're writing for the Web

You really need to take a site's visitors into account.

This Venn diagram by Randall Munroe, whose popular Web comic is known as xkcd, has gotten the notice of a number of universities.

The problem is simply this: an organization is pondering its own navel and thinking of its own needs, not those of visitors to its site.

The same thing is often true of corporate websites. When the Web first came into being, and corporations were putting up sites for the first time, they discovered that each division of the company thought it was the center of the universe. Website design came to imitate internal politics.

My biggest peeve: it's very hard to find the full legal name of a corporation -- is it Corp. or Inc.? I usually have to go to the privacy statement, where the lawyers cross the t's. Oh, and geographical location -- where in the world are you?

My solution is this. Determine who the most important visitor to your site is. Then, above the fold -- that is, without requiring the person to scroll down -- offer what that person is looking for. Moreover, offer what you want that person to do. Subscribe? Buy? Learn more? Put it right there front and center.

If  there are other segments of visitors, offer them something as well but not so prominently. Making these decisions might lead to some interesting conversations.

Somewhere a dog barked

Beware the lazy device.

Writing in Slate, Rosecrans Baldwin points out how often "somewhere a dog barks" appears in novels.

Novelists can't resist including a dog barking in the distance. I've seen it happen across the spectrum—Jackie Collins, William Faulkner, and Chuck Palahniuk: "There was no more rain, just an eerie stillness, a deathly silence. Somewhere a dog barked mournfully." (American Star) "She did not answer for a time. The fireflies drifted; somewhere a dog barked, mellow sad, faraway." (Light in August) "This is such a fine neighborhood. I jump the fence to the next backyard and land on my head in somebody's rose bush. Somewhere a dog's barking." (Choke)  

Why is this?

If a novel is an archeological record of 4.54 billion decisions, then maybe distant barking dogs are its fossils, evidence of the novelist working out an idea. Trains whistle, breezes blow, dogs bark. Dogs that authors bother to describe, or turn into characters, don't pull me out of my reading trance. The thing is, these so-called dogs are nameless and faceless, and frankly I doubt them; it's the curious incident when one actually does come into view. 

However, most authors, Baldwin writes, "employ the trope as a narrative rest stop, an innocuous way to fill space and time; since the bark is hollow, a reader can read anything into it, or nothing at all."

Scripts that work in television

What do you like to watch on TV? What about Bones, Criminal Minds, NCIS and Law & Order SVU? You get a lot of blood and bodies on slabs in those shows. I happen to think Bones has the best bodies on slabs and that NCIS' are second-rate.

What I haven't noticed is the absence of gore in such shows as White Collar, Covert Affairs and Burn Notice. It's no coincidence, Jordan Hirsch reports in the Wall Street Journal. All of these shows appear on the USA Network.

USA's shows could easily feature carnality and carnage of one kind or another. But they don't. The president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment, Bonnie Hammer, told me that when NBC purchased USA and assumed command of its programming six years ago, her team developed a "filter" for the station's content that aimed to create "smart, fun escapism." Every USA program emphasizes that essential mission.

And it works: USA's shows secured it a record 15th-straight victory over fellow cable stations in quarterly viewing ratings earlier this year.

It's interesting to me as a writer what this means. Without the gore, the shows' writers have to actually write.

What USA series forgo in cheap thrills, they must compensate for with particularly compelling characters and relationships. "White Collar" Co-Executive Producer Mark Goffman says he finds it "liberating," to avoid seedier elements and instead "focus on elegance and art." The shows pair their visual candy with humor-laden drama and protagonists who, in Ms. Hammer's words, "are flawed, but not in a dark, negative way."

The shows also manage to address weighty moral questions. They feature endearingly imperfect protagonists who "flirt with the moral spectrum" as they encounter tests of trust, loyalty and justice. "They are classic redemption tales," Jeff Wachtel, who is president of original programming for USA, told me.

Most significantly, however, Mr. Wachtel says the shows were consciously designed to strike a chord with the zeitgeist of post-September 11th America. "Following 9-11," he notes, "audiences were worried about the threat of terrorism and war on several fronts." As much as they desire an escape, viewers also seek to identify with a certain type of hero: the kind of people who, despite personal faults, "run toward the burning building while everyone else runs away."

USA's characters innovate and improvise, outlast their enemies and survive adversity—all the while determined to continue enjoying life, even in these darker times.

Ah, they tell stories.