Be careful where you put things

I got these from another listserv (for writers and editors). These are bloopers taken from church bulletins or announcements from the pulpit. They just prove that when you're dealing with words, location is everything.

• Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 PM. Please use the back door.
• The Fasting & Prayer Conference includes meals.
• The sermon this morning: 'Jesus Walks on the Water.' The sermon tonight: 'Searching for Jesus.'
• Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Bring your husbands.
• Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our community. Smile at someone who is hard to love. Say 'Hell' to someone who doesn't care much about you.
• Don't let worry kill you off - let the Church help.
• Weight Watchers will meet at 7 PM at the First Presbyterian Church. Please use large double door at the side entrance.
• Miss Charlene Mason sang 'I will not pass this way again,' giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.
• For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery downstairs.
• Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir. They need all the help they can get.
• Irving Benson and Jessie Carter were married on October 24 in the church. So ends a friendship that began in their school days.
• A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow..
• At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be 'What Is Hell?' Come early and listen to our choir practice.
• Eight new choir robes are currently needed due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.
• Scouts are saving aluminum cans, bottles and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.
• Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person you want remembered..
• The church will host an evening of fine dining, super entertainment and gracious hostility.
• Potluck supper Sunday at 5:00 PM - prayer and medication to follow.
• The ladies of the Church have cast off clothing of every kind. They may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.
• This evening at 7 PM there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.
• Ladies Bible Study will be held Thursday morning at 10 AM.. All ladies are invited to lunch in the Fellowship Hall after the B. S. Is done.
• The pastor would appreciate it if the ladies of the Congregation would lend him their electric girdles for the pancake breakfast
• The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare's Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 PM. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.
• The Associate Minister unveiled the church's new campaign slogan last Sunday: 'I Upped My Pledge - Up Yours.

There's actually a couple of those churches that sound like they might be fun to belong to. Let's all prepare to sin.

Reminder: April starts Thursday. Check out Bel's challenge for National Poetry Month at the Itsy Bitsy Monkey. Every year she invites her readers to join her in posting a poem a day throughout the month of April. Let me know if you take her up on it, and I'll be sure to post links to your poetic achievements.

What did you say?

I was working yesterday on an article about ruptured eardrums and came across this sentence in one of the references I was using. There's nothing wrong with it grammatically or syntactically, but I just hope no one takes it literally.

Teach your children about the damage that can be done by putting foreign objects in their ears.

Help, quick, can we get an editor over hear?

Thoughts on Being a Freelancer Supplemental

Writer and Editor

A couple of week ago, I said a writer is "someone who knows words and knows language and gets turned on by using both well (and by seeing other people do the same thing). A writer is someone who is curious about a lot of different things, and knows ways to satisfy that curiosity--how to research, who to ask, and what to ask in order to get the right information to share with readers."

An editor is a lot like a writer but different. While a writer's passion is words, an editor's passion is text. A writer uses words for a lot of different reasons--to convey information, to explore ideas, to persuade, to incite, to define the world the writer inhabits, to create meaning. Text is what results from the effort to do those things. But text usually is not an end in itself.

An editor understands there's a special relationship between text and its intended audience. Text without readers, that is text that exists outside a community, has no power. It can't inform. It can't incite. It can define nothing. (Just an aside here. A writer can also be the sole audience for what is written.)

The editor is like a bridge between writer and reader. The editor's first task is to make the effort to understand exactly what the writer is saying and what the writer is trying to do by saying it. And the second task is just as important. The editor needs to understand how the audience is going to respond to the text and whether or not that response is going to be the one the writer wants. Then it becomes the editor's job to bring the two things -- the writer's intent and the audience's response -- as close together as possible.

The jobs are different. But one quality identifies both -- a passion for language, including a passion for using it well. It's no surprise that the best writers and the best editors often do both tasks very well.

I'm just saying

S pointed out to me psychologist John Rosemond's parenting column in the paper this morning. I usually try not to read him, unless I need either a good laugh or a dose of "Oh my God, what's with this guy?" But today's column begs for someone to comment.

The gist of his column was that helping children develop self esteem is doing them a serious disservice. To prove it he cites unnamed evidence that people with high self-regard tend to anti-social behavior. In fact, our maximum security prisons are filled with people with very high self-regard. Well that may be true, but self-esteem and self-regard do not mean the same thing. Here's what Webster's has to say:

Self-esteem: a confidence and satisfaction in oneself; self-respect
Self-regard: regard for or consideration of oneself or one's own interests

Hardly the same. What Mr. Rosemond did was...well here's a quote from Mr. Rosemond's column:

The supposed merits of high self-esteem were sold on the basis of rhetoric.

Well if that's true (?) then I guess it's fair for Mr. Rosmond to discredit self-esteem with rhetoric. What Mr. Rosemond did was employ a rhetorical trope known as dysphemism. A dysphemism is the substitution of one term with a harsher, more offensive, or more disagreeable meaning for another term. Self-esteem and self-regard are not synonyms. And erroneously equating them does not prove Mr. Rosemond's argument that people with self esteem can't be humble or caring toward others.

But the question arises, who exactly put the focus on self-esteem in the first place? Well Mr. Rosemond does provide an answer to that one:

In the 1960s, American parents stopped going to their elders for advice and began going instead to mental health professionals--people like me. To create a devoted client base, we had to come up with something new. So we cut from whole cloth a nouveau philosophy...

In the next paragraph he says, "Mind you, we made this up."

People like me (?)...we had to come up with something new(?)...so we cut from whole cloth(?)...we made this up.

Okay. This is the man who wants us to believe what he's telling us now? I'm just saying....

In the Park

The Brownies scramble past me in the park,
A swirl of laughter like a sudden wind,
& one holds up a whirlybird, then darts
& cries out “Seed!” the others closing in.
Pencils! Pencils! They all fall down.

Their bellies flat, their laughter spent, they mark
Their books & scramble on, & I am left behind
To wonder if these scramblings are a part
Of why these seeds have wings, or how the thin
Green seeds that burrow under ground can start
Becoming roots & bark & limbs.

I marvel that before the first trees sprung
A rhythm burst from space we can’t explain.
& when I watch the Brownies twirl among
The reeling notes of birds & play their games
Of turning over rocks to find out snails,
I marvel that the rhythm still prevails.

But then I pause. Aren’t I too old to wonder
At such things? I know that life sucks life
And so sucks mine. What are these Brownies wandering
Through the park to me? Redundant seed.
Noisy children fresh from their mothers’ breasts,
Shadows of their wombs. My own heart,
Knowing only that it with time must cease,
Makes me content to let these questions be.

Originally published in A Matter of Mind, Foothills Publishing, 2004.
© copyright 2004, 2009 the Grandpa at The Word Mechanic Blog.
All rights reserved.

Observations

Writing is the hardest thing I do. It's unfortunate that it's how I make my living.

On a more positive note. Tomorrow starts National Poetry Month. Check Mommy's Nintendo's challenge at The Itsy Bitsy Monkey. Even if you don't take her up on it, it's well worth watching her do it. I followed her last year through the whole month and quite frankly was amazed.

Piano Bar Blues

(1)
I'm just a man
like anyone else. I can
command
respect when I place
myself at the keyboard, face
bathed in blue light.
I do alright.

Not like Mary.
Fell in love with a fairy
used to come in all the time.
His name was Harry.
He'd sit here at the piano making eyes
at all the guys.
Mary never got wise.

(2)
You know
one thing I know
is you
can’t kiss away the blues.

Not the real blues.

Not the hollow note
deep in your throat
kind of blues
that wake you in the middle of the night
because the silence gets so loud
you can hear starlight
fall.

(3)
It's a job.
last week some slob
laid fifty bucks beside me.
Forget what you see,
he said. I'm not here.
My wife wouldn't understand.
All I did was hold her hand,
not like I planned
it or anything. So I fanned
his fantasy for a while,
played My Funny Valentine and with style
closed my eyes tight.
I said, I don't see nobody tonight.

They go away.
Next day
my wife,
who's best friends with his old lady May,
asks how'd it go.
Real slow,
I say.
Didn't see a soul I know.

(4)
I tell people who come in all the time
you can’t kiss away the blues,
not those lonely in a crowd blues.
Those caged bird
wicker domed
watching from a swinging perch
blues.

The kind that weigh
you down even when the door is open
because you get so hungry
not even love
can fill you up.

(5)
You know when I saw you two come in
I felt sick
like I was watching someone commit
sin.
A no win
situation,
like when you begin
a set
and get
an undeniable urge to piss.

Maybe I shouldn't say this.
After all I see a lot of dirt.
I’ve watched a lot of men chase a skirt.
Jesus, I don't mean that.
It's just when you've sat
where I've sat,

you get tired
of watching friends choose
the place you gotta be to play the blues.

(6)
No,
There’s no way.
You can try,
but you’re gonna loose
because there’s no way
you can kiss away
those blues.

Originally published in A Matter of Mind, Foothills Publishing, 2004.
© copyright 2004, 2009 the Grandpa at The Word Mechanic Blog.
All rights reserved.

Another note on the way the language works, or

I just passed along some erroneous information

I read this sentence today in Discover magazine:

People who grew up watching black and white television are more likely to dream in black and white than are people who grew up watching color.

Then later when I saw S, I wanted to share my new found knowledge with her, so I said:

Did you know that people who grew up watching black and white TV are more likely to dream in black and white.

Now that may be true, but it isn't what the magazine's sentence said. The magazine said if you put two people side by side, one who whatched black and white TV as a kid and one who watched color TV as a kid, if one of them dreams in black and white, the odds are that it is the one who watched black and white TV.

My sentence said if you asked someone who grew up watching black and white TV whether he dreamed in color, chances are good he'd say no.

If you don't find that difference as fascinating as I do, than either you don't hear the voices in your head, or you haven't exhausted your brain by spending too much time working with words.

Just a note on the way the language works

I went for my annual physical a couple of days ago, and my doctor said if I didn't cut back to just two drinks a day, he was going to increase the drugs he gives me. Something about the expression on his face made me think he was trying to mean that as a threat, but, huh?

Letters to Caroline

(The title refers to the poem that comes after after the note. The note is to the people in the Blogosphere, not Caroline.)

Note: I'm feeling a little guilty because I haven't been able to spend as much time as I would like in the blogosphere for a couple of weeks now. The first week I was on vacation. This one I'm trying to catch up on my work after being on vacation. The good news is I'm almost caught up and I'll be able to respond to people's comments again pretty soon. Just don't give up on me. You guys leave the greatest comments. They make me feel good. (It's great to feel that way without having to use some foreign substance.)

One more thing. We had a visitor at our house a couple days before Christmas. He was in the neighborhood and just wanted to stop by and say "hey" because he's often too busy this time of year. But it was good to see my old friend Nick and get caught up on what he's been doing.

Letters to Caroline

1.
We've been a month without snow.
Last month, it seemed it would never stop;
now the ground in spots is bare.

Since we've stopped talking, we've lived side by side,
lying in the same bed without touching,
so well we've learned the impenetrable zones,
even in our sleep.

2.
Only a month of winter left,
but then no real spring,
only weeks of mud
and unfulfilled promise.

I remember the cat standing at your feet
in front of the couch
while you read the newspaper. If you'd put the page
down and let it,
it would have leaped on your lap. It stood watching you,
wanting, as cats want,
to be touched, then gave up and lay beside
the rocker.

Snow's predicted tomorrow night,
twenty-four hours
too late to help the skiing.

3.
If I asked about him, would you tell me he listens?
That he leaves messages at your terminal?
That you like the way he laughs?

And that he doesn't need and so
makes you young again?

4.
Two suns in our morning skies;
five days in parallel worlds,
we expand and contract, knowing neither
what blue nor gray winds fill
the other's days.

Then at night, I cruise the space between,
seeking light from familiar stars that inhabit both
our skies: Evidence of love we can both remember.

5.
The usually clear walk was strewn with pebbles
thrown up by the tide. You pointed it out
as we looked for words to break the silence.

Kids playing with kites ran over the rocks
at Odiorne Point, through the winds that blew in along the shore
and mastered the land in a way the waves
only pretended to do.

But it was the waves, Caroline,
charging, pounding, I felt rip my heart.

Low tide and no boats.
We could see the Isles of Shoals.
We could hear the waves.

Originally published in A Matter of Mind, Foothills Publishing, 2004.

© copyright 2004, 2009 the Grandpa at The Word Mechanic Blog.

All rights reserved.

I got an award

This award came from LegalMist (thank you, LegalMist) while I was out of the office, and it also came with a set of rules. But I don't have to follow them.

Here are the original rules:

• List 10 honest things about yourself - and make it interesting, even if you have to dig deep!

• pass the award on to 7 bloggers that you feel embody the spirit of the Honest Scrap.

But since LegalMist is an attorney, she made a compelling argument for changing the rules. Here are the new ones:

1. Follow the original rules if you like, or these amended rules if you prefer.

2. Post the award on your site if you want to.

3. Write some honest things about yourself if you want to. Make them interesting even if you have to dig deep.

4. Pass the award along if you want to, to any number of other bloggers from 1 to 10.

So technically I'm done, but that's not really keeping with the spirit of the award, so I'll make a stab at saying some honest things about myself.

1) I've got a good sense of humor and a quick wit, and I can make you smile or have a whole room full of people laughing without even trying. But I am no good at humor on demand. If you expect me to make you laugh (or if I think you expect me to make you laugh or if you look like I think you expect me to make you laugh) you'll probably have a jollier time reading Macbeth's soliloquy lamenting the passing of his wife. I once was invited to give a speech to a college club made up of economics students. The topic was exploring alternative careers. (I understand economics majors do that almost as much as English majors do.) I wanted to be entertaining and make the audience laugh without getting too far off topic, so I told my diving story that I had told a couple weeks earlier to a class of freshman English students. In the classroom it worked perfectly because I wasn't really trying to make the students laugh. I was teaching by analogy, and they forgot they were in a class they didn't want to be in and had a good time. The economics students, though, just sat there and stared. The next day I went into the English class. One of my students had been at the meeting and I heard another student asking her how I had done. When she said I told the diving story the first student asked, "Did they laugh?" "Not so much," was all the student who'd been there said.

2) I once introduced myself at a poetry reading celebrating Black poetry during Black History month by saying, "I'm not Black. And I'm not a woman."

3) I write because I think there is something very wonderful about making people cry. When I was eight or nine, I was sitting on the porch at my grandparents' house with my cousin who was a year younger than me. She asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I said I wanted to write books about Jesus. She clapped her hands together and said "How wonderful. My mother will read them and cry." I was hooked. What could be better than putting down words on paper that made people cry?

4) I had my first kiss at age five. I was sitting on the couch with the little girl who lived across the street. (Her name was Peggy, and she was also five. We went to the same kindergarten.) I had a book in my hand and was reading it to her (or maybe making the story up as I went along). Right in the middle of a sentence, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I looked at her and leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. Then she ran into the kitchen to tell my mother what we had done.

5) I like to dance. Not very meaningful, and I'm not really that good at it, but it's honest.

6) I don't know which is the bigger incentive for writing -- making people cry or getting kissed.

So that's enough about me. Let's talk about you. Anyone who comes here to read what I post or what other people say about it deserves this award. So please, consider yourself a recipient of the honest scrap award. And have a wonderful 2009.

Proof that there is no past or future. There is only now.

And the people I send my money too are guardians of it.

This was in the letter that accompanied our Home Owners Association assessment bill:

The Board of Directors is very pleased to announce that there will be no increase in association dues assessment for 2009.

Vinings Estates, The Registry, and the Ridge residents' assessment will remain unchanged at $550 and is due in total by January 15, 2009.

The Cove and East Gate residents' assessment will remain unchanged at $365 and is due in total by January 15, 1009.

At least the people who live in The Cove are hoping there is only now, because the penalty on that could be pretty steep.

I didn't say that

The first article that I actually got paid for (winning essay contests when you're in elementary school doesn't count as getting paid) was an article about an education program run by the local chapter of the Arthritis Foundation. I wrote it for the press office of United Way, and I dropped it off to the editor in person. She told me to have a seat and then took the article out of the envelope and proceeded to read it with a red pen in her hand in front of me. When she finished, she looked up at me, smiled, and said, "Not bad. We just need to add a couple of quotes. We'll put one here, one here, and another one here. . . ." As she said that, she took the red pen and put quotation marks on either side of several sentences.

Writing feature articles -- especially "writing for hire" -- is not the same thing as writing news articles where accurate quotations are absolutely essential. Quotes in an article about treating allergies or building model airplanes generally aren't there to become part of the public record. They are there to add authority, offer a particular perspective, make the writing interesting, and accomplish other similar goals. The rules are different than the rules for putting quotes in newspapers or in an article about foreign policy in The Nation.

So what are the rules?

• The first one is you don't make things up out of thin air. If you are going to quote someone, what's said in the quote needs to actually have come from the person who said it.
• The second rule is that while you can selectively use what a person says and actually rearrange the order in which it was said, you provide enough information so you don't take what was said out of context. It's wrong to use it in a way the person would never have intended.
• The third rule is you maintain as much as possible the actual voice of the person you are quoting without making that person sound like an idiot.

So these rules aren't really that hard to understand, are they? So why do I get copy from "professional" writers writing for an educational Web site like this:

"Stress is certainly a factor in individuals with any common disease," Jones says. "Reducing stress with yoga, breathing exercises or diet are all benefits. I would never say don't take your medication for acute disease management, but it's not just about medication or allergy shots. It's about treating the stress and immune systems and we're learning that every day."

Now if I were Dr. Jones, I'd certainly call the Web site publisher and say, "I never said anything like that at all." The truth is he probably did because, for the most part, we don't talk the way we write. And I'm guessing all the writer did was simply copy the quote directly from her notes or the transcript of her interview tape. But even so, if the writer isn't going to take the time to see if the quote actually makes sense, it would have been a simple courtesy to have reviewed the quotation with Dr. Jones and given the good doctor a chance to show that he actually is literate.

But obviously, neither one of those things happened. So the editor's job is to sort out the language that's there, decide what the actual message is, and what part needs the weight of authority, what's not important, and what needs to get the emphasis. Obviously, there's more than one way to handle the information. Here's what I did:

“I would never say don't take your medication,” Jones says. “But it's not just about medication or allergy shots.” Jones tells HealthyNewsSite.com that stress is a common problem for anyone with a health condition. And, he says, using techniques such as yoga, breathing exercises, and diet to reduce stress can be very beneficial.

Moving the quote about taking medication to the start of the passage gives the whole passage an air of traditional authority: the doc says take your medicine. But then, the second quote emphasizes there is more to it than just that. The reader has been alerted -- by the doctor -- to the fact that what follows is the important part of the message. Now there's no longer any reason to put the rest of the message in quotes. The good doctor sounds intelligent. The garbled message has been sorted out, and the reader knows it's important to do something about reducing stress.

[NOTE: Dr. Jones and HealthyNewsSite.com are fictitious names. Why? I need to be able to keep working for this client.]

Words in air

There was a great piece on All Things Considered last night about the relationship between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop based on the letters published in Words in Air edited by Thomas Travisano. It is definitely worth listening to, which you can do here.

At one point in the broadcast, talking about Bishop's approach to writing, Jacki Lyden points out, "It wasn't unusual for her poems to take decades to write." I can relate to that.

The poem "Getting On" took close to 20 years to write. I started it before my divorce from my first wife. It was a way for me to explore what was happening between us. I guess I just kept exploring until the poem made sense to me.

Over those 20 years, the poem did not go through any major changes. The metaphor of a migratory journey and the disconnect between the two migrants was obvious from the beginning, as was the general direction of the move from east to west. The images in the poem had sort of all come together over a period of a couple of days that were more or less spent journaling about the history of a failed relationship.

So why did it take 20 years? For one thing I never really had an end to the poem. I thought I did multiple times, but I would let it sit and then go back to it and pick it up and find the ending flat. So I'd rework the images and the lines in the entire poem. I'd take out what I thought was deadwood. I'd rethink this word and then that word. I'd change the cadence, the line breaks. I'd rethink the allusions. And it was all an effort to understand where the poem was going.

During those 20 odd years, my enthusiasm for writing, my energy for making it work, my success, and even my desire to write fluctuated wildly. The one thing that stayed constant was the poem. Then, shortly after I completed the manuscript for my book, I sat down and wrote the end of the poem. It was effortless. It was as if the words were in the air all the time.


the Grandpa's note: I don't really know how to tell the story of my writing career, other than to talk about the things I write. To be honest it helps me when I think about what I do. So thank you, Lilly. And thank you, Braja. I know this probably isn't what you were asking for, but it helps me to put it down. I have one poem (I consider it my best poem) that actually took forty years to write. But I also have some other poems that people have said are pretty good that I basically wrote in an afternoon, or less. I'll talk about them, too.

The last line says it all

I saw this sign in a fast food joint ironically called The American Deli.

Dear my customer
The fish suppliers has increased their cost incredibly high, we regret to inform you that we have no choice to raise our fish price for continuous service.

Thank you for understanding.

I'm sorry, what? I don't understand. Could you repeat that?

Signs of the time

There's a dry cleaning shop down the road from us that has hit on the perfect advertising slogan and put it on two signs out front as well as painted it on the window:

Non Toxic Cleaning

That is definitely going to keep me out of all the competing establishments. It also explains what happened to a blue blazer I had dry cleaned a while back.

I just like the image

This quote came from an article in a medical journal reporting on a study done in Greece. It was clear throughout the article that the author (or perhaps the author's translator) was not a native speaker of English. I wanted to use the article as a source for a piece I was writing for a newsletter. But by the time I got to this sentence, I had already realized I couldn't use the article because the language problems made it an unreliable source:

The blood samples were collected from the antecubital vein between 8 to 10 a.m., in a sitting position after 12 hours of fasting and avoiding of alcohol.

But that's not why I'm sharing the sentence with you. I just like the image of the hungry yet sober lab tech assuming a sitting position to collect the blood sample. I guess it just depends on how much the tech wanted a drink. But I don't think I'd like that person getting near my vein with a needle.

Now the writer's lack of facility with the English language may excuse his use of a dangling modifier. But it certainly doesn't excuse the editor of a scientific journal letting it and even more serious language problems get into print.

P.S. If you miss a spotlighted post (over there in the sidebar) that everyone is talking about, you still have three days to find it. Just scroll down in the sidebar to where it says, "these sites are well worth a visit."

Please watch and then share

I found this video posted by Electric Barbarella at Hooker with a Heart of Guile. It's one way the language should be used. I wanted to share it. I hope you do too.

Wow! That's a long sentence

What’s not to like about a long sentence? After all, it takes skill to build one, packing all that information in and holding it there with just one period like a dam that causes the valley to flood and creates the unnatural beauty of a man-made lake, finding voluminous connections between ideas that shimmer like sunlight bouncing from the lake, making them want to hold together as a single unit and defy anyone who wants to tear them apart, showing us the brilliance of the mind that created it.

Or maybe not. I do know I have found long sentences I truly admire. They’re everywhere in literature. Take, for example, this one from The Sun Also Rises:

I wondered if there was anything else I might pray for, and I thought I would like to have some money, so I prayed that I would make a lot of money, and then I started to think how I would make it, and thinking of making money reminded me of the count, and I started wondering about where he was, and regretting I hadn’t seen him since that night in Montmartre, and about something funny Brett told me about him, and as all the time I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying, I was a little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time; and then I was out in the hot sun on the steps of the cathedral, and the forefingers and the thumb of my right hand were still damp, and I felt them dry in the sun.

That’s 196 words. And tell me you can’t follow that. I know. Hemingway cheated. He put a lot of short sentences together with commas. But that semicolon at the end — it’s genius. Or consider Frost’s poem “The Silken Tent.”

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
***
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

It’s a sonnet, 14 lines, 104 words, and a single sentence — and a pure work of art. The words and thoughts hold together so well and convey so much imagery and meaning that when you teach the poem you often have to point out to students that it’s a single sentence.

One approach to teaching students about the subtlety of language, about subordination and coordination, about the use of modifiers, and about becoming fluid in its use is sentence combining. That’s the process of taking a series of short sentences and seeing what is the least number of sentences you can turn that series into.

But this post isn’t really about using long sentences. Creating long sentences that are effective and pleasing is an art. But too often writers use long sentences because they don’t take the time — again — to think of their readers. Look at the following sentence. It comes from a letter I got with my city utility bill explaining a change in the trash collection and recycling schedule.

The only exception to the system-wide adjustment is for customers residing in multi-unit buildings of three or more units per building without garages or carports who may elect to continue using the in-ground containers, but service will be once-weekly instead of twice weekly.

That’s 43 words. Compare it to the Hemingway sentence, which is 196 words. Which one’s clearer? I would say it’s Hemingway’s because he never loses track of how his reader processes ideas. The writer of the letter, on the other hand, seems to just want to get the information out and leave it up to the reader to sort through it all. The problem is there is too much information there and no clues for the reader to follow to know how to separate the ideas or even what the important ones are. At least, that's the situation on first reading. And how many readers are going to actually stop and give that sentence a second reading? How might the letter writer have made it easier for the reader to find out what he or she can do about the garbage?

The writer could have started simply by separating the sentence at the comma. It’s a compound sentence, but the two ideas — the exception and the collection schedule (service) — are not closely enough related to have any reason to be joined like that. Not only is there too much information for the reader to hold, but the reader is challenged to figure out why those two complete thoughts are together as one.

The only exception to the system-wide adjustment is for customers residing in multi-unit buildings of three or more units per building without garages or carports who may elect to continue using the in-ground containers.* But service will be once-weekly instead of twice weekly.

Next, the writer can look at the first sentence with the goal of finding discrete bits of information and setting them up as such. The goal is to let the reader focus on the message and not on finding the message.

The first bit of information is that there is an exception:

There is one exception to the changes that take effect in March.

The next bit of information is who the exception applies to:

It applies to customers who live in multi-unit buildings with at least three units and no garage or carport.

And finally, what the exception is:

These customers may, if they wish, continue using underground containers.

Then one last tweak to the first edit we did will give us this:

There is one exception to the changes that take effect in March. It applies to customers who live in multi-unit buildings with at least three units and no garage or carport. These customers may, if they wish, continue using underground containers. The change in service will, though, still apply. That is, service will be once-weekly instead of twice weekly.

Five sentences, and the passage is as clear — albeit not as artistically pleasing — as Hemingway’s one sentence. But since the reader doesn’t have to struggle to get the information, on some level, it’s just as satisfying.

* Note that after the first edit, “elect to continue using the in-ground containers” has the emphasis that suggests it’s the important part of the message.

I'm no quitter, part 2

Now as to how I write. . . My dad used to say there were two kinds of people in the world--those who divide people in the world into two kinds and those who don't. Well, I used to like to say there are two kinds of writers--those who overwrite and those who underwrite (and I'm not talking about insurance). Those who overwrite just pour words and phrases into a text and then spend the rest of their time taking away words that don't belong there. Those who underwrite just barely get down enough words to suggest a text and then spend the rest of their time adding the necessary words to flesh it out.

If I were to choose one of those models to describe myself, I would probably be inclined to lean more toward the underwriting side. But the fact is, I'm more of an overwriting underwriter. I once asked S if she wanted to see some poems I'd just done the first draft for. She said sure, but she didn't know whether she would have anything to say about them because by the time I'd get them to where I really wanted them to be, they wouldn't look anything like they did then. I believe she said something to the effect that it would be hard to even recognize the two versions as being the same poem.

I have to admit she's right. I never throw away first drafts of a poem or first drafts of a story because I know I can find something there worth developing if I go back to it often enough.

A few years ago, I "finished" a poem that I started when I was 19. Now when I say started, I don't mean I was constantly working on it all those years in between. In fact there were multiple drafts that I thought -- given my mood at the time -- were either finished poems or proof that I couldn't write at all. But I never really had one that felt complete. The poem began as twenty lines of free verse. The finished poem is 140 lines of iambic pentameter with a very strict rhyme scheme.

So does it always take me that long to write something? No. I write a column for the magazine I edit. I do it in one sitting, which basically means one draft. I also do a series of newsletters for health care providers. Each issue has four short articles about a particular condition. The articles deal with treatments, pharmacotherapy, patient education, and so on. Now these are a little harder to write, and there's a lot of research and note taking that precedes the actual writing. But again, the articles are done pretty much in one draft.

Here's the thing, though. The process is the same as when I'm working on a piece for years. And just for the record, I am a big believer in revision--no matter how good a first draft is, there's something that can be done to it to make it better. The question is -- will it really make a difference in how the text does what it's supposed to do? And more often the real question is when does the piece have to be published? But as I was saying, the process is the same.

As I write, I keep going back over what I've written. Even though I may have known at the beginning what I was after, I'm constantly looking back to see what it is I'm really saying. When I can do that, as laborious as it actually is at times, I can create something with the meaning I'm searching for.

So I don't really underwrite, I write slowly. I suppose when I was younger I wrote a little more swiftly. I certainly remember all nighters in graduate school to do papers that I should have taken at least a month to do. But even then, I wrote the papers the same way--by constantly looking back and wrestling with what I was saying. And that's why I can't do the NaNoWriMo (see yesterday's post). Not that I wouldn't have looked back at what I was saying and been constantly revising it. But that's just the opposite of what the event called for. The emphasis wasn't on creating meaning. It was on generating words. And words without meaning are meaningless.

Not everybody writes the same way. Some people write fast. Some people write slow. Some people write while watching TV. Some people shut themselves in a closet. Some outline. Some wing it. There is no right way to write, except what works for you.

Now, if you want to see some very effective writing, be sure to check out today's spotlighted blog post.