Language: January 2004 Archive Page

Donald sat in the corner of the room, barely illuminated by the dim moonlight filtering through the window. He was trembling badly; the events of the last few hours still storming through his mind. How the hell could he have known? How could he have known? He brought his shaking hands up to his face, and as he hid behind them the smell of fresh gunpowder brought the sickening moment back to him in full force. [Excerpt from a writing sample.]

What you're doing with this kind of opening is: You are forcing us to face the character's raw emotions without giving us any information about the story or any reason to care about the character. It is the opposite of how it has to work. We should not face the emotions until we completely understand the entire situation so that we will feel those emotions ourselves -- and then the character does not have to "tremble badly" and waste our time sitting around while memories "storm" through his mind. --Orson Scott Card --Uncle Orson's Writing Class (Hatrack River)

Orson Scott Card is a science-fiction author whose website includes a wealth of free writing advice. The same lesson also mentions "another common but killer mistake. You are trying to establish his point of view, to see the world through his eyes. However, this description is completely from outside himself -- in fact, it consists of the omniscient viewpoint in which the author talks to the reader, and the character is viewed as through a telescope, from a distance."

I think both issues stem from the tendency of beginning writers to first visualize a scene from a movie, so that their transcription into prose relies too much on external visuals and sounds, rather than on the internal emotions that prose narrative conveys so well.

(Thanks for pointing out the OSC website, Josh.)

And if they were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer,

"Better to be the poor servant of a poor master,"

and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner? -- Plato --The Allegory of the Cave (Exploring Plato's Dialogues)

I've been reading Plato's Allegory of the Cave once again. Plato recognizes that art is powerful and therefore dangerous, and that it should be strictly controlled in order to serve the state. While we're linguistically conditioned to think of the arts as "illuminating" and good artists as "bright," Plato sees art as the shadows on the wall -- shadows cast by puppeteers who are stumbling towards an imperfect representation of reality. While this is hardly a laudable way to interpret artists, Dr. Clowney of Rowan University suggests, "Think 'media', 'propaganda', and Entertainment Tonight, rather than 'fine art', and it is easier to gain some sympathy for Plato's views."

As if Plato needed further confirmation, if you glance at Michael Jackson's trial coverage, you'll see plenty of shadows dancing on Plato's cave walls. In a 1992 article in ANQ, Lance Olson calls Jackson "a pale media-packaged Xerox of a Xerox of the Real Thing." He is so multiply mediated, by plastic, make-up, by masks and umbrellas, by the directions he gives to his own personal videographer (who accompanied his triumphant entry to the courthouse where he entered his plea of not guilty) that he almost ceases to exist. While Olson notes that half a billion people apparently watched the premiere of Jackson's "Black or White" video on MTV, a scant 12 years later, outside of Cali-phoney-a, there wasn't exactly a groundswell of support for Jackson. Steve Gutterman reports that "plans to mount a major show of international support for the pop star failed to hit a high note on their first day Friday, as tiny crowds gathered in a handful of European cities" in gatherings timed to coincide with his arraignment.

Art is powerful and dangerous; at this point, the amount of time, effort, and intellectual energy that the world is investing in contemplating the significance of Michael Jackson's latest antics is enough to make a philosopher weep.

"The Clark Bar Association"? That name is sure to draw snickers when crunch time arrives. Clark will face mounds of mockery, which may prove to be the kiss of death for his candidacy and, if he's the nominee, ensure the re-election of the jolly rancher now in the White House. If Clark is smart, he'll make sure that whatever staffer thought of this doesn't see another payday. Such a decision could be a lifesaver for the campaign. --James Taranto --Best of the Web Today (Opinion Journal)

For this nutty little essay mocking Wesley Clark's adoption of the Clark candy bar as a campaign tool, Opinion Journal earns a sweet spot on my tootsie blog roll. (Note to self regarding possible career as comedy writer: keep day job.)

Avalanche is a great word. Its onomatopoeia is horrific. The very syllables bring to mind a Frenchman tumbling down a mountainside, until he meets his demise in a crunching vortex of snow and rock and ice: "Ahhhh...vahhh...laaaaaaaa...uNNCHHH!" -- Mike Arnzen --Oddly Chilling Thoughts (The Goreletter)

After some good-natured ribbing about his taste in clothing, General Wesley Clark, the Democratic Presidential candidate, has decided to donate his much-famed argyle sweater to charity. --General Wesley Clark's Argyle Sweater (EBay)

I found myself doing a little superior dance, because I just happen to have a read a blog entry about the history of sweaters on the linguistically fascinating flaschenpost, and I am therefore critically equipped to understand the cultural significance of Wesley Clark's Sweater and its presence on E-bay.

I didn't realize that what the English call a "jumper" is the same thing I call a "sweater". To me, a jumper is a long sleeveless dress worn over a shirt; the jumper is typically of a rugged material like denim, and is thus suitable as a play outfit for little girls.

Over the last two decades, academic [book] titles have become increasingly cumbersome, and it is rare to find an academic book title that is not lashed together with a subtitle and its colon. Some books even boast two subtitles, glued tenuously to the title with two colons. --Jennifer Jabson --No Mark of Distinction (Chronicle)

The title of my dissertation is "Soul and Society in a Technological Age: American Drama, 1920-1950." When it was accepted for publication, I was told that it would be retitled "Technology in American Drama 1920-1950: Soul and Society in the Age of the Machine." I was momentarily miffed that nobody had asked my opinion, but they were absolutely right. My father, who for years was a technical editor for the government, spent much of his career prying semicolons out of dense academic reports. He finds the sentences in my book generally too long, but he only found a very small number of mistakes -- apparently I left a "the the" in the text somewhere, and there are a few subject-verb disagreements (hidden in strings of semicolons, which is why I and my copyeditor didn't catch it). So I think I did pretty well.

Oddly enough, one of the handful of general style notes my advisor gave me was: although the writing is clear, the sentences are so short that in places it reads like a newspaper story; I took that as a compliment -- nevertheless, I gave my semicolon key and hyphen keys (not to mention the parentheses keys) a quick workout: I wanted to match the diction that my adviser requested.

They're the ones who keep the puerile shows on TV, who appear as regular recipients of the Darwin Awards, who raise our insurance rates by doing dumb things, who generally make life much more miserable for all of us than it ought to be. Sad to say, they comprise a substantial minority -- perhaps even a majority -- of the populace. --Neal Starkman --The S factor explains Bush's popularity (Seattle PI)

Note to self: If ever writing an opinion column calling much or most of the world "stupid," avoid destroying own credibility by misusing the word "comprise." The whole comprises the parts; the parts compose the whole.

There are far better ways to organize an attack on Bush's policies, the legitimacy of his presidency, and even his personal fitness for the job. But Starkman's essay is instead a painfully obvious example of the ad hominem fallacy. Calling people stupid because they do not share your worldview does not demonstrate the ability to think critically.

Starkman has, of course, succeeded in stirring up the "Bush is stupid" meme; that will probably help Dean's campaign.

From Orwell's 1984

'There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.'

Update, 08 Jan: In "Just Another Leftist Loon," James E. McWilliams writes about the ad hominem attacks generated by his "moderately anti-Bush" op-ed. He recognizes that he sounds like a cloistered scholar surprised and stung by his first encounter with the great unwashed audience he hopes to educate with his brilliance; but since his reflection is published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, that stance is understandable -- now he's hoping to educate his fellow academics that you need a thick skin if you want to bring your discourse into the public arena.

I wonder if McWilliams is familiar with the skin-thickening online rhetorical practices such as fisking, flaming, trolling, etc. -- if he were, I doubt he'd have been so surprised by what showed up in his e-mail.

From email messages and front-page news in the New York Times to published books and magazine articles, the 10 ouchies listed here crop up everywhere. They're so pernicious that even respected Internet columnists are not immune. | The list also could be called, "10 COMMON PROBLEMS THAT DISMISS YOU AS AN AMATEUR," because these mistakes are obvious to literary agents and editors, who may start wording their decline letter by page 5. What a tragedy that would be. --Pat Holt

--10 Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do)  (Holt Uncensored)

Mostly geared towards fiction writers. Some of the tips are a bit too broad; number 8, "awkward phrasing," isn't that helpful. Still, I appreciate this glimpse into the mind of a literary editor.

From pictograms to pixel fonts, written language has evolved over time, changing in response to communication methods and printing technology. This overview is presented as an introduction to the origins, evolution, and applications of modern letterforms. --The Evolution of Type (Medium Bold)

The ubiquity of the word processor has changed what it means to write. I still hear professors talk about "note cards," which were part of the writing process taught to me when I was in high school. The idea, of course, was that you could rearrange your note cards during the early drafting process, so that you would have some idea of the organization of your ideas before you actually started writing. For those of you born in the last 25 or so years, yes indeed, we actually wrote our papers out by hand, and then when we revised them we had to write them over again. We had a motivation to cut deadwood, since we could get the draft finished faster if we didn't copy that whole wordy opening paragraph and instead just copied the one sentence that actually introduced the subject we were really going to write about.

I'm not advocating that students should go back to the process of hand-writing their papers; instead, I'm simply noting that today's most experienced teachers learned to write in a very different way. I started word-processing some of my school assignments in middle school, around 1980 (although some of my teachers were refusing dot-matrix printouts). I have a great, satisfying sensory memory of picking up a stack of fan-folded paper, tearing off the rows of holes on the outer edges, and then separating the pages. I never bothered to tear apart all those perforations unless the printout was intended for someone else to read, and to this day I associate tearing perforated paper with that "job well done" feeling. When I was an undergrad at U.Va., for major assignments I would walk my disk to the laser printers in the computer lab (my favorite was a few steps from Cabell Hall at the other end of the Central Grounds from the Rotunda).

Since it is now push-button easy to get high-quality copies of drafts that are in progress, I wonder how much that affects the ability of today's students to recognize when they have put sufficient work into a paper. In medieval times, if you wanted about 20 pages to write on, you had to kill a sheep, skin it, and tan the hide (I recall the process has something to do with urine). So all writing that was produced was precious. That's taking it a bit too far, of course -- to make a mistake was costly, in terms of both time and resources, which undoubtedly affected the activities of a scribe (whose main job was to copy faithfully and accurately the words that somebody else had composed).

This paper addresses the evolution of metaphors for the Internet and shows how they have constrained and determined the development of cyberlaw. | Within the law, metaphors mold the framework of discourse, determining the scope of appropriate questions about and answers to various social and legal problems. Courts and commentators employ metaphors as heuristics to generate hypotheses about the application of law to novel, unexplored domains. Metaphors structure the way lawyers conceptualize legal events, as they infiltrate, consciously and unconsciously, legal discourse.... Three metaphors in particular will be examined: the information superhighway, cyberspace, and the Internet as "real" space. --Cohen and Blavin --Gore, Gibson, and Goldsmith: The Evolution of Internet Metaphors in Law and Commentary  (Harvard Journal of Law and Technology)

Looks like a good find, via Clancy on Kairosnews. The actual article is, unfortunately, a PDF document, so I'm blogging it until I can get to the office in a few days.