Writing: July 2008 Archive Page

Jimmy Maher offers a provocative editorial in the latest issue of the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games newsletter.

Galatea excites admiration, interest, even a certain amount of awe, and all of it richly deserved.  However, it seems to excite very little love.  Nor does it seem to inspire its player to grapple with anything more universal than the design of good IF conversation systems.

Is this a problem?  Not really, I think, when taken in isolation.  I think that Emily Short, whom I have immense respect for as a writer, creator, and tireless agent for positive change in IF, intended her work as an experiment and even possibly a bit of a provocation, an illustration of what might be possible.  But where is the game that takes Galatea's formal and technical innovations and uses them in the service of crackerjack story with a fascinating setting and compelling, believable characters?  Eric Eve's recent works come close, but how many others do?  Galatea sits out there in splendid isolation.  People play it, they tell themselves and each other how interesting it was, what potential for IF it demonstrates, and then they move on.  It's not up to Emily to build on Galatea's foundation; if she retires from IF tomorrow, she's done more for the form than I or 99% of you will ever manage.  It's up to us.  Where are we?

Some of us who are very, very good are writing games like the generally acknowledged best game of 2007: Lost Pig.  On the one hand, Lost Pig is nothing to disparage.  It's hilarious; it's great fun; it's honed and polished to the most beautiful shine.  Admiral Jota deserves tons of praise and respect for his creation.

Also of note, A Blind Man's Take on Interactive Fiction:

Most gaming opens worlds for people. Interacting with characters and role-playing a career or life that they do not have in the real world allows people to imagine themselves in certain situations, or challenges the person to make certain decisions.  It is that aspect of gaming, along with the writing,  descriptions of scenes and the possibility of interacting with characters that make interactive fiction so special. As a blind person, most mainstream role-playing games are unplayable. Interactive fiction is then the bridge that allows me as a blind person, who also would like to participate in the joys of relaxing with a role-playing computer game, to step into an imaginary world.

Thanks for the link, Neha. Inside Higher Ed has a good article on the place of composition within the field of English studies.

I have no interest in the now clichéd grumblings over English departments and their esoteric if not onanistic engagement in high-octane literary theory. I will only say that there is merit to the criticism. On the whole, however, such censure really isn't going anywhere; these exercises in cryptic marginalia are simply what we do, much in the same way that hyenas eat carrion. Both have their place, and whether one is more useful than the other is a matter for disputation.

My questions are more practical, if not more overtly political: Why is the teaching of writing so readily given over to the novitiate? If writing is that important as a university and life skill, why do we assign its teaching to graduate students and part-time instructors? Where are the associate and full professors of English, for it is exceedingly difficult to find them in writing classrooms?

[...]

Teaching writing -- and doing it well -- is a taxing business. It means thinking about course objectives and how to achieve them in a very practical way. It often means our learning how to impart skills that may come naturally to people whose inclinations and talents lie elsewhere. As a graduate student, my initial experiences in the composition classroom were marked by confusion and fear. I had a general inclination about what a good paper looked like -- having written a few -- but I also had almost no idea how I did it. My process had been to write and rewrite until it felt about right. How and what I was supposed to impart to others out of my intuitive sense of what worked and what didn't escaped me completely. I began to think that I was there because no one else wanted the job. --William Major

I tell my free-verse-loving creative writing majors that Picasso learned to paint traditional portraits before he chose to put two eyes on one side of a figure's nose. Likewise, learning the traditional rules of grammar will make your writing more powerful, since if you choose to ignore a convention, it will be a deliberate action, rather than something that happens because you don't know any better.

When transcribing spoken words, reporters regularly cut out an "um" here and an "uh" there.  Since punctuation is often just an approximation, different reporters who hear the same passage don't always record it the same way. (See "Ladies and Gentlemen [?] we got him." for a brief overview of how reporters variously puncutated the dramatic pause in Paul Bremer's 2003 statement on the capture of Saddam Hussein.)

But what if you're quoting an e-mail from a source whose computer apparently doesn't have a shift key?  You can often work around it through indirect quotation:

Using the clipped lingo typical of online chatter, Sasha said she would be right back ("brb") because her kid sister's rabid wallabee had gotten stuck in the air vent again ("ksrwsiava").

When does standardizing a language change the sentiment too much? There's a whole side industry of bloggers who enjoy picking apart President Bush's published verbal gaffes.  Certainly anything a public figure says at an official event is fair game, but when an ordinary citizen suddenly becomes a source of news -- perhaps by being related to a crime victim -- it may appear patronizing to publish their ungrammatical statements either verbatim, or with an encrustation of parenthetical corrections. 

Online communication adds yet another layer of uncertainty. When is it appropriate to leave the cyberspeak as is, without parenthetical clarifications or silent corrections?  The NYT offers a great reflection on the relationship between cyberspeak and standard written English.

My problem with message-board language brings up a prior problem in journalism: the difficulty of translating spoken language into written language. The philosopher Jacques Derrida gained notoriety by dimming the bright line between what was known in strange pre-Internet lingo (French, was it?) as langue and parole. He thought the written-spoken distinction was suspect and by turns collapsed and reasserted itself in the merry game of signification.

Nothing works more Frenchly and merrily this way -- shape-shifting at a rapid pace -- than Internet language, which morphs from standard English (a dialect of which has become the Web's lingua franca) to other languages and dialects to slang and emoticons and acronyms and phonetic miscellany. (Take "hey guys, i'm stoopid. DOH! meh. GAH. :O wth." Can this communication be taken as an admission of some kind of error? Can it be faithfully paraphrased as "she admitted her mistake on a message board"?) I can't tell how much of this keycap casserole belongs in ink on paper or how much of it makes sense there. -- Virginia Hefferman

One of my favorite things -- a photograph of a mistake on a sign. From Language Log.

From a collection of writings by Kurt Vonnegut. Read the full text of the essay, which is summarized (by Vonnegut) as follows:

1. Find a subject you care about
2. Do not ramble, though
3. Keep it simple
4. Have guts to cut
5. Sound like yourself
6. Say what you mean
7. Pity the readers

Active verbs form more efficient and more powerful sentences than passive verbs. This document will teach you why and how to prefer active verbs. (Active and Passive Verbs)

I'm slowly rolling out a new template for my online handouts.

For years, I've been using Dreamweaver to manage my academic website, but I don't have a copy of the program on my laptop, so I can only update my handouts when I'm in the office. Plus, now that MovableType is open source, I'd like to use it.

I love the idea of letting visitors post comments to my handouts, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to keep all the URLs. the same.  MT automatically removes dashes and underscores when it creates URLs, and all my index files are index.html (rather than .htm). I'm sure there's a way to use .htaccess to solve the problem with redirects, but I ran into a brick wall.