The Daily News
1 Quick week.
2 Almost too quick, unless you have the misfortune of going to meetings today.
3
4 How many of my peeps get to suffer insufferable meetings today?
5 Go ahead, get 'em up.
6 Okay, okay, okay. Get 'em down.
7 Sorry dudes.
8 Seesly.
9 Sorry. Meetings. Bleh.
10 Moving On, Part One: I need to take a minute to thank all of you for the lovely thoughts and emails regarding the birth of the twins. On behalf of Maren and Isla (pronounced MARE-in and EYE-luh) AND their proud parents Josh and Caitlin Rosa, I thank everyone for your love and support.
11 Pretty names when not put up there like a vocabulary list.
12 I laughed and loved getting back in touch with so many.
13 I'm not used to the spotlight so if I didn't get back to you I apologize. Write me and say something like, "Hey Captain Popular! Stop saggin' and pull your pants up! What am I, chopped liver?"
14 Or words to that effect. I would so welcome a pie in the face from an old friend. Eager to welcome it.
15 I love you all, everything.
16 Our Town peeps would recognize item fifteen as a quote from Emily Webb, and one of my favorites.
17 And so it goes.
18 Moving On, Part Two: Any writers out there?
19 I have a few more items from Stephen King. First his second foreward of three. I didn't want to overkill yesterday, so I will include in this piece the two remaining forewards to On Writing, and THEN attempt to give the Omit Needless Words lesson taught to King by Strunk and White.
20 Somewhat tall order, especially when I'm about to finish off an evening of veggies with a loaded baked potato. I am, after all, Diet Guy.
21
22 Anybody lookin'?
23 So here go. Here is the second foreward to the wonderful On Writing, by Stephen King:
Second Foreword
This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do---not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit.
One notable exception to the bullshit rule is The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. There is little or no detectable bullshit in that book. (Of course it's short; at eighty-five pages it's much shorter than this one.) I'll tell you right now that every aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style. Rule 17 in the chapter titled "Principles of Composition" is "Omit needless words." I will try to do that here.
24 Me again: Are you getting this yet?
25 I'm not sure as to when each foreward was put up, but there was a third written probably in 2010.
26 It was clearly a tribute to King's longtime editor Chuck Verrill. The page following this third foreward was titled simply C.V.
27 Here is the third foreward. Hopefully I will have time to address the concept "Omit needless words."
28 Ready? Here go:
One rule of the road not directly stated elsewhere in this book: "The editor is always right." The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editor's advise; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection. Put another way, to write is human, to edit is divine. Chuck Verrill edited this book, as he has so many of my novels. And as usual, Chuck, you were divine.
--Steve
29 Now what's interesting about On Writing is that to me, what really stuck in my mind was the entire concept of "Omit Needless Words" which is Professor Strunk's anthem.
30 Looking back over On Writing, I had to search the entire book looking for King's follow-up to his second foreward, where he lets us know he will follow the concept.
31 I used to introduce the concept to my students with this not-so-clever caveat: "You need to omit needless words that you don't really need to use in order to get your point across to your audience, or to your readers, if you consider yourself indeed, an author."
32 Most students didn't understand the irony.
33 I sometimes would follow with, "Okay. Omit needless words. Period." All other words surrounding that concept in item 31: needless.
34 On Writing contains rants, which often become articulate by their almost angry tone. While searching for King's rant about omitting needless words (I even used a small, black flashlight in search of that rule, this in the middle of the night!), I ran across an alternate rant of his, which backs nearly everything I have presented this week.
35 I'll be darned that I can't seem to find the omitting words stuff, but that has become irrelevant, since my point has already been made. Who needs Stevie King anyway?
36 The answer is this: all of us.
37 Here is more from the Master of the Craft:
...One who does grasp the rudiments of grammar finds a comforting simplicity at its heart, where there need be only nouns, the words that name, and verbs, the words that act.
Take any noun, put it with any verb, and you have a sentence. It never fails. Rocks explode. Jane transmits.
Mountains float. These are all perfect sentences. Many such thoughts make little rational sense, but even the stranger ones (Plums deify!) have a kind of poetic weight that's nice. The simplicity of a noun-verb construction is useful---at the very least it can provide a safety net for your writing. Strunk and White caution against too many simple sentences in a row, but simple sentences provide a path you can follow when you fear getting lost in the tangles of rhetoric---all those restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, those modifying phrases, those appositives and compound-complex sentences. If you start to freak out at the sight of such unmapped territory (unmapped by you, at least), just remind yourself that rocks explode, Jane transmits, mountains float, and plums deify. Grammar is not just a pain in the ass; it's the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking. Besides, all those simple sentences worked for Hemingway, didn't they?...
If you want to refurbish your grammar, go to your local
used-book store and find a copy of Warriner's English Grammar and Composition---the same book most of us took home and dutifully covered with brown paper shopping bags when we were sophomores and juniors in high school. You'll be relieved and delighted, I think, to find almost all you need is summarized on the front and back endpapers of the book.
38 Moving On, Part the Thoid: I truly hope these daily writing tips are relaxing you a little. I must say bringing these each day presents a challenge.
39 First, I notice that writing about writing IS a tad pompous, particularly when you are not Stevie King.
40 If you recall, I also discovered this week that I'm not Isaac Hayes or Otis Redding either.
41 But re-discovering books on writing that I consider monumental are considered monumental by hundreds of thousands of other teachers of English.
42 Here is something you may not know: Many schools have eliminated grammar books from their book rooms. English departments believe that gargantuan literature books that have a few grammar rules running randomly through them are enough.
43 Many younger teachers never had a comprehensive course in grammar, and virtually none had grammar dating back to fifth or sixth grade.
44 In order for my students to get any sort of grammar I had to run off various chapters from the various grammar books I have purchased over the years, and yes, I leaned heavily on the Warriners' courses.
45 I even presented sentence diagramming (horrors!) one morning when I was feeling frivolous. It was a bit of a lark, since we know that while simple, you can go only so far before your homework looks like butcher paper at a badminton tournament.
46 That day of course, our then vice principal Bill Tomlinson came into the classroom to observe my lessons. He was pretty amused, but at the end of the period he whispered to me, "Hey, worked for us!" and we enjoyed a quick chuckle.
47 That day amused me, but I still walk tall knowing that in my retirement I could help students and writers on their way to mastering the craft. First, it makes people instantly smarter, and second, I can save them a lot of time by sparing them some of the horrors of attempting to learn the rules of the language on the internet.
48 There are LOTS of horrible sights out there. I've tripped over many and don't dare look back.
49 So this is going to be some fun sessions, and they will end when they will end. My initial idea was to put together a series of these for around four or five weeks, most in September, when school begins for many students.
50 It's a good plan, and whoever wants knows to hunt it down in the September DN archives.
51 I trust it will one day blow away with what Sir Paul McCartney calls "The Mists of Time" but at least I put it there for you.
52 End of lesson.
53 I gottago.
54 Have a GREAT day. Hope your meetings don't make you tremble and twitch.
55 See you again.
56 Peace.
35 I'll be darned that I can't seem to find the omitting words stuff, but that has become irrelevant, since my point has already been made. Who needs Stevie King anyway?
36 The answer is this: all of us.
37 Here is more from the Master of the Craft:
...One who does grasp the rudiments of grammar finds a comforting simplicity at its heart, where there need be only nouns, the words that name, and verbs, the words that act.
Take any noun, put it with any verb, and you have a sentence. It never fails. Rocks explode. Jane transmits.
Mountains float. These are all perfect sentences. Many such thoughts make little rational sense, but even the stranger ones (Plums deify!) have a kind of poetic weight that's nice. The simplicity of a noun-verb construction is useful---at the very least it can provide a safety net for your writing. Strunk and White caution against too many simple sentences in a row, but simple sentences provide a path you can follow when you fear getting lost in the tangles of rhetoric---all those restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, those modifying phrases, those appositives and compound-complex sentences. If you start to freak out at the sight of such unmapped territory (unmapped by you, at least), just remind yourself that rocks explode, Jane transmits, mountains float, and plums deify. Grammar is not just a pain in the ass; it's the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking. Besides, all those simple sentences worked for Hemingway, didn't they?...
If you want to refurbish your grammar, go to your local
used-book store and find a copy of Warriner's English Grammar and Composition---the same book most of us took home and dutifully covered with brown paper shopping bags when we were sophomores and juniors in high school. You'll be relieved and delighted, I think, to find almost all you need is summarized on the front and back endpapers of the book.
38 Moving On, Part the Thoid: I truly hope these daily writing tips are relaxing you a little. I must say bringing these each day presents a challenge.
39 First, I notice that writing about writing IS a tad pompous, particularly when you are not Stevie King.
40 If you recall, I also discovered this week that I'm not Isaac Hayes or Otis Redding either.
41 But re-discovering books on writing that I consider monumental are considered monumental by hundreds of thousands of other teachers of English.
42 Here is something you may not know: Many schools have eliminated grammar books from their book rooms. English departments believe that gargantuan literature books that have a few grammar rules running randomly through them are enough.
43 Many younger teachers never had a comprehensive course in grammar, and virtually none had grammar dating back to fifth or sixth grade.
44 In order for my students to get any sort of grammar I had to run off various chapters from the various grammar books I have purchased over the years, and yes, I leaned heavily on the Warriners' courses.
45 I even presented sentence diagramming (horrors!) one morning when I was feeling frivolous. It was a bit of a lark, since we know that while simple, you can go only so far before your homework looks like butcher paper at a badminton tournament.
46 That day of course, our then vice principal Bill Tomlinson came into the classroom to observe my lessons. He was pretty amused, but at the end of the period he whispered to me, "Hey, worked for us!" and we enjoyed a quick chuckle.
47 That day amused me, but I still walk tall knowing that in my retirement I could help students and writers on their way to mastering the craft. First, it makes people instantly smarter, and second, I can save them a lot of time by sparing them some of the horrors of attempting to learn the rules of the language on the internet.
48 There are LOTS of horrible sights out there. I've tripped over many and don't dare look back.
49 So this is going to be some fun sessions, and they will end when they will end. My initial idea was to put together a series of these for around four or five weeks, most in September, when school begins for many students.
50 It's a good plan, and whoever wants knows to hunt it down in the September DN archives.
51 I trust it will one day blow away with what Sir Paul McCartney calls "The Mists of Time" but at least I put it there for you.
52 End of lesson.
53 I gottago.
54 Have a GREAT day. Hope your meetings don't make you tremble and twitch.
55 See you again.
56 Peace.
~H~
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