The Daily News

1  And...here we are.

2  My laptop buffered so much yesterday that I grew a beard waiting. 

3  And then it went grey.

4   It's not a new laptop, and I got it re-built.

5   You know computers. They can be little brats one minute, and little angels the next.

6  This sucker hovered and heaved all morning.

7   I finally Googled for repair tips.

8   I instantly got a pop-up from someone trying to sell me something that would make the thing quicker.

9  What a racket.

10 Right this minute it's doing fine.

11  Now that things have settled, and all is peaceful, I have  one annoying fly landing on everything near me, including me.

12  The swatter is under the sink. I bought it because these guys have taunted me all week.

13  I usually keep the place clean, open and close doors quickly, and take out the garbage on a regular basis.

14  I often freeze the trash 'til garbage day. That worked great all summer, especially in a town that could climb upwards of 110 degrees. 

15  I wish it were 110 degrees of fly separation.

16  What's odd is that this particular swatter has a holster. And it cost only $2.44 for the entire kit. Quite a bargain.

17   It's nice. I can wash it, wash the holster, put it under the sink and it won't even touch the ground.

18  They might not yet have invented a better mouse trap, but somebody around here succeeded in building a better swatter. Color me impressed.

19  I never realized the variety of swatter designs that are out there.

20  For your viewing pleasure, I bring you the following pics:

21  

22 DISCLAIMER: The frightened lady at the top is not a swatter. She was used for effect. Nor are Astaire and Rogers. I put them up for artistic purposes.

23  I can't speak for any of you, but I walked away from this entire display enchanted.

24  The killing of flies should make us shudder. But these little beauties come off as children's toys.

25  I admire the comic whimsy of the Pow! Splat! and of the Splat! Pow!

26  Such loftiness on a Thursday!

27  Moving On, Part One: A quick update on the Heidi stories: I may need to postpone those 'til at least Thanksgiving. 

28  October has been an amazingly busy month, and the party last Saturday took it to a new level.

29  Also I've had a few creaks and clicks that have happened late at night, and frankly, I find myself a little jumpy. 

30  I've had a few good coincidences this year as well, but they happen all the time, nothing new.

31  I keep hoping the original stories will come from cyber space and tell themselves, getting me off the hook. 

32  I haven't been home enough to get going on it.

33  Just thought it might be nice to let people know.

34  Moving On, Part Two: I had fun offering Roy Peter Clark's Writing Tools out there yesterday. If you missed it, scroll down and it should pop up. Some really fun stuff, especially the entire concept of people disagreeing on writing methods. 

35  In the long run, use things that work. And know they work.

36  Today I follow that with Clark's lesson on simplifying. I argued with a few science and math teachers on this one. They feel students need to know how to read technical pieces, even if they are written by extremely boring writers.

37  Makes sense. 

38  I prefer simplicity. Makes more sense.

39  Personal opinion.

40  Here's Clark's view. This comes to you from Writing Tools:

  This tool celebrates simplicity, but a clever writer can make the simple complex---and to good effect. This requires a literary technique called defamiliarization, a hopeless word that describes the process by which an author takes the familiar and makes it strange. Film directors create this effect with super close-ups and with shots from severe or distorting angles. More difficult to achieve on the page, this effect can dazzle the reader as does E.B. White's description of a humid day in Florida:

  On many days, the dampness of the air pervades all life, all living. Matches refuse to strike. The towel, hung to dry, grows wetter by the hour. The newspaper, with its headlines about integration, wilts in your hand and falls limply into the coffee and the egg. Envelopes seal themselves. Postage stamps mate with one another as shamelessly as grasshoppers. (from "The Ring of Time)

  What could be more familiar than a mustache on a teacher's face, but not this mustache, as described by Roald Dahl in his childhood memoir, Boy:

  A truly terrifying sight, a thick orange hedge that sprouted and flourished between his nose and upper lip and ran clear across his face from the middle of one cheek to the middle of the other. 

  ...[It] was curled most splendidly upwards all the way along as though it had a permanent wave put into it or possibly curling tongs heated in the mornings over a tiny flame...The only other way he could have achieved this curling effect, we boys decided, was by prolonged upward brushing with a hard toothbrush in front of the looking-glass every morning.

  Both White and Dahl take the common---the humid day and the mustache---and, through the filter of their prose styles, force us to see it in a new way.

  More often, the writer must find a way to simplify prose in service to the reader. For balance, call the strategy familiarization, taking the strange or opaque or complex and, through the power of explanation, making it comprehensible, even familiar. 

  Too often, writers render complicated ideas with complicated prose, producing sentences such as this one, from an editorial about state government:

  To avert the all too common enactment of requirements without regard for their local cost and tax impact, however, the commission recommends that statewide interest should be clearly identified on any proposed mandates, and that the state should partially reimburse local government for some state imposed mandates and fully for those involving employee compensation, working conditions and pensions. 

  The density of this passage has two possible explanations: The writer is writing, not for a general audience, but for a specialized one, legal experts already familiar with the issues. Or, the writer thinks that form should follow function, that complicated ideas should be communicated in complicated prose.

  He needs the advice of writing coach Donald Murray, who argues that the reader benefits from shorter words and phrases, and simpler sentences, at the points of greatest complexity. What would happen if readers encountered this translation of the editorial?

  The state of New York often passes laws telling local governments what to do. These laws have a name. They are called "state mandates." On many occasions, these laws improve life for everyone in the state. But they come with a cost. Too often, the state doesn't consider the cost to local government, or how much money taxpayers will have to shell out. So we have an idea. The state should pay back local governments for some of these so-called mandates.

  The differences in these passages are worth measuring. The first one takes six and a half lines of text. The revision requires an additional half line. But consider this: The original writer has room for fifty-eight words in six and a half lines, while I get eighty-one words in seven lines, including fifty-nine one-syllable words. His six and a half lines give him room for only one sentence. I fit eight sentences into seven lines. My words and sentences are shorter. The passage is clearer. I use this strategy to fulfill a mission: to make the strange workings of government transparent to the average citizen, to make the strange familiar. 

  George Orwell reminds us to avoid long words where short ones "will do," a preference that exalts short Saxon words over lone ones of Greek and Latin origin, words that entered the language after the Norman Conquest of 1066. According to such a standard, box beats out container, chew trumps masticate; and ragtop outcools convertible. 

  I am often stunned by the power that authors generate with words of a single syllable, as in this passage from Amy Tan:

  The mother accepted this and closed her eyes. The sword came down and sliced back and forth, up and down, whish! whish! whish! And the mother screamed and shouted, cried out in terror and pain. But when she opened her eyes, she saw no blood, no shredded flesh.

  The girl said, "Do you see now?" (from The Joy Luck Club)

  Fifty-five words in all, forty-eight of one syllable. Only one word, ("accepted") of three syllables. Even the book title works this way.

  Simple language can make hard facts easy reading. Consider the first paragraph of Dava Sobel's Longitude:

  Once on a Wednesday excursion when I was a little girl, my father bought me a beaded wire ball that I loved. At a touch, I could collapse the toy into a flat coil between my palms, or pop it open to make a hollow sphere. Rounded out, it resembled a tiny Earth, because its hinged wires traced the same pattern of intersecting circles that I had seen on the globe in my classroom---the thin black lines of latitude and longitude. The few colored beads slid along the wire paths haphazardly, like ships on the high seas.

  Simplicity is not handed to the writer. It is the product of imagination and craft, a created effect.

  Remember that clear prose is not just a product of sentence length and word choice. It derives first from a sense of purpose---a determination to inform. What comes next is the hard work of reporting, research, and critical thinking. The writer cannot make something clear until the difficult subject is clear in the writer's head. Then, and only then, does she reach into the writer's toolbox, ready to explain to readers, "Here's how it works."

41  I can't do better than that. Such a well-written and concise chapter.

42  White, Dahl, Tan...these names keep surfacing. May I throw in another one-syllable name? How 'bout Clark?

43  Great lesson.

44  I'll test my skills at single syllables all day. Fun thing to do.

45  Gottago.

46  See you again.

47  Have a GREAT day.

48  Peace.

~H~

fin.