Steve A. shares good advice from Kilpatrick

I share Steve A.'s feelings about James J. Kilpatrick (right). No matter where Kilpatrick went with politics (and I didn't always go with him), he always wrote well on writing well. Here's Steve:

I miss James J. Kilpatrick. He died on Sunday, August 15, 2010, at age 89. He wrote the weekly, syndicated column "The Writer’s Art." He retired it in February 2009.

I began reading his column almost from its beginning in 1981. It was never the first thing I turned to. I would read the paper section by section and his column would emerge like an old friend imparting wisdom and humor in the midst of government budget crises, scandals, murders, and other bad news.

This link will take you to a few of his 2006 and 2007 columns. There are a few opinion pieces mixed in with the Writer’s Art columns. Kilpatrick wrote conservative opinion pieces before he took up the cause of defending good writing.

His politics are, at times, a bit too right wing for me, and he used to march on the side of the segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s, but he was not afraid to speak it like he saw it. He later apologized for his stance on segregation,and said he had changed his views. In the 1970s, his stance on politics landed him a spot on 60 Minutes’ Point-Counter Point segment defending the conservative view.

But I didn’t pay attention to that side of Kilpatrick. It was his discussions about language that drew me in. I bought his book, "The Writer’s Art," when it first came out in 1984. It’s a book I still turn to, along with Strunk and White, whenever I need clarification on something or to be re-taught a principle.

It’s well thumbed, highlighted, with many marginal notes. In flipping through it just now, I landed on Chapter 5 where he gives a 43-page discourse about “The Things We Ought to Be Doing.” As these are things we’ve been talking about in class, I thought I’d end with his list:

1. We ought to master our tools.
2. We ought to pay more attention to cadence.
3. We ought to pay closer attention to the arrangement of our words and clauses.
4. We ought to keep in mind that words have nuances; words carry connotations, and words that may be appropriate in one context may not be appropriate in another. We ought constantly to search for the right word.
5. We must keep our instrument properly in tune.
6. We ought to remember that life is not entirely serious, and therefore we should pay some attention to humor.
7. We must copy-edit, copy-edit, copy-edit!