Ardelle helps us clear our minds

William Zinsser is a mind-reader.

In his book "On Writing Well," he said, "Clear writing doesn’t happen by accident. It takes effort, focus and discipline. Clear writing reflects a clear mind; a clear mind requires a thorough understanding about the ideas you’re communicating . . .Managers at every level are prisoners of the notion that a simple style reflects a simple mind. Actually a simple style is the result of hard work and hard thinking; a muddled style reflects a muddled thinker or a person too arrogant, or too dumb, or too lazy to organize his thoughts.”

Touche!

Zinsser read right through me. I'll admit it: My mind is messy. And my apartment, my cooking and especially my writing are reflections of such messiness.

So if we're supposed to clear our thinking before we can write clearly, the question is How? I searched Zinsser's book for an answer but didn't find a satisfying one. I found this interesting web page instead.

It explains simple exercises from Julia Cameron's book "The Artist's Way" on how to lighten your mind to create better content. I have found these to be very helpful and they don't take much time.

Julia Cameron, where have you been all this while? What a relief!

Ardelle Merton

Mary finds physical descriptions a slippery slope

I was revising my article today and in just the first paragraph found a couple of things that Professor Saul had asked us to avoid. I had written:

"What’s it like to stand on Olympic ice, before the crowd and TV cameras, waiting for the music to begin? Pair skater and two-time Olympian Cindy Kaufmann Marshall knows. Quick and athletic at sixty, with striking blue eyes and a blonde skater’s ponytail, the three-time world bronze medalist offered to teach me about her career and the mental side of her sport."

Gag.

Strike the "striking" eyes and the "blonde" ponytail. He is right, I would not have put that much energy into describing her appearance if she were male. She still is, and looks like, a figure skater, and I did want to say that.

I also wrote "offered to teach me," which has that pesky "me." My next-try thought also had me in it, something like, "Cindy met me at Highland Ice in Shoreline, the rink where she and her brother Ron skated together."

I wouldn't put "I" or "me" in an academic paper, but I don't have a reporter's reflex to keep it out of other kinds of writing.

I read an article in the NYT dining section recently that went through some weird gyrations that I thought were intended to avoid the first person. The reporter observed a chef telling a worker to put on a belt, and described it like this, "While he remains a demanding boss — an unfortunate young counter worker at New York’s Bouchon Bakery recently received a personal lecture on the importance of wearing a belt — Mr. Keller says he has become a more patient leader with a greater appreciation for collaboration."

I didn't like the middle of that sentence. I would prefer, "While he remains a demanding boss — I watched him lecture an unfortunate young counter worker recently at New York's Bouchon Bakery on the importance of wearing a belt — Mr. Keller says he has become a more patient leader with a greater appreciation for collaboration."

But on second thought, the "I" does make the aside jump out of the middle of the sentence too much, and it could be written without it, like so: "He recently lectured an unfortunate young
counter worker at New York's Bouchon Bakery on..." I think I like that best.

Why did the reporter put the "unfortunate counter worker" first? She must have wanted to emphasize the person being dressed down (and told to dress up) by his boss.

Now I'm doing something else that scares our professor: rambling.

Back onto the first person, do any of the rest of you have trouble avoiding it? Does it grate on you to see it outside of a personal essay? How about the descriptions of personal appearance? Do you describe a female's physical appearance more than you would a male's?

Mary Saylor

Thank Mary for links to the NYT article

I had meant to put up links to The New York Times article we discussed last night, but never found time to do it. Along comes Mary to the rescue:

I thought some people in our class might want to read the article that we
were talking about last night, so I'm sending the link and some accompanying
information for you to pass on.

The New York Times article

A New England Journal of Medicine article, "Dr. Pou and the Hurricane."

A long video interview with the reporter of the NYT article.

Thank you, Mary. You may have saved my job.

Kate finds good advice on story starts

Back on November 2nd, John's blog post mentioned Zinsser's book and what Zinsser said about the beginning of a piece of writing:

"The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead."

I want to add to that something I found in "The Journalist's Craft: A Guide to Writing Better Stories" edited by Dennis Jackson and John Sweeney.

The newly aspiring writer is admonished against using false openings in the hope of snagging a reader: "Splicing a snazzy lead onto an otherwise conventional article strikes me as false advertising. The lead should establish the tone and voice of the story. Best not to begin your story with a cheap trick."

I am guilty of the afore-mentioned trick and then I struggle for continuity of tone for the remainder of the piece. I also struggle with finding a place to use scene-driven narrative as mentioned by Daniel James Brown. By the time I get the necessary facts in my article, my writing sounds more like a news article than a lyrical prose piece moving along scene by carefully chosen scene.

Is anyone else running up against this issue?

I guess it fits that a book by writers on how to become better writers would be well-written and enjoyable reading. After reading the section on writing narrative non-fiction, I was drawn into the section called, "These Things we Can Count On" with its list of "linguistic misdemeanors" committed by lazy writers.

That was so enjoyable to read that I moved into the chapter on finding good stories. By the time I was finished I had even read the pages entitled, "Business Writing that Screams "Read Me!"

No small feat for someone who summarily pulls the business sections out of the paper along with the flyers for hearing aids, truck sales and Rite-Aid coupons.

I have also picked up the "Lonely Planet's Guide to Travel Writing." which is also a good read. The problem with all these engrossing writing guides is putting aside the teaching manuals and opening up the keyboard to practice what they preach.

Kate Boris-Brown

Rathnakar recommends two books on punctuation

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires shots in the air.
"Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit.
The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
“I’m a panda,” he says at the door. “Look it up.”
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

That's the joke that spawned the title of Lynne Truss' book on punctuation.

In that book she says, “Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.”

I couldn’t have agreed more.

I think Winifred Watson and Julius M. Nolte meant the same thing when they wrote in their grammar book almost 70 years ago: “Sentences have stop and go signals: a capital letter at the beginning is a green light; a dash, comma, semicolon or colon is a yellow light to make readers hesitate; a period, question mark or exclamation point is a red light.”

It looks there are couple of used copies of this book available through Amazon, I might order one.

The first student post comes from Lorraine

Lorraine shared the following with me in an e-mail, and I decided to make it the first of our student posts.

It's short (you can go longer if you want). It's about writing and gives Lorraine's reasons for why she found the webinar valuable. It also has a link to something you might consider (this is not an endorsement by me or the UW).

Here's what Lorraine had to say:

I recently attended Dr. Julie Miller’s webinar on “Get a Grip with Grammar.”

It cost $79 and was worth every penny. She delivers an interesting interactive webinar and provides numerous tips for remembering complicated grammar rules.

You may not need a refresher on grammar, but it's a good resource to keep in mind.

My highlighter is back, and it's long overdue

Some of you may think I'm belaboring this point since I made it when editing several of your profiles, but I had meant to get to Zinsser's Chapter 9 sooner than this. So please bear with me as we follow along with the highlighter.

Here's the first thing Zinsser (above) says in "The Lead and the Ending" and what I wrote at the top of some of your papers:

"The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead."

There couldn't be anything more important when writing for a purpose -- for pay, to entertain, to inform, whatever. If your readers stop reading, you have not achieved your purpose. Hook them with facts, with something they didn't know (called news in my old business), with humor, with mystery, but mostly with clear, strong, specific language, something that's easy to follow, easy to relate to.

You may move in "leisurely circles," as Zinsser says, toward your eventual point, but this is certainly true:

"Readers want to know -- very soon -- what's in it for them."

If this doesn't come in the first sentence, it should show up fairly soon. In journalism, it's known as the "nut graf," the paragraph that tells the nut of the story -- the reason why the readers might care and should keep reading. Editor, and readers, like to see it in the second or third graf.

So you get the reader's attention, tell them what you are up to and then start lacing together paragraphs that keep the reader going (see "Managing the Murky Middle" in an earlier post to this blog).

Do that until you get to where you reward your reader for persisting: A gift of an ending.

More on that, and "spiraling," too, at a later date.

See you Tuesday night at the front entrance to Odegaard Undergraduate Library. See map in a post below.