Critique schedule is now official

Here is the schedule for critiquing the final projects for this class. Remember that you need to attach your project to a post on the Catalyst message board a week before your critique is taking place. This will give others a chance to read your writing (please do) and give them time to make thoughtful, constructive comments about your work. What you will post will probably be a work in progress. No problem. Let us help you make progress. Post it.

Nov. 30 critiques (post by Nov. 23)
Sarah
David
Steve G.
Amanda
Sandra
Laura
Sturgis (Chapter 1 of his book is posted)

Dec. 7 (Post by Nov. 30)
Nora
Joanne
Viv
Catherine
Denise

Dec. 14 (Post by Dec. 7. Final paper due to me by Dec. 19)
Tobin
Aleta
Samantha
Lea
Steve A.
Linda
Renata
Heidi
Kiera

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!

Laura gives us "How to Write Less Badly"

I meet a lot of highly educated people who assume that an advanced degree in electrical engineering, chemistry, history, etc. also makes them an expert in writing.

The article, "How to Write Less Badly" from the Chronicle of Higher Education, points out that everyone (including otherwise highly trained and gifted academics) needs to practice writing. It also provides some good tips that I think would help many non-fiction writers.

Laura

You can't always get what you want

Our first blog entry from the class comes from Sturgis, who has a tale to tell from an interview he attempted:

I conducted an interview the other day with one of Prescott College’s 1966 “charter class” to get a sense about what the town (Prescott, Arizona) was like back then and how the townsfolk reacted to having a bunch of hippies suddenly appear in their midst. By the time I got there in 1971, the atmosphere was so poisonous that I cut my long hair after only three days; I just couldn’t stand all the hostility.

So I think I’m on safe ground to seek details about the conflict between the values of this quintessential small Western town and those imported by the students of the new College, most of them from considerably more sophisticated urban centers on the East and West Coasts.

My interview subject however, had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO SAY ON THE SUBJECT.

He couldn’t remember anything! His entire college career was lost in an alcoholic haze and he spent at least some of his college years in the strip of seedy cowboy bars on “Whiskey Row” getting along with the locals just fine.

Famously, during a political demonstration on the nearby Courthouse Square by Prescott College students protesting Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, these very same seedy cowboy bars produced an army of incensed patriots who, with the collusion of the local cops, swarmed from The Bird Cage Saloon, the Palace Bar and Matt’s Saloon to beat the living crap out of every long haired young person they could lay their hands on.

My interlocutor had never heard this story. No doubt he was curled around a boilermaker when he looked up to see he was alone in the bar on that infamous day. Rather than wonder where all his new friends had gone, he probably just helped himself to more of those yummy jalapeño peanuts and stole a shot or two from behind the untended bar.

Lesson learned: No interview is a complete failure. I got some new names from him, and I got some good practice asking questions, even if the questions didn’t quite take me where I wanted to go.

A bright forecast for ebooks

Here are a couple of links discussing the future of ebooks. The articles are very optimistic with the first giving this stat:

"Just 7% of online adults who read books read e-books. But that 7% happens to be a very attractive bunch: they read the most books and spend the most money on books."

The second article is in response to a writer who brought up the point that readers "cherish the book. And they believe that this is an artifact that they want in their lives. And some of the technological commentators in this industry just completely miss this point.”

If there's a book in your future plans, these are articles worth reading.

What does 700 words look like?

Someone asked that question in class on Tuesday and I've been thinking about it ever since. Sat deliberating at my computer for quite awhile, in fact, until the notion struck me that I should find some articles that matched that description.

Daily journalism didn't seem the place to look since one would expect those articles to be short. So I turned to one of my favorite essayists, Dr. Johnson. And while this essay is 1,332 words, if you have put off anything in your life lately (surely not an assignment for this class!), you should read what Samuel Johnson (right) has to say about procrastination.

Then I thought about the articles I had linked to from this blog. That Gene Weingarten article mentioning Lady GaGa? 679 words.

An article on knife sharpening in The Seattle Times magazine I linked to last year as a fine example of an informed essay? 679 words.

Turns out my on again, off again favorite magazine, Esquire, has a feature called "A Thousand Words about Our Culture" and this month it is addressing a question that crossed my mind recently: "Why Can't Kanye West Shut the Hell Up?" 1,001 words. Close enough.

And in the political realms I found 702 words on Ben Bernanke and fiscal policy in National Review.

The Nation had 935 words to say about Sarah Palin's new TV show (there was one kind one, I think).

Your thoughts on the Cross proclamation?

Here's what my highlighter found helpful in Chapter 20 of "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser:

Vomit your first draft, then clean it up (that's me, not Zinsser): "Even careful writers use quite a few (cliches) on their first draft. But after that we are given a chance to clean them out. Cliches are one of the things you should keep listening for when you rewrite and read your successive drafts aloud."

Good writing is taught by imitation: "Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or craft. . . . Find the best writers in the fields that interest you and read their work aloud."

Words that last: "Writing that will endure tends to consist of words that are short and strong; words that sedate are words of three, four and five syllables, mostly of Latin origin, many of them ending in 'ion' and embodying a vague concept. . . . After verbs, plain nouns are your strongest tools; they resonate with emotion."

I'm curious what you thought of the Thanksgiving proclamation given as an example of words that had "weathered the passage of time." It's on pages 236 and 237 of my edition. Did the words of Gov. Wilbur Cross (portrait above) make you want to imitate him? Please comment.