I'm trying to excise "Man, I'm so [BUSY or TIRED]" from my vocabulary. It's a weak hello. Some Cool Updates I'm on the gymnastics club at my school. I'm 26 on a team with a median age of 19. My nickname is grandpa. We have our first meet this Saturday and I'm going to perform the high bar and floor events. I haven't done gymnastics in 15 years but I've spent the last two months practicing and it's a little bit like riding a bike. I've more or less caught up to the technical difficulty that I was last capable of, sans the flexibility. I had my first round interview with Morgan Stanley's compliance division yesterday. I think I rather nailed it, but I have no idea how many people wound up applying. I should find out in the next day or two if I made the last round. Egads! My writing skills are getting a lot of practice as a result of one particularly particular grader. He's an economics professor that I adore--his enthusiasm is so infectious--but he's an enormous stickler for precision and clarity in writing. He assigns weekly two-page papers that I spend more time on than almost any other homework. But I've come to appreciate the class more than any other. He started the semester off with this passage from Dierdre McCloskey, an economist who also wrote a usage guide for writers called Economical Writing: AmenThe one genuine rule, a golden one, is Be Clear. In the first century after Christ a Roman professor of writing and speaking put it this way (Quintilian, Book VIII, ii, 24): "Therefore one ought to take care to write not merely so that the reader can understand but so that he cannot possibly misunderstand." Clarity is a social matter, not something to be decided unilaterally by the writer. The reader like the consumer is sovereign. If the reader thinks something you write is unclear then it is, by definition. Quit arguing. Karl Popper, a philosopher with a good style and a correspondingly wide influence, wrote:
I... learned never to defend anything I had written against the accusation that it is not clear enough. If a conscientious reader finds a passage unclear, it has to be rewritten .... I write, as it were, with somebody constantly looking over my shoulder and constantly pointing out to me passages that are not clear. (1976, p.83).
Oh man. Clarity in writing is a lost art. (Or the practitioners of it are being replaced by blogger-quality writers.) If they give you an open assignment some day, write five different interpretations of the 2nd Amendment that are clear, unambiguous, and each take a different stance. They really fucked that one up.
Stein on Writing. Fiction, non-fiction, don't matter. The guy was the senior editor at Voice of America and then ran his own imprint for 25 years. In between he helped take down McCarthy, apprenticed to Thornton Wilder, helped found The Actor's Studio and edited James Baldwin, Elia Kazan and Lionel Trilling.
It’s this little book. And I would read kb’s suggestion. I actually find the usage manual or style guide genre to be eminently readable and thought-provoking, so I can’t get enough of them.