A society that doesn’t honor words is a society that is short on serious thought. This is one of the messages we take away from an insightful and moving piece in the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books (July 15, 2010). Titled simply “Words” it is about the devaluation of words […]
Back in the early sixties one of those mad, mad men decided there was a need for a punctuation mark that expressed both a question and extreme surprise. We think this must be something like that television ad for the rental car company where John McEnroe is told he can choose any car on the […]
Used to show strong or sudden emotion and for emphasis, exclamation marks or points are most frequently used in dialogue in fiction writing. They are often used to convey urgency: “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” Or command: “Stop the train! Or I will shoot you dead!” Or astonishment: “Wow! Did you see […]
We just read THE PORTRAIT (2005) by Iain Pears for the book club. Not to keep you in suspense, the book club loved it which is interesting because THE PORTRAIT is 211 paperback pages of a guy talking while he paints the portrait of another man. The sitter never speaks and the portraitist, Henry MacAlpine, […]
We recently stopped by the Robert Frost cabin in Ripton, Vermont. The cabin – unchanged from Frost’s time – was where the great American poet spent summers during the last 30 years of his life from the late 1930’s until his death in 1963. He did much of his writing there. Owned by Middlebury College, […]
A quote that is all over the Internet compares rewriting to “scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush”. The quote is a great deal more available than information about the writer to which it is attributed, Pete Murphy. We think this must be the Peter Murphy who wrote JOHN THE REVELATOR, an acclaimed coming of […]
Scare quotes are defined as the use of quotation marks to show that a word is not being used in its usual sense. Scare quotes can also be used to indicate irony. Here are some examples: The people who lived in the small town, “the natives,” claimed to have a “big city attitude.” Many of […]