Readers are yahoos. Yes, that means you and gulp, us too.

By The Word Process on Oct 5, 2010

“Marion doesn’t mean what she says,” a hypothetical book club member asserts in regards to a character in a fictitious book. “She really loves Andrew but she can’t say so.”
“Where does it say that in the book?” asks the member of the book club who is also an editor. “Where does it say she really loves Andrew? And why can’t she say so?”
“Because people who were living in Philadelphia in that time period had to be careful about what they said. Society was repressive back then.”
Thunder clouds gather between the editor’s brows. “1944? In the midst of the World War II?”
“But…Philadelphia,” responds the book club member as if the place name speaks volumes about its degree of repression.
“Marion can’t say she loves Andrew because she is going to marry Charles,” says another book club member.
“No,” shrieks the maddened editor, frantically searching through the book, “the author says she is ambivalent about Andrew. Let me find the line.”

Editors are text driven, and we like to try to ferret out what the author is really saying, unlike most readers who are unabashed about putting their own spin on what they read. But recently, we caught ourselves in the act of making an assumption about something we had  read and the light dawned. We do it too.

All readers bring their own experiences, prejudices and sensibilities to bear on what they read. Hence, no book is ever read just the way the writer intended it to be. Readers change things. They make books their own.

In spite of this, we always tell our writers they have to trust the reader. We’ll explain in the next blog.

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In honor of the new season of Dexter…endorsing the serial comma.

By The Word Process on Sep 28, 2010

Dexter is the eponymous serial killer hero of the Showtime television series. The TV show – the first episode of the fifth season aired Sunday – is fraught with moral ambiguity, note the strange bedfellows “killer” and “hero” applied at one time to the leading character.

The serial comma (SC), too, is fraught with ambiguity. It is the comma that does or does not go before the coordinating conjunction in a series of three or more words as in:

The fruit basket contained bananas, apples, oranges, grapes and kiwi fruit.

OR

The fruit basket contained bananas, apples, oranges, grapes, and kiwi fruit.

Naysayers believe the SC is redundant since the “and” does a pretty good job of separation all by itself. Here at THE WORD PROCESS, we were evenly split on this issue until recently. One of us was a serial comma-ist, the other was not. The two great gurus of punctuation are similarly divided. The SC tends to be standard in most non-journalistic writing, which typically follows the Chicago Manual of Style. Journalists, however, usually follow the Associated Press Style Guide, which advises against it.

Preparing our last blog entry, we noted that Punctuation Man, he of Punctuation Day fame, has come out in favor of the SC. (In fact, he came out two years ago.) His argument is consistency.

There are cases where everybody agrees the SC is needed, as in the following example:

Raspberry and strawberry, kiwi and lemon, blueberry and lime and banana and orange smoothies were offered at the café.

The confusion is obvious. Without a comma after “lime,” it is not clear if there is one blueberry, lime, banana and orange flavored smoothie or two, one flavored blueberry and lime and the other, banana and orange.

Because the SC is necessary in some instances, Punctuation Man argues that it makes sense to use it all the time. We are not going to argue with that.

Now, is Dexter a killer or a hero?

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Watch out! Serial commas, errant colons, and slipped ellipses are on the loose; it is National Punctuation Day…

By The Word Process on Sep 24, 2010

(We have to thank a friend on Facebook for pointing out this important observation to us. Yes, yes, as editors we should have starred the day.)

Award winning newsletter writer and teacher, Jeff Rubin, – a.k.a. Punctuation Man – established National Punctuation Day (NPD) in 2004. Rubin, who gives school presentations on punctuation and promotes punctuation play, has recommendations for celebrating NPD:

• Sleep late.
• Take a long shower or bath.
• Go out for coffee and a bagel (or two).
• Read a newspaper and circle all of the punctuation errors you find (or think you find, but aren’t sure) with a red pen.
• Take a leisurely stroll, paying close attention to store signs with incorrectly punctuated words.
• Stop in those stores to correct the owners.
• If the owners are not there, leave notes.
• Visit a bookstore and purchase a copy of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.
• Look up all the words you circled.
• Congratulate yourself on becoming a better written communicator.
• Go home.
• Sit down.
• Write an error-free letter to a friend.
• Take a nap. It has been a long day.

If you prefer to celebrate NPD more actively, Rubin holds punctuation day events. Last year, he sponsored a punctuation bake-off. This year, he is holding a punctuation haiku contest. Haiku is a Japanese verse form with a 5 – 7 – 5 arrangement of syllables. Submit your entry by September 30th to Jeff@NationalPunctuationDay.com. Here are a couple of examples:

Punctuate or die.
What is a writer to do?        
Good writers will know.

Colon-oscopy:
When my editor removes
My inflamed colon.

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In singing, the head voice and the chest voice. In writing too?

By The Word Process on Sep 21, 2010

Singing voices are customarily divided into different registers: the head register, and the chest register depending on where the sound seems to be coming from. Thus, if a singer is singing in his or her head voice, the tone will resonate in the head. The chest voice resonates in the chest.

The easiest way to understand this may be to hop in the shower and sing. See what happens when you try to pitch your song from your head and then try to summon it from your chest. In addition, to feeling that the song is coming from different parts of your body, you should be making different sounds. Head voices for both women and men are considered light, bright singing tones that are higher in pitch. Chest voices are often associated with deep, warm, rich, thick sounds.

We wonder if writers don’t have head and chest voices. Some authors do seem to write off the tops of their heads. These are writers who find considerable material in observation of the world around them, whose minds seem to be always working. Jonathan Franzen (at least in his last book, THE CORRECTIONS) seems to be a writer who writes from his very intelligent head. So, one can imagine, did Jane Austin. They are great observers.

Writers with chest voices get deeper in the gut, and the emotional struggle taking place is palpable. When William Faulkner writes about road surfaces you get the sense the macadam is dripping with emotional significance.

This is not to say that head writers do not employ their emotions or chest writers aren’t thoughtful – or to say that one is better than the other. It is just an interesting analogy and when we apply it to our summer reading, we are sometimes surprised by the conclusions we reach. For instance, we would classify the author of EAT, PRAY, LOVE as a head writer. Although Elizabeth Gilbert is dealing with emotional experiences, she does it in an observational way. MR PEANUT, our favorite book of the summer, is constructed like a video game and full of film noir references. But this is a book that comes from the gut.

What kind of writer are you? It might be useful to know.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgtjEjEKUA4]

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The Franzen hype: good for American writers

By The Word Process on Sep 16, 2010

By now, everybody knows that Jonathan Franzen’s new novel FREEDOM is out, and speaking for the book club, we can’t wait to read it. In the meantime, we have been mulling over the reviews and the controversy that Franzen inevitably, it seems, excites. Don’t we love it? Is the book “a masterpiece of American fiction” or “unappealing” or, quite conceivably, both?

We won’t know those answers until we read the book but on a couple of levels we think the hype over FREEDOM is good for U.S. writers. One is obvious. Anything that gets people reading, talking and thinking about books is a plus for books and the people who write them. One can imagine the publishing industry salivating over this, a big book by a serious American author who harks back to F. Scott Fitzgerald and the heyday of the American novel. Oh, to tango like we did back then.

The other level is more subtle and it has to do with Leo Tolstoy. Much is made in the reviews of Franzen’s references to Tolstoy. The editor of the “New York Times Book Review” calls Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE a “touchstone” for FREEDOM while a second Times reviewer writes that Franzen’s references to Tolstoy are “laughably conceited.”

The point to us is not that Franzen equates himself or his work with Tolstoy, but that he equates us to characters in a Tolstoy novel. Whatever else he may have to say in FREEDOM, we feel confident that he is saying our society and our times are every bit as worthy of being recorded in great novels as Tolstoy’s Russia of 1869, the year WAR AND PEACE was published.

That is the takeaway for American writers. It is also, to some extent, what the fuss is all about. For years, serious fiction has been dominated by foreign writers, as if the American experience was so over that only stories from raw, struggling places had merit.

Franzen clearly thinks we have merit too. Where he may get into trouble is in the way he sees American society today. He has written that he got lots of angry mail after his last book, THE CORRECTIONS, came out. One enraged correspondent called him “a pompous snob, and a real ass-hole.”

We are not suggesting that writers try to emulate Franzen in style or substance, but we are saying that there is much in our society to inspire and be written about. As Franzen demonstrates, we are such stuff as books are made on.

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Eat, pray, (think) write…

By The Word Process on Sep 14, 2010

If we weren’t so stodgy, we probably would have picked up the book before. Girlfriends have raved about it. But it wasn’t until our daughter apparently started to live it – traveling to Indonesia and falling head over heels for a South American – that we decided we had to find out what Elizabeth Gilbert’s EAT, PRAY, LOVE (now a Julia Roberts movie) was all about. As just about everybody knows by now this is the author’s account of her trip to three countries beginning with I, I, I to discover God, her worldly self and incidentally, a Brazilian husband.

On our way home from the far, far north last week, we summoned the book on our i-thing. Passing pine trees and glacial lakes, we sat back for a pleasurable listen.

Well not, as it turned out. The trouble with being editors is that we listen (or read) more closely than most people to what the author is saying. Words matter to us and immediately, we found we did not trust the author of EAT, PRAY, LOVE because she was tossing out words like tinsel onto a Christmas tree that was looking less and less like an actual tree. Here are some examples from the first pages of the book:

“This loss upon loss has left me feeling sad and brittle and about seven thousand years old. Purely as a matter of principle I wouldn’t inflict my sorry, busted-up old self on the lovely, unsullied Giovanni.”

The author is a successful, attractive woman being paid to travel and write about it. We know she is not really sorry or busted-up or old. And her use of language does not even convince us she is feeling that way. How can one feel 7,000 years old? How one can even imagine it? Is it anything but hyperbole?

“This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.”

Truthfully, we find peace playing solitaire on the computer so we know it does not come only from solitude.

“Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief.”

A great lake? Really, Alice? How hard would a normal-sized person have to cry to create such a thing? Is it even possible? We can’t help wondering why Gilbert just didn’t describe this scene as it happened. (This would be an interesting writing exercise: Describe something using hyperbole and then in more factual terms. Compare the two.)

Possibly our obsession with the language has blinded us to the charm of Gilbert’s story which has captured so many others. But, we think the words do matter. They reveal a lot about the writer and what she or he is attempting to convey or maybe, hide. If you have ever taken a baffling dislike (or liking) to a book, look at how the author uses language.

Having barely made it to the first I-country before we quit EAT, PRAY, LOVE, we will just have to refer to our daughter for the ending of the story which we hope is a follow-through on her avowed intent to study linguistics.

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Shakespeare and an Inspiration for Writing

By The Word Process on Sep 10, 2010

I’ve just started a Shakespeare class, and I have to be honest, I’ve never been a huge fan. I’ve always had trouble with the roundabout language and all of those references to Ancient Greek mythology. But so far, my class has been far more interesting than anticipated. We’ve just finished up with Titus Andronicus, long considered to be one of Shakespeare’s goriest texts. From what I could tell, this is a valid claim. If anything, it seemed like Shakespeare’s version of a slasher film. But the play isn’t all just violence. In Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare actually uses references to Greek mythology as central to the plot of the play, as opposed to being merely an extended metaphor. He uses the legend of Philomele to give voice to an otherwise voiceless character, thus commenting on the necessity of literature and myth as a means of communication. Despite the graphic violence of the narrative, I found it to be a rather inspirational tale for writers.

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"I would of done that."

By The Word Process on Sep 8, 2010

If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, then you know one of the hardest bits of grammar to grasp is pairing the right prepositions with the correct adjectives and verbs. If we think about the literal meaning of our preposition pairs, many of them actually seem quite arbitrary. In Spanish, one dreams “with” instead of dreaming “of/about.” When studying another language, we often have to just grit our teeth and memorize these pairings. In English, we tend to go by what sounds right, and we’re usually correct. Usually. Many writers, including myself, have to occasionally think twice about what preposition proceeds an adjective or verb.

While writers should aim to avoid all of these types errors, the worst offender is writing “of” instead of “have.” As in: “I would of done that.” Phonetically it sounds correct, but seeing it written makes me, along with many other readers, cringe. Thankfully, Microsoft Word tries to automatically change it back to “have,” but it’s something to look out for. One reference I like when I’m having a preposition mind-blank is : http://www.bedavaingilizce.com/prepositions/adj_pre.htm. It doesn’t have every combination out there, but it’s been a helpful guide when I can’t remember if something is beneficial “for” or “to.”

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Great Expectations – The Comic Book?

By The Word Process on Sep 3, 2010

Linda, Molly and I have discussed recently whether anyone reads anymore. Certainly they do, but we’ve agreed it’s not in the same way that people used to. There’s something to be said about the quick fix read – the thriller or romance novel you can read on the beach, or during your commute on the metro. And yet those rarely tend to be the favorites, the remembered, the cherished, at least for very long. There is a sense of reward, of camaraderie with the story, that comes with delving into a complex and challenging text.
This brings to mind a trend I’ve seen lately in bookstores. Many publishers are putting out classic texts – Great Expectations, Moby Dick, even the American Constitution – in graphic novel form. I for one immensely enjoy narratives that originate in graphic form. There is some exciting work being done both artistically and narratively in that genre. However, to use the graphic narrative as a way to simplify and add drawings to a text that has so much to offer on its own is a crime. Blending genres can often be a fun and creative way to convey a story or idea, but most of these comic book classics seem to be nothing more than the picture book version of their celebrated originals. What good did anyone really get out of skimming the cliff notes?

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Writing Well: Not just for Novels

By The Word Process on Aug 31, 2010

It’s me again, the college intern, here to talk about writing effective emails. During my time at university, I’ve experienced first hand how beneficial writing well can be to aspects of life not associated with writing for writing’s sake. Many of the rules I try to follow in creative or critical endeavors apply to daily tasks like writing professional emails, personal notes, or in my case, answers on tests. In any writing that I do, I try to keep in mind two specific questions: what is being asked of me, and who is going to read this? Then I read what I wrote. Always. I don’t care how short the message is – I will always read it before sending it off into the world. In creative or academic writing, it is all too common for writers to leave out elements of plot or important evidence that they themselves find obvious or apparent. This problem often crosses over into personal or professional written communication. As many people have probably experienced, it is extraordinarily frustrating and inconvenient to send someone an email that asks multiple questions and to receive an answer that only addresses one. While this often results from poor reading, it translates into writing that needs constant clarification. In a professional setting, this calls for extra steps and a longer time to relay important information. When writing lengthier works we have more time to edit and re-edit our compositions, making them as clear and concise as possible. But with shorter, everyday writing, getting it right on the first try will save everyone the most time. So before hitting the reply button, try rereading both the email sent to you and your response, making sure all the necessary information is there.

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