How top down spelling revision didn't work

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, writing, spelling, spelling reform, history

The cover is too good not to show: enough is enuf: our failed attempts to make English eezier to spell by Gabe Henry takes us on a rollicking journey through the stories of numerous persons, societies and clubs that have tried and tried to revise the spelling of English. Just since the founding of the USA, national figures including Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt have involved themselves in the pursuit of "logical" spelling. "Simplified spelling" organizations persist to this day.

English is the only language for which spelling bees are held. Nearly all other languages with alphabetic writing are more consistently phonetic. However, I would exempt French from that proviso. I discovered during three years of French classes that the grammar of French verbs is, to quote a Romanian linguist friend, "endless." Putting together all possibilities of conjugation, tense and mood, French has four times as many varieties of verb usage and inflected endings as English does, and then each variety is multiplied by inflections that denote number, person and gender. However, inflections ranging from -ais and -ait to -aient all have the same pronunciation, "-ay" as in "way". Other multi-sonic instances abound. Perhaps French has stalled on its way to being like Chinese, for which the written language is never spoken and the spoken languages aren't written.

But we're talking about English here. The author states several times that there are eight ways of pronouncing "-ough" in English. Long ago a friend loaned me a book, published in 1987, a collection of items from the 1920's and 1930's by Theodor S. Geisel, before he became Dr. Seuss: The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs the Dough. Geisel's essays on English spelling seen from a Romanian perspective (tongue-in-cheek, as usual; he was from Massachusetts, of German origin) dwell on the funnier aspects of our unique written language. The peculiarities of -ough occupy one of the chapters.

Being intrigued by the "8 ways" claim, I compiled this list using words extracted from an online dictionary:

1. "-ow" in Bough (an old word for branch) and Plough (usually spelled "plow" in the US)
2. "-off" in Cough and Trough
3. "-uff" in Enough and Tough and Rough
4. "-oo" in Through and Slough (but see below)
5. "-oh" in Though and Furlough
6. "-aw" in Bought and Sought
7. "-ə" (the schwa) in Thoroughly ("thu-rə-ly")

And…I could not find an eighth pronunciation for it. Maybe someone will know and leave a comment.

"Slough" is actually a pair of words. Firstly, a slough is a watery swamp. Secondly, slough refers to a large amount of something, and in modern American English it is usually spelled "slew", as, "I bought a whole slew of bedsheets at the linens sale." However, "slew" is also the past tense of the verb "slay": "The knight slew the dragon," which is the only way most folks use that word.

Numerous schemes have been proposed over time. Sum peepl hav sujestid leeving out sum letrz and dubling long vowls (e.g., "cute"→"kuut"). A dozen or more attempts at this are mentioned in the book. Others have invented new alphabets, or added letters to the 26 "usual" ones, so that the 44 phonemes could each have a unique representation. An appendix in many dictionaries introduces IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet (which includes the schwa for the unaccented "uh" sound). Public apathy and pushback have doomed every scheme.

The only top-down change to American spelling that came into general use was carried out by Noah Webster in his Dictionary. He took what we now call the English U out of many words such as color and favor; the Brits still use colour and favour. And he removed the final K from a number of words, including music and public (I think the Brits have mostly followed suit); pulled the second L from traveler and the second G from wagon; and introduced "plow" and other words that didn't quite make it to present-day usage. His later attempts at further simplification didn't "take".

I could go on and on. It's an entertaining pastime to review so many attempts. However, something has happened in the past generation, really two things. Firstly, advertising pushed the inventers of trademark names to simplify them, particularly in the face of regulations that forbade the use of many common words in product brands. Thus, we have "Top Flite" golf balls, "Shop Rite" and "Rite Aid" retailers, and new uses for numbers, such as "Food4Less" for a midwestern market chain and "2-Qt" for a stuffed toy brand. Secondly, the advent of ubiquitous cell phones motivated kids everywhere to develop "txtspk". Single-letter "words" such as R and U plus substituting W for the long O leads to "R U HWM?" Number-words abound: 2 for "to" and "too", 4 for "for", 8 in "GR8", and even 9 in "SN9" ("asinine", for kids who have that word in their working vocabulary). Acronyms multiply: LOL, ROFL (rolling on floor laughing), TTYS (talk to you soon)…a still-growing list. Even though most of us now have smart phones with a full keyboard (but it's tiny), txtspk saves time and now even X-Gen and Boomers (such as me) use it.

Social change works from the bottom up. Top-down just won't hack it. Unless, of course, you are dictator and can force it through, as Mao did when he simplified Chinese writing the year after taking power in 1949. Many of my Chinese friends cannot read traditional Chinese script. Fortunately, Google Lens can handle both, so Chinese-to-Chinese translation is possible!

We have yet to see any major literature moving to txtspk, let alone technical and scientific journals. If that were to happen, the next generation would need Google Lens or an equivalent to read what I am writing now, and all English publications prior.

It will be a while. Meantime, let this book remind us of the many times our forbears dodged the bullet and declined to shed our traditional written language. The legacy firstly of several long-term invasions (Saxon and Norman in particular), and then the rise of the British Empire, and finally in "melting-pot" America, our language is a mash-up of three giant linguistic traditions and a couple of smaller ones, plus borrowings, complete with original spelling if it existed, from dozens or hundreds of languages. Thus, one more thing found primarily in English: the idea of etymology, the knowledge of a word's origin. I haven't checked; do dictionaries for other languages include the etymologies of the words? My wife has several Japanese dictionaries of various sizes; none mentions the source of words except for noting which are non-Japanese because they have to be spelled with a special syllabary called Katakana.

English is unique. Harder to learn than some languages, but not all, it is still the most-spoken language on Earth. It is probably also the most-written, in spite of all the craziness.

Science me up a story

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, storytelling, writing, scientific approach

"You can't catch fish with a straight pin." This Evangelical trope about Gospel preaching applies to all storytelling. A fish hook has a bent end and a barb. Author and educator Will Storr writes in The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better that the way our brains work makes us pay attention to stories that hook us and then snag us, while we're bored with what I would call "straight pin" narratives.

There are reasons the ancient Five-Act Play model of telling a story works so well. Author Storr tries to explain them to us. In the process he gets into the metaphysics of how an "I" emerges from the brain in its dark and silent box, the skull. Of course, bereft of communication with "the outside", a brain could do nothing but cogitate on whatever might occupy its memory materials. He tells how the product of all our senses is a "hallucination" (his word) that is a rough map of "the outside". In this conceptual world built of our sense impressions, we are the hero of a continually-running play. We can't abide not being the hero, so change is threatening.

The key to story is that stories are about change. If nothing changes there is no story to tell. Stories that catch our interest, that grip us, that move us, are about changes in persons caused by changes in their circumstances coupled with their reactions thereto, particularly when their control methods fail.

For example, most of us know how to handle a rainy day. We look outside, see that rain is falling, so we take an umbrella, a raincoat, perhaps galoshes, and we're usually good to go. We leave early so we won't be late, because we know getting somewhere will take longer in the rain. Now suppose what we see out the window is no ordinary rainstorm, but a historic hurricane, with torrential rainfall in the three-inch-per-hour range and hundred-mph winds. And we absolutely, positively, somebody-will-die-if-we-don't, need to go somewhere. I don't own appropriate gear to venture into such a storm, which would need to include a car that will stay on the road in those conditions. But what if you simply can't go, and somebody really does die as a result. Now what? Do you berate yourself? Commit hara-kiri? Blow it off with an "Oh, well, things happen" attitude? If we have just described Act I and Act II of a 5-Act story, the next three acts will follow a person who changes, or one who does not change, as a result of the foregoing action.

We are resistant to change, particularly change to who we are and how we want to be perceived. We typically can't endure the thought of being seen as "bad." When a big enough change occurs, even a tragedy, it's hard for anyone to come out a true hero.

My wife and I and a dozen others were seriously affected when a close friend and his wife and children died in a carbon monoxide gas poisoning event in their home. Everyone was badly shaken. Some blamed themselves, except among them, nobody (other than my wife and I) even knew that carbon monoxide existed. Some got angry at God, "for letting it happen." Some learned from it and others walled it all off inside themselves. Of the 14 of us, my wife and I and three others did the inside work, the spiritual work, to learn and even gain something valuable from the experience. The rest soon "vanished into the woodwork." None of us 14 knew initially how to cope with such a tragedy. The coping skills we had were inadequate or were dramatically unhelpful. We had to grow and to change…or to decline to do so.

Someone could have written 14 stories about the extended event, or a 14-part story. I could not do so. Having read the book, and having done my best to pay attention, I realized I don't have the right personality or skills to actually craft such a story. I'm a straight-pin kind of man; if I had read this book fifty years ago, perhaps I could have incorporated the author's work into my skill set, but these things take time to learn effectively.

Mr. Storr calls his work "The Sacred Flaw Approach". We are all flawed. Our inadequate coping skills are examples of such flaws. What worked before isn't useful in the new situation. Good stories show us a flawed person, let us observe them in action, bring them into a new situation (often with the opening sentence), let us observe their failure, and then show us how they either permit themselves to change, or deny the change.

When I have counseled others who are struggling to cope, I've told them the definition of a neurosis: a defense or coping mechanism that is out of date. One woman asked, "Am I neurotic, then?" I said, "In that sense we all are." And I remember what the apostle Paul wrote to the Romans, "Be transformed by the renewing of the mind." This is the meaning of "repentance," a change of mind. It happens to be just about the hardest thing anyone can do. It was no "easy believe" gospel that Jesus proclaimed, when His first word was "Repent." So the kind of stories that this book analyzes come down to practical repentance when the old ways stop working…or to failure to repent.

The book's four chapters, and 40 sub-chapters, discuss all the pieces. The extended Appendix details a kind of recipe for the 5-Act story, and uses the book The Godfather by Mario Puzo to brilliantly show how it fits that formula (the film is simplified and takes a sidestep, which actually enhances the story's power). One could have as easily used Jurassic Park; a colleague of mine many years ago had been the college roommate of Michael Crichton, who at that time was building his skills and methods for writing, and he told some of us the formula Crichton used for his books.

So we are all control freaks, and when our control methods fail, we may grow or we may descend into depression and obscurity, the true opposite of a happy ending. The best stories, according to Will Storr, tell of someone who is faced with such a transition, however it may turn out.

Memoirs of a Meta-Author

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays, writing, books, books about books

What is the difference between a columnist and a blogger? This isn't a trick question. The columnist usually gets paid by the publisher. Of course, some bloggers are earning money from their weblogs, but they are paid more directly by advertisers or by subscribers. There is also a difference of tone. Most bloggers, myself included, primarily write what pleases them, and if others like to read it also, so much the better. The tone of a columnist's writing can range from very personal to hortatory to documentary, but is more outwardly focused than the usual weblog.

Here, a book combines literary criticism with a weblog: Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books, by Michael Dirda. The 52 chapters are weblog posts from a one-year assignment with American Scholar. The posts average about 1,000 words—similar in size to my posts in this weblog—which is about 2-3 times as long as is "recommended" in the various "advice for bloggers" pages. But if ever someone could merge column writing with blogging, it is he.

And if ever someone made a living out of writing about writing, Dr. Dirda is the prince of such meta-writers. His 1992 Pulitzer Prize was conferred upon his columns of book reviews. The columns/posts in Browsings are more personal than critical (in the positive sense of the word: evaluative). He loves books, and by his account reads such a great deal I am rather amazed he has time to write about it.

I couldn't really categorize the chapters into a coherent set of bunches. I thought I had wide-ranging interests, but reading this book put me in the presence of a mind of Galactic proportions (yes, that is a bit of a pun. He reads mostly fiction, including a large measure of science fiction). I can only systematize thus far: Some of the chapters are focused on lists of books or book sets, and some (the smaller quantity) are not.

For example, the chapter "Wonder Books" contains an annotated list of books be bought on a certain day at Wonder Books and Video in Frederick, MD. This is one of the shorter lists, 19 volumes, but 15 of the book titles are followed by a half-page mini-review. This is also the longest chapter, 11 pages (Yes, I counted them all from the table of contents. Two others approach 10 pages in length. And just FYI, early on the chapters average about 5 pages, but later they average 7).

The author describes himself as an "almost hoarder". He keeps shelves in several rooms full of books, but rotates them from piles and piles of boxes in the basement. In one chapter, "The Evidence in the (Book) Case", he lists the books at his bedside: at least 33 volumes, though some not mentioned as such might be multi-volume titles. I reckon that is enough to fill four feet of shelving, or two shelves of a substantial night stand.

Looking around, I am glad I learned to draw the line and limit my collecting of early books and "firsts" to a couple of dozen, the rest of my shelving being devoted to books my wife and I have found useful. In this "Cave", I have forty feet of shelving, very nearly filled. One four-foot shelf contains many years of Scientific American in box-sleeves and shorter runs of a few other magazines for which I keep only the past two or three years. Another three-foot shelf is mostly filled with our cook books, and the one just below it, with my wife's language-instruction volumes (she worked as a language tutor for many years). In an upstairs bedroom with built-in shelving, the "Library", another thirty feet are about 80% filled, sharing space with some knick-knacks and pictures in frames. That room's collections are primarily related to spiritual matters and Bible study.

Nearly all the books I've reviewed in this weblog the past ten years were borrowed from the local library. I don't feel the need to keep a copy of a book that I plan to read only once. About once yearly I like a book I've read well enough to go out and buy (or use Amazon to get it). Otherwise, my night stand contains, in addition to the one I'm currently reading, three or four volumes waiting in the wings, plus an omnibus volume of Shakerspeare's plays that I occasionally peruse, and The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen J Gould, from which I read a page or two at a time. I do intend to finish it…

One of the shortest chapters, "Grades", at four pages, is a personal musing about having to give grades to the students he teaches, and his own spotty grade record. He dislikes grades, though nobody has suggested a better way to efficiently evaluate learning, concluding, "People are individual, so how can you reduce them to an A, a B, or a C? Or even, sometimes, to a D – along with an invitation to stop by for a quiet chat with Dr. Calta, the high school principal?"

I have sometimes wondered what the bookish life is like. Reading Browsings has gone a long way toward satisfying that itch.

Am I interesting enough to write about?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, writing, memoir

First please note that the keyword above is not "memoirs" but "memoir". The title of Beth Kephart's book Handling the Truth: on the Writing of Memoir should make it clear. The book is not a memoir, but contains advice about writing your memoir. Ms Kephart should know, I suppose; she has written five memoirs.

I recall a time that a person of note (at least to him- or herself) would, upon approaching dotage, retreat "to write my memoirs". It was done once, to cap one's life, to grasp the chance to tell one's own story, perhaps in hopes of having the last word. Fat chance if you're at all controversial, but a nice try!

Times have changed. Now the word is singularized, and "a memoir" can limn events and experiences from any period from a few days to all the life one remembers or can reconstruct. Or—and this interests me most—a memoir might deal with certain kinds of experience throughout a life, leaving other sorts of things to be dealt with in another volume. Thus, in "Part 2: Raw Material", the sections on Photos, Loves, Weather, Landscapes, Songs, Colors, Voices, Tastes, Smells, Possessions and First Memories could each form the core of a separate memoir. Although the author intends these to be woven into a single work, an analytical sort such as I am might do better focusing on one aspect at a time. I particularly like the idea I had upon finishing the book last evening, to collect favorite photos from all eras I've lived through (6.5 decades and counting), to form a core of a memoir.

The essence of the author's work, to which she returns again and again, is the nature of truth and how we handle it (thus the title). I think we have all experienced a bull session with siblings or other relatives, or with classmates or colleagues, in which a dispute arose over some event, and everyone had a different take on what happened. Every memory is partial. Our visual-auditory-sensory-memory system is selective. Our brain's storage system is very capacious, but definitely not infinite. Also, each person has a different perspective, a different angle. In an extreme case, two people standing a few feet apart and looking out the front door will see entirely different scenes. If closer together, so they see some of the same things, each will see things the other does not. Our attention, informed by prior experiences and interests, is like that doorway.

From where I sit, I can, by scanning my visual center, read the titles of most of the thousand or so books in this room. With a little more care, I can discern the serifs and other details that distinguish the hundreds of typefaces used. A photograph with enough detail to enable the same would require some 30-50 million pixels. We don't know how the brain encodes a visual memory, but a good (not extreme) quality JPEG image file would be about 8 Mbytes in size. If we were like super high quality (think Omni Theater) video recorders, a few minutes' worth of visual memory would fill the brain. Most of what we see (99.9% or more!) is filtered out. Now that I have looked away, back at the computer screen, I couldn't tell you the order of the books. I have a pretty good idea where the ones are that I use the most, and that is about it.

Even the more, we often conflate memories. If you've been to a certain villa for vacations ten years in a row, and on one occasion your younger brother needed medical attention, can you be very sure, 20-30 years afterward which of the ten years it was? Your brother may know the most accurately, were he old enough to form stable memories (at least 5) at the time. I remember pulling my younger brother out of a swift river when I was 7 and he was 3. He doesn't remember it. And anyway, it might actually have been the next year. Perhaps my father (in his 90s) might remember the year better, if he remembers which years we visited that particular farm.

So when we discuss past events with others who were there, we need to keep an open mind. Planning to put that event in a memoir? Then do your best to collate all the memories, taking advantage of which person has the strongest interest in accurate recall.

This brings to mind a problem students of the Bible have in making a Harmony of the Gospels, something I have also done. It is an attempt to turn the Gospels into a single historical narrative. Events recorded in two or more of the Gospels are sometimes different in detail. For example, Mark may write of a leper or blind man being healed, where Matthew mentions two lepers or two blind men. Even worse, the healing of Bartimaeus is listed before Jesus entered Jericho in Mark, but afterward in Luke. Some use such "conflicts" to denigrate the accuracy of the Bible as a whole. But consider each writer. Matthew was a tax collector. An expert in accurate counting. If he says Two, it was two. Mark (actually Peter, who told the stores Mark wrote down) focused on one, and may have noticed only one of them. Further, Luke was not an eye-witness. He interviewed people some 30 years later, and put down the stories in the best order he could, but in many cases, he could only use the order in which he got them from others. However, Luke was also a physician, so when he says a certain man had dropsy, you can be sure it was dropsy. The word is used only in his Gospel. He probably asked the eye-witness of details regarding the sick man to make his diagnosis.

OK, you have lots of material, and a great interest in generating a memoir. Now what? The shortest sections of the book involve the mechanics and process. Much more important, to exercise empathy and to have a worthwhile goal. Memoir is art, and we are encouraged, "Seek Beauty". You want your reader to be glad to have read it, even if you are writing only for three family members and no others. Actually, especially when writing for a small audience! Will they be offended? Thus the need for empathy.

Most of all, we are urged to read, read, read. Almost a quarter of the book is a long Appendix in which we find short reviews of more than 70 published memoirs, sorted into categories by aim or subject, recognizing that "the subject" is typically one slightly more prominent than two or three others. I may take Ms Kephart's advice, but as an autodidact, I may not. Just as I find "folk art" (art by nonprofessionals) more satisfying than the classics, the efforts of unschooled writers more frequently have great charm and beauty. If I write any memoir(s), the key question is, Why? Maybe some day soon I'll know.

Words of motion, words of wonder

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, words, writing

Not every sentence needs them. Nearly every sentence has them. Some languages almost dispense with them. Others lavish attention on them with inflection after inflection. A Romanian friend who speaks several languages told me, "French grammar is endless!" She was referring particularly to the conjugations of verbs. When I was learning French, my fellow students and I joked that French had a hundred verb conjugations, each of which had a different way to spell the inflection, but nearly all were pronounced "-ee".

Ah, Verbs! Even in English, which is considered a language having minimal inflection—it usually uses helper words instead—many verbs have as many as six forms. Consider swim. As a child I learned, "Today I swim, yesterday I swam, and I have swum many times in the past." Then there is, "I am swimming," and, "He swims fast," and finally, the noun made from swim: "I am a swimmer."

Such verbs are called irregular today. The regular verbs simply add -ed for the past tense and past participle, though they still add -ing for present progressive, -s for third person singular present, and -er for the related noun (when one exists). Thus, spill, spilled, have spilled, spilling, spills and spiller (it exists, but is darn rare). Then we have niceties such as doubling certain final consonants and using -es rather than -s for final sibilants. This all makes learning English tricky for a foreigner (but not as tricky as French!).

Fortunately, only about a ninth (some say an eighth or even a seventh) of English words are verbs. More than half are nouns. As there are at least 14 ways to forma noun's plural (including nouns that have no plural), nouns bedevil language learners the most. But verbs come a close second; in our speech, we seldom create a sentence without using a verb, or several.

The most common verbless sentence is the admonition intended to stop a child in his tracks: "John!" This monosyllable typically implies a lot: "John, what are you doing? You stop that!" Two verbs, one including the helper are; a proper noun and four pronouns; all wrapped up in one exclamation. So even when we don't speak a verb, it comes right along anyway.

Over many years I gathered words and word forms from many sources. Then I classified them, producing a reference with nearly 61,800 words and all their forms: nouns and noun plurals, verbs with their 4 or 5 inflections, adjectives with their comparative and superlative forms, and all the common adverbs, connectives (AKA conjunctions), exclamations or interjections, prepositions and pronouns. The nouns number just over 6,750 or 11% of the lot. Adverbs outnumber verbs a little, adjectives number about 10,500, and the nouns dominate: more than 31,600 (most with plural forms).

But if you add up the kinds of words used in everyday speech and ordinary writing (not creative or formal prose, and certainly not poetry), verbs don't quite dominate, but make up about a sixth of the words used, and as the stage directors of every sentence, form a structure that would fall apart without them. Here is the prior sentence with all verbs removed:

But if you the kinds of words in everyday speech and ordinary writing [a gerund not a verb] (not creative or formal prose, and certainly not poetry), verbs don't quite, but about a sixth of the words, and as the stage directors of every sentence, a structure that without them.

Rather hard to follow, what? So when we have, as the inmate said in Cool Hand Luke, "a failure to communicate", the blame belongs to verb use, whether sloppy or pathological. (When President Clinton said, "That depends on what the definition of 'is' is.", that was pathological.) Part of the problem is the rules we probably all learned in grade school. Some rules are useful, such as those for recognizing when a verb takes a direct or indirect object. But other rules of "grammar" are misleading or simply wrong, because they are based on Latin as it was spoken by Cicero and Pliny. For example, do you remember being told not to split an infinitive? Miss Thistlebottom in your third-grade class would deplore, "To boldly go where no man has gone before." An assignment would be returned with the emendation, "Boldly to go…", but the writer of the Star Trek motto made a few millions off that phrase! In fact, in Latin it is impossible to split an infinitive, because Latin doesn't use to; Latin infinitives are single words, but every English infinitive is two or more words. English infinitives practically invite spitting! So go ahead, when you need to really split one, split away!!

The twelve chapters of Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing, by Constance Hale, take on the remnants of our faulty education. Ms Hale hopes to make us all better writers as we learn how verbs really work, and how they can make our writing better understood (or make it foggier, if that is our aim). The four verbs of the title form the structure of each chapter. After some intro, the Vex section discusses/exposes a problem, the Hex section propounds a curse upon the ensuing misunderstanding, then the author Smashes and pillories sundry blunders that made it into print, and finally she offers a Smooch to the writers whose writing keeps us reading, particularly illustrating the right way to tackle that chapter's conundrum.

This doesn't mean there are twelve classes of rules needing correction. The first four chapters are historical, outlining the development of English over the past 15 centuries into the growing, effervescing brew we now enjoy. With the right perspective we can enjoy using its capabilities fully. Thus the eight following chapters help us understand tenses and voices and moods and so forth. I particularly like the author's take on the passive voice. We can't write well without it, so the pronouncements of some to "eliminate" or "avoid" or even "eschew" using passive constructions constrain us either to overactive, hyped prose or to vapid "activese".

I think of the passive voice as akin to dietary fat. We need some, just not too much. About one-eighth of our food, by weight, can be fat. Similarly, if you scan the verbs in good writing you'll find that about one sentence in eight is some kind of passive construction. Let's see, the sentence above that begins "About one-eighth…" uses a passive construction. What would I have to do to "activize" it? How about "Fat can weigh in at one-eighth of our food," or "We can healthily consume food containing up to 1/8th fat." I think the way I originally wrote it simply scans better, and matches a common mode of speech.

Near the end a chapter is devoted to "phrasal verbs", constructions such as make up, chase down, put off and look up to. These powerful verbs need thoughtful use in our writing. They easily become clichés, and some such as meet up with (just use meet) should be avoided. Phrasal verbs often lead to sentences that end in prepositions. Thus, we find a simple, straightforward question: "Did the plant shut down?" (Dear Miss Thistlebottom, this is also a passive construction. So there!). Unless you know who shut it down, it would be incorrect to ask, "Did you shut down the plant?", even though the voice is now active and the final preposition has been "moved inward". The original question implies further investigation will follow, as it ought to (another final prep.). A goodly number of examples are discussed, and either their fallacy is explained, or they pass muster. An appendix goes into further detail.

Ah, the appendices! The six appendices do not quite set a record. Each is a short chapter (without the Vex, etc.), and well worth reading. Appendix Three in particular recommends several dictionaries. It is good to have a few. A quick look around shows that I have four English dictionaries in this room, and two bilingual ones. In the next few days as I finish clearing out my office (8 "work" days until retirement!), I'll bring home four more, including a 20-pound Unabridged (New 20th Century something-or-other), plus a Larousse's French/English for my son. I also have a couple rhyming dictionaries. I will leave behind the dictionaries of Geography and of Physics terms for my colleagues, who have been visiting to use them anyway.

This book could have been larger, I suppose, but it serves well for its aim. When we write, we usually wish to be understood. Gaining a better command of verbs will strengthen our writing. Finally, a book about English usage that isn't about "Grammar" (which really means "the way of Latin usage before it killed off the Romans")!

How to rewrite endlessly

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, writing, editing

Several years ago a retiring colleague gave me several books she didn't intend to take home. Now I am going through the same process myself. I decided to read one of these hand-me-downs that looked interesting: How to Write So People Can Understand You by Robert S. Burger (1914-1998). Beginning in 1958, he taught a course on concise writing for more than thirty years, to a great many of America's largest corporations. He focused on saying the most with the fewest words, without seeming choppy or overly terse. The first edition of his book was published in 1969; mine is the second edition of 1971. It was not reprinted, but a few used copies are found from time to time at Amazon.

The content of the book is simply the content of Mr. Burger's writing course. In 29 chapters—after 4 short chapters of introductory material—he discusses and demonstrates 39 "agents" of bad writing. His experimental subject is the "Sloane Report". The "Stage 1" version is about 2¼ pages of typescript, with 75 numbered, double-spaced lines. At Stage 7 it fits on a half page, though now the paragraphs are single-spaced. Nonetheless, there are but 21 lines.

I have taken several business writing classes. I recall one for which we were given a bad example and asked, prior to the first class session, to try to improve it. I went through the standard sort of editing processes I had learned before, and wrote a version I thought was pretty good. After a couple of days, I wasn't so happy with it. I tackled it again. I turned in both rewrites, with a note: "The second version is what I would write if I weren't afraid of the recipient." It was clear, bold, frank, almost terse, and made the point that needed making, with sufficient backup. It earned praise from the instructor, who said to all the class that the primary "disease" we need to overcome as writers is fear of the reader's reaction.

As I compare the various Stages of the Sloane Report, I find that the 7th stage is indeed frank and fearless, in great contrast to the 1st. It makes me wonder, what if Sloane had been handed back the report with, "Fit this on half a page, and make it clear!"? Would it match Burger's version?

I found the book quite interesting, but as I read I began to be bothered. Could anyone other than Burger really go through all this Sturm und Drang over a single, 2-page report? Were Mr. Burger alive to ask, I am sure he would say he could boil it down in an hour, or perhaps half an hour. True, but could anyone else? Unlikely. But perhaps I should give him the benefit of the doubt: I am sure those who take this course do not go through a 39-step or even 29-step process with all their reports afterward. Like any other complex task, in editing we learn to recognize a collection of errors and correct them all at once. After taking a course like this, a student would have picked up at least several of the ideas and be able to apply them. Over time, the skill would grow.

However, I find it telling that the book has been out of print for forty years. The writing book I keep on my desk, and continue to refer to, is "the little book": The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. I also have a PDF of the original 1918 edition of Elements that I read through once to see what White changed after Strunk's death. White improved it. Strunk had his idiosyncrasies, but his 105-page book remains in print. The short collection of maxims under the heading "Omit Needless Words" encapsulates the spirit of all the 39 "agents" in Burger's book. "The little book" is, quite simply, not overwhelming. How to Write is overwhelming.

A writer's writer

kw: observations, opinion, writing, writers

I wish to comment further on Globish by Robert McCrum, which I reviewed yesterday. Reading the book was an experience not far removed from reading a good novel. I was not just learning, but was transported elsewhere.

Though the book is filled with evidence of great erudition, it is not a dry, scholarly tome. I have had to read plenty of learned works, the kind that induce slumber. Most share some common defects, all of which McCrum has adroitly avoided. He used endnotes, but done in a style that does not leave the text riddled with superscripted 1,2,3; the notes themselves are succinct and seldom exceed two lines; the references to published work are smoothly done, avoiding author (date) references in favor of more personal and personable narrative; he avoided footnotes, because if something is worth saying it is worth saying as you go and be done with it, and this goes for long endnotes also.

I was reminded of the best of nineteenth century writing (a century which also produced some of the least readable books every printed). Reading ought to be a joy, and give evidence that the author enjoyed the writing as much as you enjoy the reading. A well-written book makes me feel as if I were snuggled with the author in an overstuffed chair as we read together. I do hope Mr. McCrum would not find such a sentiment creepy.

Turn over a rock and...

kw: genealogy, writing

For the first time since writing a dissertation, I spent the whole day writing. I was composing mini-biographies of selected ancestors, going into the production of a book-length document. In most cases, once I got into each person's records, there was a conundrum or two to solve. In one case, a few sources indicated a certain wife and mother, but the dates were funny: she was 20 years older than her purported husband, and supposedly gave birth at ages between 55 and 70. Even if you shift the birth date by twenty years, having children at age 50 was pretty darn rare in the 1600s. Women who tried, mostly died. Also, the records indicate the man's wife was widowed while the children were somewhat young, but she was in no way feeble. I had to conclude that I do not know the name or dates of the woman. In another case, nearly every account cobbles together events from the lives of a father and his son to produce one generation where it seems certain there were two.

This kind of work is interesting and gratifying. The day went by like nothing.

Weaving with straw

kw: family history, genealogy, writing

If locating a new ancestor is like finding a needle in a haystack, genealogy as practiced by my mother and two other women to whom I am related is like weaving the haystack into a tapestry, and using it to display one's needle collection. First and foremost, I am thinking of a book I received very recently, Buckland Filleigh: A Continuous Thread by Madeline Jane Taylor.

There are thousands of books that recount the family history of one specific family, but a much smaller number that weave together the history of a region or place out of all the family stories to be found in it. When a place is small enough, it is possible in one volume to encompass all the family histories, and that appears to be what Mrs. Taylor has done for Buckland Filleigh, a parish in Devon, England that is one of twenty-six in the Shebbear Hundred.

A Hundred is an administrative unit, as set up by the Saxons, consisting of one hundred "hides", a hide being a land area that can support one family. It is not hard to determine that Buckland Filleigh, then, contains but a handful of hides. But in modern times, by which I mean since the Industrial Revolution of the early 1800s, only a few families might live by farming, while the rest have "day jobs", so the chronicle of even this small place is rich with stories and is quite a challenge to compile.

I cannot yet review the book, as I am still reading it, and that right slowly. For the moment, it is quite amazing the amount of raw information from parish records, land office records, tax records and other sources that the author has compiled to produce the book. Was it Rumpelstiltskin who wove straw into gold? The nugget for which I obtained the book is the last appendix, an 8-generation descendancy chart for Stephen Vanstone, an ancestor of Mrs. Taylor's, and also one of mine. From noting where the line to her and the line to me branch, I reckon that we are eighth cousins.

Genealogy of the Lindsey Family, compiled by Emily Lindsey, is an unpublished manuscript that jump-started me and my mother in the genealogy obsession. We received in 1962 a typescript produced by my mother's cousin from the manuscript. This cousin had typed up the 1901 manuscript and added a few pages to bring it up to date to 1962. The total volume is but 30 pages of double-spaced typescript, containing the vital data for about 100 people, beginning with Thomas Macy, one of the original purchasers of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. Miss Lindsey, my great-grandfather's sister, must have been about my age when she compiled the material, starting with the Lindsey family Bible.

The descendancy record from Thomas Macy to her generation occupies just five pages. The following twenty-one pages record other descendant families, Freelands, Pecks, Turners and others. My mother's cousin added Lusters, Wilcoxes, Vanstones and more, and one or two more recent generations of the other families, for a record of about 100 cousins through the fourth degree, most of whom I've never known.

Then there is my mother. She, my brothers and I figured out Miss Lindsey's system (by no means clear at first), and drew charts of the ten generations of our own family tree. Within a few years, my parents' nest emptied and my mother joined a genealogy club, among other pursuits. Then I found in a library The history of Nantucket: county, island, and town, including genealogies of first settlers by Alexander Starbuck. Mom told me, "At the genealogy club, we all have cake when someone finds one new ancestor. This book has about thirty, so we had quite a party!" That was in 1970, now forty years ago.

Just a few years ago, my brother sent all her genealogical records to me; she'd sent them to him when she could no longer continue to research and compile. He did quite a bit of research himself, in the years just before we all got computers. The core is a large, half-folio-size binder of pedigree pages, more than 100 of them. A box of photocopies from books, newspapers, and other sources rounds out the material. My brother did not add to the pedigree pages, but had gathered census records in both the US and England. Again, this was before computers: he photocopied microfilm records.

I think if she'd had time and energy, my mother would have written a book from all this. She is gone now six years. Since my brother sent me all the stuff, I've put it into Ancestry.com and the number of ancestors in the tree has grown to just over one thousand. The descendancy information on cousins I've chosen to track adds another hundred or so. That is quite a needle collection!

Are writers born, or made?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, writing, education

I am a writer. Sorry if that sounds trite, but to state it is one of Elizabeth Berg's suggestions in Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True. When I read (and reviewed) The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted, I learned of this book, and decided to track it down.

I find I have written nearly 650 posts, about two-thirds book reviews. I write to please myself, though I find I'm quite tickled when an author likes my review and comments to say so. The proportion of book reviews has dropped since I began posting more often. I used to post about twice a week; that has about doubled. But I am still reading at about the same rate. In a sense, I am following Robert Heinlein's advice, who wrote, "Write a story every week. I defy anyone to write 52 bad stories in a row." He's probably been proven wrong. I am hoping I haven't written 600+ bad essays in a row! But I know, according to Sturgeon's Law, "90% of everything is junk." That's OK.

I have two places I write. One is the office of my day job, where I'll either write a post over my lunch break, or come in early enough to write one before the day begins. Perhaps someday I'll look over these two kinds of posts to see how they differ. The other is a dedicated "computer room" at home, where any posts I write in the evening, or at insomniac hours, emerge.

All of these accord with suggestions by Ms Berg. She also strongly urges journaling. I wonder if blogging qualifies. When I was very young (a pre-teen) I wrote daily in a journal, but in a cipher, being shy. I've lost those journals. This blog is as close to a journal as I have now. So, I don't have the paper journal that Ms Berg suggests writers use for private thoughts. I may have to remedy that, for she has a chapter that totally floored me: "If you're a man, be a woman: exercises to unleash your creativity". That's 33 pages of short suggestions that she fully expects a serious student of writing to take up, one by one (though not in order). At about ten per page, there are more than 300 of these suggestions! Here are a random dozen:

• Getting a puppy
• Describe three kinds of rain.
• __________ children. [you fill in the blank, then write a page or few]
  
• The worst date you ever had
• Describe a scene by starting with a wide-angle view, the moving in for a close-up. Now do the opposite.
• Your father begins by saying, "It's time to tell you something." Finish what he says.
• The man is not crying, but you know his heart is breaking. How do you know?
• What I always wanted most was his ____________.
• Use these three words in a short paragraph: baseball, poetry, fortune cookie.
• as likely as a trip to ___________.
• Room by room, describe your ideal house.
• your favorite cup

At the end of this chapter, the "homework" is to make up ten more of these.

Though there is a chapter, "Myths to Ignore", I find much of the book to be overturning myths and other faulty ideas. The prime focus is to define what a writer is. In short, a writer writes. People write for different reasons. My son, a good writer, primarily writes to fulfill his college assignments. Most writers enjoy writing. Those that don't mainly quit after a while. Some writers love writing, and it is these that we most enjoy reading.

I remember Isaac Asimov, among whose 400+ books, nearly 300 were nonfiction. He wrote for hours every day, keeping four manuscrips going at any one time, rotating among them. When asked, "What would you do if you knew you would die in two weeks?", he replied, "Type faster." His joy in writing shines through. To a critical eye, the quality of his writing is variable, but it is uniformly enjoyable to read. Elizabeth Berg has that same quality. She writes as she breathes, because she must.

Much of her instruction and advice is for those who wish to write fiction, particularly those who think they can't write fiction. It boils down to "Write what you know", and we all know more than we think we do. In particular, to be human is to be complex. You don't have to be insane to recognize that you have many strong facets to your personality, some of which can at times "take over" and operate independently (For someone who is Bipolar, as I am, it is like there are mainly two people in there, one cheerful, one rather morose or thoughtful, who alternate control). Every writer builds characters by mining this internal storehouse of personalities. I think, even when we write nonfiction in the first person, we use fictional story-telling methods.

Writing is not so much creating theme, plot, character, and so forth out of whole cloth, but of winnowing nuggets of passion and meaning from a remembered and imagined life full of events both precious and drab. When I remember a signal event, and want to tell the story, I know that I dare not recount every detail; that could take hours, and I have half a minute. I have to extract a few key details that support and lead to the conclusion, the response I want to elicit.

Just a couple of days ago, I was with one of my most long-standing friends. He lives a continent away, so we had decades to catch up on. We spent five hours together, and it went by so fast, I was astonished when I noticed it had got dark outside. Now, if he and I wrote down what we said, would it make something others would enjoy reading? I don't know, but I realized later that every life is rich with story material, whether I want to tell the stories as fiction or not. The brother of a rancher friend of mine in South Dakota is an English teacher and author. I read one of his books, and said to him later, "It sounds like plain fact told with different names." His red-faced grin let me know I had him pegged.

My favorite kind of fiction is science fiction. As I've matured, I've realized when I get away from the Tom Swift-style juvenile adventures for the sake of adventure and whiz-bang gizmos, that sci-fi is about people and how they grow, just as much as is "mainstream" fiction. The stories are told on a more speculative stage.

I don't know if I'll ever write for paid publication. My published work to date is technical, (except for a few poems printed in a rockhounding journal) and either unpaid or I paid the page charges. As much as I like reading sci-fi, I don't know if I could write any. I am most comfortable writing essays and opinion pieces. And a blogger doesn't need an agent to market the work or an editor to accept and prepare it. That suits my lazy nature. But I may try some of those 300 journal exercises…

Dream writing

kw: dreams, writing

I woke up from a vivid dream a short time ago. I had entered a quirky writing contest; I had a moment to look at a flash card with a subject, then half an hour to write an essay on two sheets (supplied) of paper. I awoke at that point, struggled a bit to remember the subject, then an essay began to spin itself out in my head. Here is the result:

Subject: "All men are created equal. Defend or refute."

Thomas Jefferson knew what he was about when he wrote, "…all men are created equal." He had no way of knowing whether it is true of "all persons…". What is true: we all begin as a fertilized ovum containing 46 chromosomes (except for a few genetic accidents). A male ovum contains a single Y chromosome. At this point creation is complete, and development, chance, experience, and education take over. These items certainly are not equal.

Consider my parents, two musical people with little else in common, though they got along quite well. Dad, a mechanical sort with great people skills, had a year of college and an Army background in the Corps of Engineers. Mom, an emotional, even passionate woman with a flair for extravagance, loved history and geology, finished junior college and worked in an engineering office until the two of them married in 1946. They had four boys…four quite different boys.

I, the eldest, got the history and geology, and a good dose of the musical talent. I got little of the mechanical aptitude. I became a computer programmer, something nothing in their background (except musical aptitude perhaps) could have predicted. I came close to earning a PhD, but didn't finish.

Boy #2 is a historian, calligrapher, and now archaeologist. A good singer, but otherwise not much of a musician. He, as I, is a perfect speller. He did complete a PhD.

Boy #3 got all the mechanical aptitude, but being dyslexic, is not much of a scholar, though he finished college. He designs environmental remediation equipment.

Boy #4 disdained college in favor of Dianetics training. He usually makes his living as a handyman and remodeler, though he has the best people skills of us all. He plays guitar and, like all of us, can sing well.

Four boys, four very different people, yet with a common thread. Created equal perhaps, but creation isn't everything.

There you have it. I don't think I'd have won the contest.

A writer, an editor, or something in between?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, writing, reviewing

I seldom read writing about writing. As I hope this blog gives evidence, the way to learn to write is to write (and considering the very few pieces that have been published, to say nothing of remuneration, it is clear I am not destined to rank among the pros).

However, seeing the dust jacket almost forced me to take the book—In Other Words by John Crowley—home to read. Dust jacket, endpiece, and at section heads, the book is illustrated with old etchings by Grandville and others, similar in tone to this one. Picking early 19^th-Century illustrations does neatly avoid copyright dust-ups.

Author Crowley has quite a bit to say about writing, and quite well put. As it happens, after four essays in fifty pages, the rest of the book is book reviews. Giving it another look, three of the essays are reviews of a sort as well, but of a body of work rather than a single volume.

This is sort of like, "who watches the watcher?"...I am reviewing a book of reviews! It's a good thing they are smashing good reviews.

One section contains reviews of a few works each by the authors Robt. Louis Stevenson, Thos. M. Disch, T.H. White, Vladimir Nabokov, and Anthony Burgess. Having read at least one book by each of the five, I found myself nodding in agreement as he extracted something essential from each author. For example, though no single review brought this out, the several reviews of Burgess's work make clear his later torments, and how they showed in the quality of his later writing (rather bad with one stellar exception).

After that section, the reviews are mostly single, ranging over quite a bit of history, including Daisy Ashford's The Young Visitors, written at age nine in 1890 (first edition 1919); comic-book writing (and a bit on illustration) by Walt Kelly (Pogo series) and others; to a posthumous publication of Italo Calvino's unfinished autobiography, reviewed in 2003 but written and gathered over a few decades, and edited by the author's widow.

Considering the way our minds work, I can't help but be influenced by Crowley, but it will be without conscious intention. He thinks very differently...and that's very good.

Behind the struggles of struggling writers

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays, collections, writing

One thing at least, besides being a published writer, these 66 writers have in common:

Eric Chase Anderson, Jake Arnott, Tash Aw, David Baddiel, Nicholson Baker, Melissa Bank, Caren Beilin, Ronan Bennett, Anthony Bourdain, Alain de Botton, Arthur Bradford, A. S. Byatt, John Byrne, Tim Carvell, Douglas Coupland, Marie Darrieussecq, Jill Dawson, Janine Di Giovanni, Tony D'Souza, Geoff Dyer, Michel Faber, William Fiennes, Tibor Fischer, James Flint, Jonathan Franzen, David Guterson, Peter Hobbs, Alan Hollinghurst, A. M. Homes, Siri Hustvedt, A. L. Kennedy, Chip Kidd, Nicole Krauss, Hanif Kureishi, Neil LaBute, Nick Laird, JT LeRoy, Jonathan Lethem, Javier Marias, Benjamin Markovits, Claire Messud, Jay McInerney, Rick Moody, Narasha Mostert, Audrey Niffenegger, Joyce Carol Oates, Gina Ochsner, ZZ Packer, DBC Pierre, Ian Rankin, Dan Rhodes, Tom Robbins, Bruce Robinson, Luis J. Rodriguez, Nar Segnit, Will Self, Elif Shafak, Lionel Shriver, Iain Sinclair, Jane Smiley, Ahdaf Soueif, Adam Thirlwell, Matt Thorne, Vendela Vida, Willy Vlautin, Louisa & Isabel Adomakoh Young

Of the 66, I previously knew of only six, and only of two have I read more than a paragraph. Of those two, only one am I likely to read from again. I guess my taste is even more restrictive than Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is junk." So anyway, what do they have in common?

They all contributed a paragraph or three to How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors, edited by Dan Crowe...with Philip Ottermann, in very small type. Many authors were asked what they needed—a special toy, room, ambience, whatever—to keep the words flowing. These contributed photos and short essays. For one, it is a tiny toy wind-up horse named Clippity; for another, a fifteen-foot-long built-in desk; for another, a few thousand sticky notes; and yet another, chain-smoking, but only during writing time.

If these self-revelations are any guide, I haven't lost much by not reading most of them. Theirs is a specialized audience, or indeed, sixty or more niche audiences. I found it interesting to compare the list of authors mentioned by the editors in their preface, and their quirks:

Agatha Christie, Gore Vidal, Lewis Carroll, Anthony Burgess, William Faulkner, G. K. Chesterton, Dan Brown, Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope, James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert, Henrik Ibsen, Herman Melville, Jane Austen, Philip Roth, Thomas Wolfe, Bruno Schulz, Oscar Wilde, P. G. Wodehouse, Vladimir Nabokov

Of these twenty, the only one I hadn't heard of is Bruno Schulz, and I've read from all the others. Their quirks were of a similar range: several require plenty of alcohol fuel; others coffee or tea; some a special ring, or mittens, or slippers; one wrote only in a rocker. A few on the former list, and many on the latter, "classic" list, wrote only by hand, eschewing typewriters or other automated helps.

The book is almost coffee-table size, yet the total text is no more than 20,000 words. Of course, there are the pictures nearly every author sent, but also tons of other artwork, graphics fantasies and typographic gingerbread. Without all that, the book would be the size of the "slim volume of poems" that encompasses many an author's first hardcover output.

The REAL bird man of the entire 20th Century

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, birds, painting, writing, collections

Roger Tory Peter with his painting of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which he knew from firsthand experience. (Photo by Virginia M. Peterson, on p.120 of All Things Reconsidered)

I grew up with a succession of the "Peterson Field Guides" either in my room or in the family book room down the hall. Though not an avid bird watcher, I have enjoyed occasional rambles through this field, desert, or mountainside with an appropriate field guide and binoculars in hand, usually with one friend, seldom more than one, and seldom alone.

I did not pay much attention to who Mr. Peterson was. I was clear he knew more about birds than anyone I was likely to meet. I was just happy for his clear method of quick identification, as I am far from a careful observer, and cannot sketch at all. I just look, that's about it.

How happy I was to find a book with forty-two of his essays from The Bird Watcher's Digest, edited by the journal's editor, Bill Thompson III: All Things Reconsidered: My Birding Adventures. Therein I found that Peterson was not just a field guide designer and illustrator for some sixty years, but an excellent painter of larger works, an avid (he says "obsessive") photographer, and a lucid, engaging writer. He has as well carried much of the heavy freight for the cause of conservation from the 1930s until he passed away in 1996.

The picture shown above is from the chapter titled "Finding the Ivory-billed Woodpecker" (the chapters are not numbered). He is one of a very few field guide illustrators to have seen and heard ivory-bills.

An inkling of the range of his interests is the prior chapter, "Orgy on Delaware Bay", about the mass egg-laying of horseshoe crabs and the great variety of birds and other creatures that feed on the eggs. That chapter ends with his advice to pay a visit to Moore's Landing on the full moon in May (June will work also), to see the spectacle, "this mystical conjunction of planetary and biological forces."

The world came close to losing him many years ago, when he visited a guano rock offshore of Argentina, to see the bird rookery there. Getting there, in a hired rowboat, was easy. An offshore wind that continually strengthens during the day, a foehn off the Andes, made the return nearly impossible! He closes that chapter, "High Seas in a Rowboat", "To take a chance once in a while and to get away with it is to feel alive."

Two other favorites chapters: "Memories of Manhattan", a lyrical evocation of the great hordes of migratory birds that visited Central Park in pre-WW2 times—though reduced, the spectacle is frequently similar today—; and "Long After Columbus", in which he asserts that the Endangered Species Act has done more harm than good (developers get a window of opportunity between "study" and "listing", which they all too often take tragic advantage of), and that while a few species have been lost, many more are benefited by human activities. Still, he acknowledges that we must keep watch, for not all activities are beneficial, and he is justly proud of his part in getting DDT banned in the 1960s.

Peterson the Polymath reveals himself to us in these wonderful columns. This book is a treasure.