Posts from — January 2008

This Top 10 Blogs for Writers list comes from Michael Stelzner at the Writing White Papers site. This is a fantastic list and definitely worth your time. He also has links to his other Top 10 lists immediately after this one.

He was interviewed on The Writing Show (direct link to that podcast) a few weeks before I was, which made the honor of being on that show that much greater given the quality of Michael’s work. His interview was about – not surprisingly – writing white papers. Even if that’s not your cup of tea, you’ll still learn some useful writing tips by listen to his interview.

The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded this day in 1986. In a few years, my son will probably have to come home and ask us where we were when certain historical events happened. He and the kids in his class will not believe that their parents could remember exactly what they were doing last week let alone years and years ago.

I was in 7th grade and we were out of school that day because of snow. I was watching “The Price is Right” and putting my dishes in the sink after having a late breakfast of pancakes when the CBS Special Report flashed on. I watched TV all day after that.

I also remember one other part of that day.

Tonight is The State of the Union Address, which will most likely be another laundry list of things that won’t come to pass and one that few will remember. It’s difficult to remember the last SotU speech that actually had something both memorable and positive in it.

I do remember Reagan’s speech that day 21 years ago and that still-famous line:

We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” to “touch the face of God.”

That speech was written by Peggy Noonan and certainly was a career-maker for her. As writers, we hope for even a single, inspired day like that. Regardless of what you think of Reagan, he knew how to deliver the words his speechwriters gave him.

The quoted pieces come from the poem “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. Magee died at the age of 19 in World War II. This is easily his most famous poem, though few outside the aviation world have ever heard of him.

Click the above link, scroll down, and read the entire poem. There’s a reason why it means something special to military aviators everywhere.

(Cross-posted at my other blog. Warning: May contain excessive amounts of language geekery.)

My wife and I were watching TV one night when a string of prescription drug ads filled the entire commercial break. I finally noticed something I should have seen before. The vast majority of drug names have three syllables, and many of those have an accent on the second one.

The obvious next question is, why?

It didn’t take me long to find this article, which provides some insight into how the whole process works and some of the linguistic science behind it.

The article doesn’t completely address my question, so here’s my guess for whatever it’s worth. As the article says, two or three syllables make it easier to remember. My theory about the accent on the middle syllable is that it creates an alternating ‘down-up-down’ pattern (for lack of a better term) that feels more poetic than the alternatives. It can stick in your head like a piece of song lyric.

Warning: serious geekery ahead. I just looked this up. This pattern of a stressed syllable surrounded by two unstressed ones is called an amphibrach. The real insight – it’s the primary pattern used in limericks. Makes sense now!

I was particularly fascinated by the article’s discussion of phonemes, which are basically the smallest pronounced units that make up any given word. (like c in car or f in far) I noticed the other day that an inordinate number of words that begin with sl (another example of a phoneme) have unpleasant connotations: slime, slink, slap, slam, slob, sloth, slum, etc.

From the above article:

“Research shows letters with a hard edge, like P, T or K, convey effectiveness. X seems scientific. L, R or S provide a calming or relaxing feel. Z means speed.”

Something to keep in mind next time you write something.

I didn’t do any research into this, but I think the name of a prescription drug has to be the most expensive word you’ll ever pay someone to write. A freelance magazine writer feels ecstatic to get $1/word. The name of a drug, however, goes for a couple million per word.

I’m in the wrong line of work.

Most writers call anything over 150,000 words an epic novel. Right now, I call it a software help library.

(Intrepid souls can go here to see it.)

One of the things I do is write help/support libraries for software. I use this documentation development software called Flare, which is essentially the half-sibling of RoboHelp. Flare lets you compose help resources of just about any size and export them to a variety of formats. In my case, that’s XHTML on a web site.

A word count on a project of that nature is not a conventional tool available in that sort of software. We just kept writing until we felt we were done for a given release. Little did I know how much we actually had written.

I downloaded a trial of Analyzer, Flare’s companion application for doing all sorts of quality control checks on your documentation. I didn’t have time to play with it much since it took two hours to complete the analysis of the help library. In the end, all I needed to see was the Statistics panel.

Total word count: 161,029

I think the actual number is a bit lower because it appears to have included a few sections I excluded from the final, compiled version. Still, the true word count has to be over 150,000.

In comparison, according to what I think are the statistics from Scholastic…

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’s total word count: 168,923

Excuse me while I go ice my hands.

I just finished reading Without, a collection of poems by Donald Hall, formerly the U.S. Poet Laureate. It’s easily the most powerful book of poems I’ve read in a long time.

In the first half of Without, Hall holds nothing back in his telling of the final weeks and months of his wife’s battle with leukemia. In the second half, Hall pours out one heart-wrenching line after another in a series of letters written as poems to her as he struggles to move on after her death.

The poems take an even deeper turn when you learn that Jane Kenyon, a well-known and excellent poet herself, was his wife. Having read some of her work in the past, I found exploring the literal and figurative marriage of their poetry brought out even more for me. After getting acquainted with them through some of their other poems and imagining the lives of these two soulful people together, the sense of the world crashing down in Without is all the more powerful.

When I imagined myself in his shoes with my wife in her place and let myself try to feel what was going through him, the book blew me away. Hall lays out a bare, pure truth in this work. We may be perfectly healthy now, but anticipating the possibility of such future grief is inescapable while reading this book. Hall brings us to understand that one cannot truly love without risking such terrible grief and loss, but that the alternative is a far worse fate.

To give you a sample, I found one of the poems from Without -
“Letter in Autumn” – on The Writer’s Almanac web site.

If you enjoy poetry at all, this book is a must read.

Even though there are still 11 or so shopping months until next Christmas/Hanukkah, I figured I’d get a jump on it by releasing the print version of my holiday short story That Day in the Manger (PDF, in a new window), which was broadcast on The Writing Show last month. (Direct link to that show)

I wanted to point people solely to Paula’s site for a while since she was gracious enough to have me on the show. Please do spread a little site traffic love and visit The Writing Show’s web site. Every writer should subscribe to her podcast. I was a long-time listener even before I was on the show, so no bias here!

Bartleby.com has the full content of The Elements of Style (1918) by William Strunk, Jr. available electronically for free through its site. It also includes a search box and a Table of Contents to help you find specific topics.

I know there are newer versions of both The Elements of Style and other grammar and usage guides, but this is a timeless classic that still affects us almost a century later. It’s the cornerstone of every grammar and style guide that has come after it.

You can also find many other online works at Bartleby.com.

Sometimes a blog is so good that it requires little introduction. If you are someone obsessed with language geekery or the arcana of English, this blog is for you.

Go read the Language Log.

Here’s something to bookmark. YourDictionary.com has a list of the 100 words they think are the most commonly misspelled words in English.

I think a number of them are more usage problems than spelling issues (e.g., conscious vs. conscience or its vs. it’s), but it’s hard to argue with much on their list. Until is the strangest one.

Accommodate is the one that always gets me. Don’t ask me why.

Continuing the tradition started by “It was a dark and stormy night,” the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest gives writers the chance to write (intentionally) the worst possible opening line of an imaginary novel.

You may spend countless hours at your desk believing your writing is the worst ever put down on paper or pixel. As long as this contest exists, you can rest assured that something out there is worse.

Here are the 2007 ‘winners’ along with more information about the contest.

It looks like entries for the 2008 contest are due April 15. Go intentionally write something bad and enter!