“writing”
65 posts under this tag.
This may sound silly but I was happy to read such a well-crafted confirmation email. Notice the avoidance of empty superlatives, the non-patronizing, the effort, not to sound hip or flippant or “professional”, but to be useful. The complimentary premium articles were the extra touch that made me want to share this with the world. This is persuasive (marketing) writing at its best.
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The McKinsey Quarterly is impressive by itself too, most interesting and with the best graphs I’ve seen since The Economist (and they present them inside sexy, useful Flash “exhibits” that allow you to zoom in/out and pan around).
 Annzah’s was the first blog I read, back before there was a word for blogs themselves. A belle with a knack for writing, drinking, geeking, musicking, and partying—all with flair—, she used to blog her life at glitterkitty.net/anna: living and growing up in Sweden, her many girlfriends (wives, she called them), her parents (she’s a single child), her extended family, going through one strange boyfriend, moving to London, reading, cooking, clubbing, living with the second (webdesigner!) boyfriend, working at a bar and a clotheshop, getting hurt—falls, car-accidents (hates cars), whatnot—a surprising amount of times, and starting an English major. Her candid blog got her intermittently into trouble and after many false starts she finally changed to LiveJournal, where she blogs very different stuff, far too far and in between.
She was somewhat obsessed with SuedeWP (whom I know thanks to her) and used many of their songtitles for her posts. Today Suede’s Saturday NightMP3 played randomly and I missed her suddenly, with a vengeance. “Having a public voice can make you a non-stranger, even to people you have never met.” This is a post to her.
Oh, whatever makes her happy on a Saturday night
Oh, whatever makes her happy, whatever makes it alright
We’ll go to peepshows and freak shows
We’ll go to discos, casinos
We’ll go where people go and let go
Oh, whatever makes her happy on a saturday night…
Suede, Saturday NightMP3)
Blogs are many different things to all of us, but sometimes, if the stars align just right, they can be empathic enzymes of sorts. They have been.
If you want to share an anecdote or story from your life, pretend the readers weren’t there. Because they weren’t. “You had to be there” never makes a joke funny.
Readers crave your anecdotes and stories. They really do. So give ‘em the whole megillah. Instead of, “The party was a riot!” or “I’m depressed today,” carefully explain why. Elaborate. Parties and depression are perfectly good writing subjects. The Great Gatsby, for instance, has plenty of both.
Anything makes a good subject, as long as you take your time and crystallize the details, tying them together and actually telling a story, rather than offering a simple list of facts. Do readers really want to know how miserable you are? Yes. But they’re going to want details, the precise odor of your room, why you haven’t showered in a week, or how exactly somebody broke your heart. One–liners won’t suffice.
At the same time, you don’t want to over–explain yourself. Understatement can be thunderous, or humorous, or heartbreaking. Or all three.
My final discovery of A List Apart—a magazine “for people who make websites”—has been late coming, but as the article I’m about to talk about explains, relationships in the web are just difficult to establish (they require “an exorbitant amount of synergy”, why-the-lucky-stiff would say). I’ve been visiting them fairly frequently along the past couple of years and almost always I’ve learned something valuable. It is not only top-notch content, the attention to detail is painstaking too, though it takes you several visits to start noticing it: from the spot-on illustrations (most by the very talented Kevin Cornell), to the helpful snapshot feature at the right, to the issue-number stamp, to the tasteful ads, to the impeccable atmosphere they maintain throughout, to Zeldman’s and Kissane’s careful editing—it’s not a print wannabe, it’s the first web-only alreadyam.
The cover article of issue 221 (as of this moment, the latest) is a gem and the reason I started writing this post. By Amber Simmons, it is wonderfully titled ”Gentle Reader, Stay Awhile; I Will Be Faithful” and deals with how to write (particularly, with how to write for the web) by introducing the never-before-better-named idea of a faithful writer—a writer who thinks of her reader, who anticipates her questions and curiosities; a loyal writer, respectful of her reader’s time and intelligence; a writer who delivers. Truly great advice—I know I’ll never write the same again.
I’ve been plowing through Humanized today and though it’s been somewhat less interesting than I thought it would be (perhaps my expectationsELZR were just too high), here are two very worthy text scraps:
Why do people use Google Maps? Because it’s just so nice to use. Microsoft’s Terraserver gave users access to high resolution satellite images many years before Google Maps did the same. (In fact, while attempting to be clever, I inadvertently terrified my to-be roommate: I used the service to view an aerial photograph of his home and asked him some leading questions about the stuff in his backyard. It took until the second quarter of college before he even talked to me, and then only warily.) But, it wasn’t until Google rethought online maps that the security and privacy issues of such a service came into the national conscience. Why? Because whereas Microsoft had given access to satellite imagery, Google made them accessible.
[Bracket Notation for Editing is] simply three sets of square brackets. The first set denotes deletion, the second set denotes addition, and the third set denotes a comment. It’s easiest to explain by example. Let’s start with a simple sentence plagued by two typical errors:
They called to say that their coming over in an quarter-hour.
An editor might revise the sentence to:
They called to say that the[ir][y’re] coming over in a[n] quarter-hour. [][][Be careful with “their” and “they’re”.]
George Orwell’s Why I Write. Genius.
..for fifteen years or more, I was… making up of a continuous “story” about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my “story” ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ”He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf,” etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The “story” must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality..
Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
- Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen—in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
- Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
- Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
- Political purpose—using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
By nature—taking your “nature” to be the state you have attained when you are first adult—I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, “I am going to produce a work of art.” I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.
..The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it..
Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
This is from Douglas Crockford’s Survey of Javascript (never program JS without your Crockford!). I thought it quirky at first, surprisingly helpful later. (Emphases added.)
The && operator is commonly called logical and. It can also be called guard. If the first operand is false, null, undefined, ”” (the empty string), or the number 0 then it returns the first operand. Otherwise, it returns the second operand. This provides a convenient way to write a null-check:
var value = p && p.name; /* The name value will
only be retrieved from p if p has a value, avoiding an error. */
The || operator is commonly called logical or. It can also be called default. If the first operand is false, null, undefined, ”” (the empty string), or the number 0, then it returns the second operand. Otherwise, it returns the first operand. This provides a convenient way to specify default values:
value = v || 10; /* Use the value of v, but if v
doesn't have a value, use 10 instead. */
Short-circuit logical operators are a well-known, simple idiom in several languages, but they can sometimes be confusing to read, specially when nested. What I want to point out here is that next time you have to go through code that uses them, try reading them as guard or default, as the case may be. You’ll grokEE them immediately, trust me.
Isn’t it striking, the power of names?
Mi storyteller hermana Shmito nos narra su mas reciente patoaventuraWP:
Manoloooooo!!!
I am in pain!!!
Tengo una lesion abrasiva en la parte inferior de mi gluteo derechoooo!!!!
Deje le hago la cronica de lo sucedido:
 Pues mire, sucede que aqui en Guadalajara los domingos de 8 a 2 de la tarde cierran varias calles por el centro de la ciudad y le llaman Via Recreactiva. Va mucha gente a andar en bici, caminar, correr, on en patines. Yo opte por la ultima, los patines, porque me los compre alla en Houston y los queria estrenar. Pues fuimos mi familia y yo a la mentada via recreactiva. Todo iba bien—shhht-shhht—deslizandome por las calles de cemento, hasta que llegamos a un paso a desnivel (de los que son por arriba, no los subterraneos) y pues con todo mi esfuerzo subi, y a la bajada dije ”uju! Voy a agarrar un impulsito super cool!!”. Fui estupida, lo se—inocencia quiero llamarlo. Total que iba hecha la madreeee!! Manolo, agarre muchisisisisimo impulsooo!! no me podia frenar!! Temi horrible por mi vida! Mis opciones eran, estamparme intencionalmente contra el camellon o el como barandalito de los lados (lo que era un madrazazazo seguro y una probable muerte en el intento), o seguir bajando e intentar lograrlo.  Asi que segui bajando, agarrando cada vez mas y mas velocidad, temiendo cada vez mas y mas por mi vida, tratando de esquivar toda imperfeccion de la calle que pudiera causar mi caida. Todo iba bien, casi lo logro Manolo!! Cuando inesperadamente me di cuenta que justo cuando se termina la bajada, se termina tambien el cementito bonito y empieza un asfalto horrible lleno de pequeñas y letales piedritas e inumerables baches (imperceptibles a los carros y bicicletas, pero la pesadilla de cualquier patinador). Pero a esas alturas era muy tarde para intentar hacer algo. Asi que iba yo con todo el impulso de la bajada… llegue al asfalto… y sucedio lo inevitable… cai Manoloooo!!! Fue horribleeeeeeeeeeeee!! Me fui como de lado, raro… porque cai con mi mano derecha apoyada (ahora raspada) y con mi trasero-pierna derechos (raspadisimos). No me podia levantar Manolooo!!!  Mi piernita temblabaaaaa! Pero unas señoras se apiadaron de mi y me ayudaron a levantarme, y como no habia desayunado nada, como que del susto y todo me empeze a marear. Pero bueno, me recupere y segui patinando, ya no me quedaba de otra. Me dolia mi pierna en el lugar del golpe, pero no habia baños ni nada donde me pudiera ver. Asi que segui como por una hora y media mas, hasta que terminamos nuestro recorrido en un restaurante para desayunar. Para esto ya traia super super hinchada mi piernita en esa areaaa!! Cuando entre al baño a verme… Santa madree Manoloo!! Me asuste!! Se ve horriblee, es como una gran quemada, mezclada con raspada, mezclada con el aporreamiento del sentonazo!! Se ve super super feo, y duele aun peor!!!
Llegando a mi casa me iba a bañar, pero me quede dormida y despues de como 8 horas me desperte. me lave y #$$%&x%x madre, me dolio hasta el alma, pero bueno, ya esta limpito ahi.
Ahora solo tendre que esperar como 1 año de aqui a que sane esa horrible herida.
Bueno, esa es mi historia. Se la platico esperando que se divierta un rato a expensas de mi sufrimiento.
A saint said “Let the perfect city rise.
Here needs no long debate on subtleties,
Means, end,
Let us intend
That all be clothed and fed; while one remains
Hungry our quarreling but mocks his pains.
So all will labor to the good
In one phalanx of brotherhood.”
A man cried out “I know the truth, I, I,
Perfect and whole. He who denies
My vision is a madman or a fool
Or seeks some base advantage in his lies.
All peoples are a tool that fits my hand
Cutting you each and all
Into my plan.”
They were one man.
It’s times like these that I wish I was my married-with-children sister, a maker of muffins or perhaps an elementary-school nurse. It’s not that I’m not proud of my book [The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping with Chicks], or that I’ve become un-enamored with the path I’ve chosen—it’s just that every once in a while, lugging the old freak flag around gets a bit overwhelming. And although I was pretty much wrapped in the flag at birth, this whole sex thing has me flying it at full mast all the time.
Jen Sincero, On being a Sexmonger
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