Jean Reynolds's Blog, page 55

Are You All Right?

There was a small earthquake last week that you probably didn’t notice. My May 21 post featured this list of problematic words:[image error]

So what was the earthquake? Here it is: After 30 years of railing against the common one-word spelling, I finally removed all right from the list.

The turning point for me was a blog post from James Harbeck that made these sensible points:

 There are two possible meanings of all right, so it makes sense to have two spellings.

Your answers on the test were all right.

If you’re feeling all right tomorrow, we’ll go shopping. 

2.  We already have two spellings of all ready for the same reason.

Your hotel room is all ready for you.

I already made the reservation for our hotel room.

3.  The one-word spelling has been around for 100 years.

4.  Use of the one-word spelling has increased 500% since 1960.

You’ll notice that nowhere in this post have I written the one-word version of all right. There are limits to how much I can stretch! To me it still looks like a misspelling, and I still get that shake-a-finger-at-you impulse.

But I did revise my list, and I’m really pleased that James Harbeck made such a sensible case for the change. If you have time to read his post, it’s a model of thoughtful decision-making about English usage.

The times, they are a-changin’ – as they always have and always will, at least as far as language is concerned! [image error]

 

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Instant Quiz ANSWER

The past tense of lie is (strangely) lay. Once you get past the strangeness of this verb, it’s not difficult – and you can impress the English teachers you know by getting it right!

When I lay down for a nap yesterday afternoon, the phone rang.  CORRECT

You can learn more about lie/lay at this link.

What Your English Teacher Didn’t Tell You is available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon.com and other online booksellers.

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“A useful resource for both students and professionals” – Jena L. Hawk, Ph.D., Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College

“Personable and readable…Jean knows her subject forwards and backwards.” – Adair Lara, author of Hold Me Close, Let Me Go

Instant Quiz

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Can you spot the error in the sentence below? Scroll to the bottom of today’s post for the answer.

The doorbell rang, then we ran to greet Aunt Mary.

More about Writing for an Audience

Last week I offered some useful advice about writing for an audience. Here’s a recap:

Put yourself in your readers’ shoes.
Think about a living person you know who’s similar to your imaginary audience. Write for that person.
Figure out what your audience already knows about your topic. Be prepared to fill in the rest of the background they’ll need, and do it early.
When you get to the editing stage, reread your piece slowly, looking for any words your readers might not understand. Delete them (or insert clues to their meaning).
Ask a friend or family member outside your field to read your piece and give you feedback.

But let’s say you’re already well versed in these principles. Is there anything else you need to know about writing for an audience?

Yes. What sets truly great writers apart is their ability to touch a reader’s mind, heart, and soul. Please don’t dismiss that as a platitude! It’s much harder than it sounds.

Every good writer I know is a great observer of human nature and human behavior. Good writers are good listeners, and they have an inexhaustible curiosity about other people (a trait that’s quite different from ordinary noisiness, by the way.)

My husband is a huge fan of Georges Simenon (1903-1989), a Belgian novelist who is still one of the world’s bestselling writers. True story: A prestigious writing organization once selected Simenon to receive its highest award. The award dinner was held at a fancy hotel, and of course Simenon was the center of attention.

But when the time came for the award presentation, he was nowhere to be found. A search committee was hastily rounded up to bring him back to the banquet room.

They found Simenon sitting in a quiet corner in the lobby where he could watch the hotel guests coming and going. When they asked why he wasn’t at the banquet, he explained that he liked to observe people and had learned a lot that way. His people-watching habit was more important to him than the award.

Can you learn a lesson from this story? Answer: we all can. How do I know that? Because I often think about this story, and I’m still learning from Simenon’s example. Try it!

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             Georges Simenon

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Instant Quiz ANSWER

You can’t use then with a comma to join two sentences. You’ll end with an error that grammarians call a run-on, a fused sentence, or a comma splice. If you really want to use that comma, you’ll also need to insert and or but.

The doorbell rang, and then we ran to greet Aunt Mary.  CORRECT

Your other choices are a period or a semicolon: 

The doorbell rang. Then we ran to greet Aunt Mary.  CORRECT

The doorbell rang; then we ran to greet Aunt Mary.  CORRECT

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What Your English Teacher Didn’t Tell You is available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon.com and other online booksellers.

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“A useful resource for both students and professionals” – Jena L. Hawk, Ph.D., Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College

“Personable and readable…Jean knows her subject forwards and backwards.” – Adair Lara, author of Hold Me Close, Let Me Go

Instant Quiz

[image error]Instant Quiz 

Can you spot the error in the sentence below? Scroll to the bottom of today’s post for the answer.

Either a cake or a dozen cupcakes is needed to serve our guests. 

 

Learning from Children’s Literature

Although I have three degrees in English literature, I once spent about six months teaching second grade in an elementary school. That’s when I discovered the joys of books like Danny and the Dinosaur and Little Bear. Story time was always one of the highlights of the daily routine in my classroom.

But since then I haven’t had many encounters with books for children. So it was delightful to read a wonderful New Yorker article about Maurice Sendak (author of Where the Wild Things Are and illustrator of the Little Bear books).

I wasn’t surprised when Sendak – unmarried and childless – said that he tapped into his own early years in order to write his books for children. But what set me reeling was something else Sendak said:

“You see, I don’t believe, in a way, that the kid I was grew up into me. He still exists somewhere, in the most graphic, plastic, physical way. It’s as if he had moved somewhere. I have a tremendous concern for him and interest in him. I communicate with him—or try to—all the time. One of my worst fears is losing contact with him.”

I’d thought that only Jungian psychologists believed in that notion of multiple selves – but here was a children’s author sounding like my favorite psychologist, James Hillman!

I think Hillman (and Sendak) are right, and I know – for example – that I share my soul with a giggling eight-year-old who thinks Danny’s adventures with his dinosaur friend are absolutely hilarious. At other times I become my mother, my favorite high-school English teacher, a testy adolescent – you get the idea. They all jostle with one another for my attention, and things can get pretty crazy. Fascinating! (By the way – you, reading this, have your own cast of characters who enjoy disrupting your life.)

But right now I want to focus  on that giggling eight-year-old. What if you’re someone (like me) who doesn’t write for children? Is there any reason for me to keep in touch with that I-won’t-grow-up part of myself?

Yes – and to explain, I’m going to take a detour into postmodern language theory. People are complicated beings – there’s no such thing as “simplicity” when you’re describing human personalities and behavior. And language is just as complex. No matter how hard you try to stick to one idea when you’re writing, other elements, themes, and issues are going to find their way into your words. More than once I’ve written a piece that horrified me when it was published:  I’d given away some of my secrets without knowing what I was doing!

If you respect your own complex cast of characters, you can channel some of their vitality into your writing. I’m thinking of a book I loved reading three years ago: Walden on Wheels: On The Open Road from Debt to Freedom. It’s a true story: Ken Ilungas longed to go to graduate school, but he’d already struggled to pay off a $32,000 student loan and didn’t want to go down that road again. His solution was to buy a beat-up van, park it on a side street near Duke University, and live there until he finished his graduate program.

I found myself thinking wistfully about Walden on Wheels just the other day. What an adventure he had! By contrast, here’s what my life has been like lately: I keep track of our condo fees and phone bills, get my teeth cleaned every three months, and make sure I return my library books on time. I watch TV on a schedule. I have such a reputation for punctuality that my dance teachers call my cell phone if I’m two minutes late for a lesson. (I am not making that up.)

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to wear jeans every day, wander into the college library any time I felt like it (even at 2 AM), and be so untethered that nobody knew – or cared -where I was or what I was doing?

Well, not really. To put it another way: The Grown-up Jean who’s in charge of my life most of the time wants marriage, healthy teeth, predictability, and financial stability.

But tucked away somewhere in my soul is a little girl who loved The Boxcar Children (last year I read it again!) and would have adored sharing the freedom and adventures of those four children – for a little while, anyway. (I should explain that The Boxcar Children is a classic book about four orphaned children who find out that they’re going to be placed in separate foster homes. They slip away at nightfall and find an abandoned boxcar where they can stay together.)

Gee whiz. Of course I loved Walden on Wheels! In a way it’s just The Boxcar Children all over again, rewritten for an adult audience.

I don’t care how smart and sophisticated you are. If you go back to reread one of your favorite books, I predict that you’re going to catch a whiff of another you. Maybe it’s a daredevil, a diva, a saint, or a would-be movie star – or someone else who’s both unknown to you and yet amazingly familiar.

Homework assignment: Make a list of the books you’ve loved. (They don’t have to be written for children, and don’t limit yourself to titles that are considered great literature!) Then go back over the list and think about the person within you who loved each book. Think of ways to connect with that person. Dive into that person’s energy, enthusiasms, yearnings, and fears. Then start thinking about ways to bring all that vitality into your writing.

Your readers will love you for it.

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            The Boxcar Children

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Instant Quiz ANSWER

The rule you need for today’s Instant Quiz is an interesting one! It’s one of the few times you DON’T go to the beginning of the sentence to solve a usage problem. In either/or sentences, you skip to the word or.

It’s easier than it sounds! Here’s today’s sentence again:

Either a cake or a dozen cupcakes is needed to serve our guests.

What to do? Look for the word or. You’ll find “a dozen cupcakes” there. So you need the verb are.

Either a cake or a dozen cupcakes are needed for dessert. CORRECT

Now look at the sentence below. Again, skip the beginning of the sentence and look for the word or:

Either a dozen cupcakes or a cake is needed for dessert. CORRECT

You can download and print a free handout about subject-verb agreement rules (like this either/or rule) at http://bit.ly/SubVerbAgreement.

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What Your English Teacher Didn’t Tell You is available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon.com and other online booksellers.

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“A useful resource for both students and professionals” – Jena L. Hawk, Ph.D., Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College

“Personable and readable…Jean knows her subject forwards and backwards.” – Adair Lara, author of Hold Me Close, Let Me Go

Instant Quiz

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Instant Quiz

Can you spot the error in the sentence below? Scroll to the bottom of today’s post for the answer.

We’re in no eminent danger from the hurricane, but we’re paying close attention to the weather forecasts.

Copyright

How much do you know about copyright? Here’s a chance to find out. I’m going to recount a real-life experience I had with copyright a couple of weeks ago. How would you have handled it?

I’d just published an article called “Writing Clear, Effective Police Reports: No English Degree Required” for the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin. (You can read the article at this link: https://leb.fbi.gov/2017/may/perspective-writing-clear-effective-police-reports-no-english-degree-required.)

A few days later, a police chief emailed me to ask whether he could make copies for his officers. He didn’t want to violate the copyright. What did I tell him? Scroll down for the answer.

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The answer was that I no longer owned the copyright – I had signed a contract transferring it to the FBI. So even though I’d written the article myself, I didn’t have the right to make copies myself or allow anyone else to do it.

I suggested he write to my editor, and I gave him her email address. She, I’m happy to say, gave him the permission he needed.

Copyright is complicated, and it’s serious business! I just came across a terrific free resource that can help you understand how copyright works. It’s called How To Copyright A Book: A Comprehensive Guide. Here’s the link: https://blog.reedsy.com/how-to-copyright-a-book

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I’m going to add something to the excellent information you can find at the link. When you’re dealing with a professional publisher, you can be sure that you’ll get useful advice about dealing with copyright.

But you need to be wary when you’re publishing on your own. You may work with a rep who understands copyright – but maybe you won’t.

I’ve been shocked not once but twice lately by the shoddy research I found in two self-published books about Bernard Shaw. I hasten to add that I didn’t find any copyright problems. But the authors had no idea how academic publishing is done, and no one had helped them. I suspect that no one talked to them about copyright laws.

I’m not an attorney, of course, so I can’t give you any specific advice about copyright. But I can urge you to educate yourself about copyright…and to be careful. When in doubt, consult an attorney.

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Instant Quiz ANSWER

Be careful not to confuse eminent (“famous”) with imminent (“about to happen.”

We’re in no imminent danger from the hurricane, but we’re paying close attention to the weather forecasts.

What Your English Teacher Didn’t Tell You is available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon.com and other online booksellers.

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“A useful resource for both students and professionals” – Jena L. Hawk, Ph.D., Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College

“Personable and readable…Jean knows her subject forwards and backwards.” – Adair Lara, author of Hold Me Close, Let Me Go

Instant Quiz

[image error]Instant Quiz 

Can you spot the error in the sentence below? Scroll to the bottom of today’s post for the answer.

This afternoon Kay is going to announce that our department has met it’s goals for this quarter. 

 

Letting Go

Natalie Goldberg is the author of a bestselling book of advice for writers: Writing Down the Bones. I’ve always felt a special connection with her because she grew up in Farmingdale, on Long Island, at about the same time I was growing up in nearby Bethpage.

I didn’t discover Writing Down the Bones until after I had started publishing. My first encounter with Goldberg came through Common Boundary magazine, a New Age periodical that enriched my life in countless ways during its short publishing life.

Goldberg’s articles focused on her Zen practice, and a comment in one of her articles particularly fascinated me: students of Zen take a vow that they will be the last ones to accept enlightenment. It’s very different from our Western spiritual traditions, with their emphasis on goals and growth. I’ve known spiritual seekers who had no scruples about knocking over anyone who got in the way as they scrambled up the Mountain of Enlightenment.

I think Goldberg’s long immersion in Zen eventually found its way into her approach to writing. This morning I started thinking about a taped workshop she did some years ago. Goldberg gave participants a writing prompt and then invited them to read what they had written. One man clearly had a great deal of writing experience and came up with an impressive response to the prompt.

Goldberg told him to give up any idea of being a writer.

Gasp.

I’m thinking of how I would have responded early in my ballroom adventures if an expert had told me to give up any idea of being a dancer – and done it publicly.

For the record, the man at the workshop did not seem at all perturbed by Goldberg’s advice. Clearly she wasn’t saying he was a bad writer, and she wasn’t advising him to quit.

Somehow he immediately grasped what she was trying to tell him, which probably amounted to something like this: Your writing has to be messy – even dirty – before you clean it up. He’d gotten to the finish line too quickly and missed some promising detours on the way. In other words: Zen. The way to get there is to stop trying to get there.

To put it another way: your goal to write well can get in the way of other reasons for writing: awakening something in your audience – exploring an idea – digging into a feeling.

Here’s an example of what I think Goldberg was talking about: over the years I’ve found that journaling is a powerful way to dive into problems and start working out a way to solve them. But to make journaling work for me, I have to write without capital letters and punctuation. My editing habits are so deeply embedded in my writing practices that they block the stream of feelings and thoughts.

Goldberg’s advice about writing in all her books generally boils down to one principle: Let yourself go, at least in the beginning. Of course you want to impress readers with what you have to say. But when you take that path, you may be cutting yourself off from the energy flow needed for good writing.

I’m going to take a detour for a moment into ballroom dancing. I’m realizing that I took Natalie Goldberg’s advice before I ever stepped into a studio for my first lesson, and it’s stood me in good stead.

Of course I’ve always wanted to be a good dancer (hell – I’m going to be honest: a great dancer!), and that desire has driven me to invest huge quantities of time and energy  (and considerable sums of money) into lessons, gowns, shoes, and everything else that makes a ballroom dancer.

But what I’ve told myself again and again over the years is that what I really want to know is how it feels to be a dancer. What do dancers think about? How do they respond to a piece of music? Where does choreography come from? How do dancers solve problems? What do dancers do with their feet – hands – eyes? How does it feel to dance with a great partner? And so on.

Even on the baddest of bad days (and there have been many of them!), I can say that I’ve taken another step or two towards my goal of knowing what dancing is all about.

Back to writing. If you embark on a writing project and then decide that it’s never going to work (something that’s happened to me many times), you have two choices. You can berate yourself because you spent time and effort on a project that didn’t work for you. Or you can congratulate yourself for having achieved your goal of investing time and energy in writing.

Think about it for a moment: how many people have you known who talk wistfully about wanting to write – and never do a damn thing about it?

Like Natalie Goldberg, who set a goal to be the last person to accept enlightenment, I will probably be the last person to master the foxtrot. But the climb up the mountain has been a glorious one, and no – I don’t think I’ve knocked anyone to the ground on my journey to that unattainable peak.

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       Natalie Goldberg

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Instant Quiz ANSWER

Be careful with it’s and its! A good trick is to remind yourself that the possessive of it is like his: no apostrophe.

This afternoon Kay is going to announce that our department has met its goals for this quarter.  CORRECT

(Think: our department has met his goals for this quarter. No apostrophe!)

One more tip: Never put an apostrophe after its:

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What Your English Teacher Didn’t Tell You is available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon.com and other online booksellers.

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“A useful resource for both students and professionals” – Jena L. Hawk, Ph.D., Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College

“Personable and readable…Jean knows her subject forwards and backwards.” – Adair Lara, author of Hold Me Close, Let Me Go

Instant Quiz

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Instant Quiz

Can you spot the error in the sentence below? Scroll to the bottom of today’s post for the answer.

We bought everything on our shopping list, but the handbag for Aunt Margaret.