How to improve writing (no. 19 in a series)

A newspaper article about a falafel vendor states that falafel is served on "pizza bread." The reporter doesn't know from falafel, which is served on pita bread.

When writing about an unfamiliar subject, it's smart to check the vocabulary. Doing so helps to avoid anchor performances, pneumonic devices, and surrealist falafel.

This post is no. 19 in a very occasional series, "How to improve writing," dedicated to improving stray bits of published prose (and falafel sandwiches).

All "How to improve writing" posts (via Pinboard)

Ralph Stanley

[Photograph by Rachel Leddy.]

Dr. Ralph Stanley and His Clinch Mountain Boys, April 26, 2008.

(Thanks, Rachel!)

A dowdy finals week

"Well, he may be a 'dreamboat,' but young lady, you have studying to do. Young lady? I am talking to you! I would advise you to stop all this nonsense this instant and apply yourself. Finals begin in just two days! Two days! Are you listening to me, young lady? You haven't heard a word I've been saying! Oh — [deep sigh] — co-education!"

[Photograph from Alan H. Monroe, Principles and Types of Speech (New York: Scott, Foresman, 1955). Words from my imagination.]

All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Jimmy Giuffre (1921-2008)

Jimmy Giuffre, the adventurous clarinetist, composer and arranger whose 50-year journey through jazz led him from writing the Woody Herman anthem “Four Brothers” through minimalist, drummerless trios to striking experimental orchestral works, died on Thursday in Pittsfield, Mass. He was 86 and lived in West Stockbridge, Mass.

Jimmy Giuffre, Imaginative Jazz Artist, Dies at 86 (New York Times)

Here are two performances of the Giuffre signature piece "The Train and the River," from the 1957 CBS television show The Sound of Jazz, with Jim Hall and Jim Atlas, and from Bert Stern's 1960 film Jazz on a Summer's Day, with Hall and Bob Brookmeyer. (The second performance is split into two clips.)

"The Train and the River" (YouTube)
"The Train and the River" 1, 2 (YouTube)

Joy Page (1924-2008)

[Joy Page and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.]

From the AP obituary:

A dark-haired beauty, Ms. Page was 17 and a high school senior when she got the role of Annina Brandel in the 1942 Warner Brothers classic Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

Page's scene with Bogart is a great moment of fear and uncertainty met with bitterness. Annina, a Bulgarian refugee, married eight weeks, hoping to get to the United States, wonders whether she should sleep with Captain Renault in exchange for exit visas for herself and her husband Jan.

Anna: Oh, Monsieur, you are a man. If someone loved you, very much, so that your happiness was the only thing that she wanted in the world, but she did a bad thing to make certain of it, could you forgive her?

Rick: Nobody ever loved me that much.

Actress Joy Page Is Dead at 83 (New York Times)

Writing, technology, and teenagers

Writing, Technology and Teens, a report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, is in the news today, in reports that emphasize teenagers' use of "informal elements" such as emoticons and messaging shorthand in their schoolwork. (The sky is falling.) I liked reading these student comments though, on page 16 of the report:

I like handwriting. I don't know, I feel more organized writing by hand especially with outlines and drafts and stuff.

I find it hard to think creatively when I am typing so I like to handwrite everything then I put it on the computer.

I type so much faster than I write. But if I want to make a paper much better I have to type it out first, then hand write in the changes, then type the good copy. And it makes it easier to think things through if I can handwrite it. And I think my worst work is when I just type it and don't handwrite it.

I'd want to see greater care with punctuation in these statements (gathered, it seems, in focus groups), but I'm cheered to see these young writers thinking about the ways their tools affect their work.

More: 93% of teenagers surveyed report doing writing out of school. 72% of teenagers usually do personal writing by hand.

A general Pew concern is that teenagers do not regard instant messaging and e-mailing as what the report calls "real writing":

The act of exchanging e-mails, instant messages, texts, and social network posts is communication that carries the same weight to teens as phone calls and between-class hallway greetings.

The kids seem to be thinking clearly here. "Real writing" for them would be analog: on paper, in an institutional context, writing that gets a grade or seeks access to an opportunity (a college-application essay, for instance). Texting a friend or family member is a different proposition. U shd c soma my txt messgs to my kids.

When the conventions of "real writing" and the conventions of digital informality collide, the result is a mess, as in e-mails to professors that say

hey i mnissed class cd you mail me the homework thanks

Which is why I wrote How to e-mail a professor. As this college semester nears its end, that post accounts for 20% of recent visits to Orange Crate Art. That's also cheering news, a sign that many students have come to understand that the conventions of "real writing" have analog and digital lives.

Some related posts
"[I]n my own hand, in my own notebook" (Robert Fitzgerald)
On handwriting and typing (W.H. Auden)
Writing by hand

Colson Whitehead, "Visible Man"

I know some folks feel bitter about me, as bitter as the first dandelion greens of the season. Yet these people are not without hope, hope that is drizzled on those dandelion greens like a dash of sweet pomegranate vinegar. Do they begrudge the scorpion its sting, or the duck its quack? How can I be other than what I am, The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He's Black?

From a wickedly satiric Ellison-influenced commentary on these times by novelist Colson Whitehead. Read it all: Visible Man (New York Times).

Related post
Yes, they can

Bean, an OS X word-processor

Bean, James Hoover's free word-processor for Mac, gets better and better. Version 1.1.0 became available a few days ago. Among recent additions and improvements to the program: a full-screen mode which allows for distraction-free writing.

Bean is small and fast, like this sentence. And like the last bowl of porridge in the old story, Bean is just right, at least for many word-processing tasks. The program offers more options than TextEdit, fewer than iWork's Pages. It is not a behemoth, not a Microsoft Word replacement.

Bean is released under the GNU General Public License. (It's free!) You can read more and download the program here: Bean.

[Above, the Bean icon, designed by Laurent Baumann.]

Meme (123)

My blogging friend Lee has tagged me with this meme:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Here's what I've found:

Products began to offer something more, something magical, something that could only be achieved at the press of a button. Indeed, of the terms used by people in the Populuxe era to describe their remarkable time — "the jet age," "the space age," "the atomic age" — "the push-button age" seems the most comprehensive and evocative, the one that embraces the miracles and the menace of the time.

There was a tremendous proliferation of push buttons on products during the 1950s and well into the 1960s.

Thomas Hine, Populuxe (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2007)

Yes, there was. My family's first car (or the first one I know about), a Plymouth, had a push-button transmission.

Ben, Elaine, Jason, Joe, Sara: you're it.

Malcolm X on prison and college

I don't think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some college. I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that. Where else but in a prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day?

From The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine, 1987), 183

["Boola Boola" is the Yale fight song, words and music by Allan M. Hirsch (Yale '01).]