How to improve writing (no. 44)

[Mark Trail, May 8, 2013.]

When Mark Trail and Wes Thompson went off in a plane to “look at sheep,” leaving “the girls” (Mark’s wife Cherry, Wes’s wife Shelley) alone at camp, trouble was sure to follow. Trouble, one might say, was in the air : the plane crashed, and Mark and Wes have been stuck in the mountains for many days’ worth of comics.

Trouble is also in this panel’s dialogue, in the form of the clunky however that begins Wes’s sentence. In The Elements of Style, Strunk and White offer good advice: “Avoid starting a sentence with however when the meaning is ‘nevertheless.’ The word usually serves better when not in first position.” That sounds like a matter of style. But Strunk and White then confuse matters by seeming to suggest a prohibition: “When however comes first, it means ‘in whatever way’ or ‘to whatever extent.’”

Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern American Usage takes up however with greater clarity:

It seems everyone has heard that sentences should not begin with this word — not, that is, when a contrast is intended. But doing so isn't a grammatical error; it’s merely a stylistic lapse, the word But or Yet ordinarily being much preferable. . . . The reason is that However — three syllables followed by a comma — is a ponderous way of introducing a contrast, and it leads to unemphatic sentences.

And re: today’s Mark Trail, I’d add that no one talks like that, especially not with a broken foot. I have revised the panel to eliminate the ponderous however and add a bit more drama:


[Mark Trail revised, May 8, 2013.]

How I wish I could travel back to student days and remove howevers from the beginnings of my sentences. But it’s what I was taught as an element of intelligent writing: independent clause – semicolon – conjunctive adverb, any conjunctive adverb – comma – independent clause. O ponderousness!

“Let’s go,” by the way, is an instance of the hortatory subjunctive.

Related reading
Other How to improve writing posts
Other Mark Trail posts

[This post is no. 44 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. Cherry made tea this past Monday.]

Spellings of the future

A spelling of the future is a misspelling so strange that it must be traveling backward in time to give us a foretaste of our language’s evolution. Today’s spelling of tomorrow, or vice versa:



A sample sentence: Yes, we have now bananas.

I have seen now for no three times in recent months. If now for no is a typo, it’s a mighty strange one. I think that the sound of know explains now.

Other spellings of the future
Aww : Bard-wired fence

Some more rocks

[“Seek and Ye Shall Mind,” Zippy, May 7, 2013.]

Sunday: Proust. Monday: some rocks. And today: some more rocks. Some rocks + some more rocks = really many rocks. But Zerbina’s rocks may be the very rocks Zippy was looking at yesterday, in which case they remain “some rocks.”

“Some rocks” (Zippy)

[“Victimless Crime,” Zippy, May 6, 2013.]

Two Zippy posts in two days: I hadn’t planned on it. But as they say, attention must be paid. By me, at least. To the mystical grouping known as “some rocks.” End of sentence fragments.

Some posts
Hommage à Ernie Bushmiller
“Bushmiller Country”
Landscape with some rocks

Route 66 wisdom

As Buz and Not Buz drive off to another episode, Not Buz recalls something his father told him:

“Whenever you reach an impasse, look at the third side of the coin. . . . The third side is the edge, the place the two sides come together, the meeting place of heads and tails. Dad used to say that was the best side because it welds opposites together. And it's a circle, a continuing circle, closed and perfect, as endless as understanding itself.”

Elaine and I continue to make our way on Route 66. Among the actors in our most recent episodes: Don Beddoe, William “Billy” Benedict, Donna Douglas, Joey Heatherton (her screen debut), Zohra Lampert, E. G. Marshall, Charles McGraw, Suzanne Pleshette, and Johnny Seven. People of the mid-twentieth-century, how fortunate you were to have this show.

[From “Three Sides,” Route 66, November 18, 1960. Series co-creator Stirling Silliphant wrote this episode. Extra credit for anyone who remembers William “Billy” Benedict.]

Griffy, Zippy, and Proust

[“Dead White Cornflakes,” Zippy, May 4, 2013.]

I just went In Search of Lost Zippy: this panel is from yesterday’s strip. The Zippy archive has five more Proustian strips: “Proust Reduced,” “Forgetfulness of Things Past,” “Taste Is Everything,” “Proust Schmoust,” and “Within a Budding Grove.”

[Griffy: cartoonist Bill Griffith’s stand-in. Have you seen the word kidult before?]

Separated at birth?

[Three detectives: Hopper, Derrida, Falk.]

The funny thing is that William Hopper (Perry Mason’s Paul Drake) and Peter Falk (Lieutenant Columbo) look nothing like one another. But each in some way looks like Jacques Derrida. I think that this is what they mean by différance. I would prefer a white-haired Hopper to deepen the Derrida resemblance, but I couldn’t find a suitable picture. I think this is what they mean by absence.

Other long-lost siblings
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
Steve Buscemi and John Davis Chandler
Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt
Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov
Ted Cruz and Joseph McCarthy
Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln
Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks

San José profs nix Harvard MOOC

The Philosophy Department at San José State University has decided not to make use of Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s MOOC [Massive open online course] JusticeX. The department has explained its decision in an open letter to Sandel. An excerpt:

In spite of our admiration for your ability to lecture in such an engaging way to such a large audience, we believe that having a scholar teach and engage his or her own students in person is far superior to having those students watch a video of another scholar engaging his or her students.

I’d be proud to knew these faculty as colleagues. Their principled stand for (what I call) real-presence education and against its cheap simulacrum should prove a model for faculty in similar circumstances.

More from the Chronicle of Higher Education
Why Professors at San José State Won’t Use a Harvard Professor’s MOOC
The Philosophy Department’s open letter
Michael Sandel’s response

Thanks to Stefan Hagemann for catching these developments before I did. If you care about teaching and learning, take the time to read Stefan’s post about how to answer a professor’s question in class.

Mina Shaughnessy on error

Anyone who has read, say, a comma-free student essay (comma-free for fear that using commas might mean making mistakes), will see the wisdom in Mina P. Shaughnessy’s observations about error. From Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing (1977):

The discovery by a student that he can do something he thought he couldn’t releases the energy to do it. Students who make many errors feel helpless about correcting them. Error has them in its power, forcing them to hide or bluff or feign indifference but never to attack. The teacher must encourage an aggressive attitude toward error and then provide a strategy for its defeat, one that allows the student to count his victories as he goes and thereby grow in confidence. . . .

The alternative course of ignoring error for fear of inhibiting the writer even more or of assuming that errors will wear off as the student writes more is finally giving error more power than it is due. The “mystery” of error is what most intimidates students — the worry that errors just “happen” without a person’s knowing how or when — and while we have already noted that some errors can be expected to persist even after instruction, most of them finally come under the control of the writer once he has learned to look at them analytically during the proofreading stage of composition. Freedom from error is finally a matter of understanding error, not of getting special dispensations to err simply because writing formal English is thought to be beyond the capabilities or interests of certain students.

Shaughnessy is sometimes criticized as reducing students to their errors, or patterns of error. I can’t agree with that criticism: understanding patterns of error is what makes it possible to move beyond them.

[A new habit for the end of a semester: pulling out a handful of books I haven’t looked at in years.]

Bob Brozman (1959–2013)

Bob Brozman was the best friend the National guitar ever had. Here is the obituary from his hometown newspaper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

A YouTube sampler: “Highway 49 Blues,” “Minnie the Moocher,” “Moana Chimes,” “Ua Like.” The last two are duets with Ledward Kaapana.