“You can improve that paper”

The linguist Geoffrey Pullum, after reading a student paper with endless passive-voice sentences, and after acknowledging that some writers (Noam Chomsky, Anthony Trollope, Jeffrey Ullman) get things right the first time:

Our students should not imagine they can adopt the working practices of such brilliant exceptions. They are mostly like you and me: Our first drafts aren’t good enough, and need many restructurings, improvements, and corrections before they are fit for a reader. Yes, a few authors can produce publishable prose without ever looking back, but they are outliers, not role models. Balzac “revised obsessively.” Dickens did likewise.

So, to the typical student working late Thursday night for a Friday paper deadline I say: You are not Chomsky or Ullman or Trollope, and you have left it too late! You cannot write A+ material the first time through. Next time start your paper at least a week ahead. Then rewrite it. Then read it aloud, and go through it again fixing some more of its faults: the echoes and clunkinesses; the slips in verb agreement; that vague bit you thought you might get away with; the sentence where you decided on a structure but changed syntactic horses midstream and ended up with gibberish.

And don’t tell me you don’t have the time! Ordinary working people do 40 hours a week. Typical millionaires work 70 or 80. Admit it, you’re not committing that kind of time to your studies. You can improve that paper, and ensure that reading it isn’t like being repetitively bludgeoned. Please.

Related posts
Pullum on Strunk and White
More on Pullum, Strunk, White
Hardly (adverb) convincing (adjective)

[Pullum commented on the first of these posts. He’s never touched the third, which looks at his untenable claim that The Elements of Style forbids the use of adjectives and adverbs. In the Lingua Franca piece I’ve excerpted, Pullum still can’t acknowledge that inappropriate use of the passive voice is his student’s problem. Instead, it’s the student’s “tin ear.” I cannot see the difference. But I think this exhortation is worth sharing.]

It’s the Weekend Edition lapel pin

[1 3/8" x 5/8".]

If you listen to NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, you may have wondered what it looks like. That’s what it looks like, the Weekend Edition lapel pin, one of the prizes for the lucky listeners chosen to play the Sunday puzzle on the air with Will Shortz. I played sometime in the 1990s, back in the days of sending in postcards. My challenge was to figure out word pairs with an added x. I remember maim and maxim.

In 2011, I vowed to find this pin, long out of sight and mind. I also won a Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10th ed.), much less shiny, and always in sight.

[Not a great photograph, but I cannot find online a single photograph of this shiny object. So this one will have to do.]

One more from Dreyfuss

“In the 1950s, advertisers and manufacturers discovered in teenagers a lucrative market for consumer goods”: Ellen Lupton presents Henry Dreyfuss’s Princess telephone. It’s Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the Day.

Dial D for Dreyfuss

At Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the Day, Ellen Lupton writes about Henry Dreyfuss’s Model 302 and Model 500 telephones. Bonus: Henry Dreyfuss’s account of his undercover work as an telephone repairman’s helper.

A related post
Thrift-store telephone (A model 500)

*

November 10: Cooper Hewitt has revised the post to make clear that an actor is reading Dreyfuss’s words.

“Footpads and knaves”

From Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977), the first of three volumes recounting the writer’s 1933–1934 walk across Europe. In Vienna, Leigh Fermor meets up with a man named Konrad, a pastor’s son whose command of English comes largely from reading Shakespeare:

“We must beware,“ he said. “Among good and luckless men there is no lack of base ones, footpads and knaves who never shrink from purloining. Some love to filch.”

Related posts
From A Time of Gifts : Leigh Fermor’s Brueghel : Leigh Fermor’s eye : One word from A Time of Gifts

[In a month I’ve traveled only forty pages. Too much else to do.]

Fountain Pen Day

Never heard of it before today: Fountain Pen Day.

My favorite OCA pen post: Five pens.

[In my pocket this first Friday of November, a Lamy Safari.]

How to improve writing (no. 51)

I noticed this sentence while browsing:

Thus, in order to understand why Apple has been so successful in previous partnerships — and, looking forward, to better estimate the chances of Apple Pay becoming widespread — it is essential to understand how the company acquires and uses leverage.

Twenty-seven of the sentence’s thirty-nine words precede its subject (it ): that’s a case of what Richard Lanham calls the “slow windup,” the ponderous start. Reading the sentence aloud is a good way to hear the problem. Other problems:

Needless words. Successful partnerships must already exist, so there’s no need for previous. “Looking forward” is unnecessary, as there is no place else to look if one is gauging prospects for success. I see little difference between estimating and better estimating: one would want one’s estimates to be good ones.

Lifelessness. “It is essential to understand” is boilerplate term-paper language, lacking in agency. Here again, Richard Lanham is helpful: “Find the action,” he suggests. Who does (or did, or will do) what? The fix here: a transitive verb in the active voice.

My revised sentence:

To understand Apple’s success in partnerships and to estimate the chances for Apple Pay’s success, we must understand how Apple gains and uses leverage.

Twenty-four words, fifteen of them preceding the subject. I’ve condensed and rewritten in several other ways, which I’ll leave to speak for themselves.

Revising this sentence took perhaps a minute. Explaining in this post, revising my sentences while doing so, much longer.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[Richard Lanham’s Revising Prose (2007) is an immensely helpful, absurdly expensive book. (Blame the textbook publisher Pearson Longman). A presentation of the book’s core, the Paramedic Method of revision, may be found at Purdue OWL. This post is no. 51 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Ticonderoga, Ticonderoga, Ticonderoga

[From the Dick Van Dyke Show episode “When a Bowling Pin Talks, Listen,” May 8, 1963. Click for a larger view.]

Sally Rogers (Rose Marie) is struggling to come up with a comedy bit. The Dixon Ticonderogas aren’t helping. The pencil stage right? Perhaps a Mirado or Velvet.

Other Ticonderoga posts
Is there a pencil in The House (FBI Ticonderogas)
Musical-comedy pencils (Judy Holliday, sharpening)
Pnin’s pencil sharpener (“ticonderoga-ticonderoga”)

To adjective, to adverb, to verb

Today’s xkcd: Language Nerd.

November 5

I think my state just moved to Wisconsin.