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Hillary Rodham on the possible and the impossible With a link to audio excerpts from her 1969 commencement speech.

From Fred Rogers

And his mother Nancy Rogers: “Look for the helpers.”

How to improve writing (no. 64)

I began reading an essay in The New York Times and stopped after the first sentence:

There are many moments throughout my average day that, lacking print reading material in a previous era, were once occupied by thinking or observing my surroundings: walking or waiting somewhere, riding the subway, lying in bed unable to sleep or before mustering the energy to get up.

It’s a bad sentence, in several ways. Tense blurs: there are moments that were . The phrase “lacking print reading material in a previous era” is awkward, and moments cannot lack reading material. Moments “once occupied by”: an ungainly passive-voice verb. There’s something at least slightly odd about the idea of having nothing to read while walking. And the order of the gerunds “thinking or observing” gives the momentary suggestion that the writer is thinking his surroundings. A possible revision:

Not that long ago, if I found myself with nothing to read — waiting for someone, riding the subway, lying in bed unable to sleep or not ready to get up — I would observe my surroundings or think.

From forty-seven words to thirty-five.

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[This post is no. 64 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

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The New York Times reports on the linguist David Crystal’s contention that the period is going out of style. “We are at a momentous moment in the history of the full stop,” he says. “In an instant message, it is pretty obvious a sentence has come to an end, and none will have a full stop. So why use it?” The Times has, rather predictably, run the story without periods.

The period’s disappearance from text messages, and its occasional function therein as a marker of tone, are, I think, evidence that texting is more akin to speech than to writing. Different forms of discourse have different conventions. Telegrams lacked periods[stop] To-do lists, too, lack them, even when written as complete sentences:

Walk plants[.]
Water dog[.]

Reports of the period’s death are greatly exaggerated.

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All OCA punctuation posts
On “On the New Literacy”

Destruction, degree by degree

Public higher education in Illinois: Western Illinois University is preparing to eliminate degree programs in African-American studies, philosophy, religious studies, and women’s studies. Faculty positions may be cut in the 2017–18 school year.

In March I wrote about what I called “the mantra of ‘flexibility’” in higher education. I described it as

a strategy to diminish or eliminate whole fields of academic endeavor: African-American studies, art history, classical studies, cultural studies, foreign languages, literature, philosophy, queer studies, women’s studies, whatever might be deemed impractical, unprofitable, unacceptable.

The present (manufactured) budget crisis in Illinois offers an easy excuse for “flexibility,” really another name for destruction.

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“English professors have many wiles”

In January 1936, Willa Cather wrote to Carlton F. Wells, a professor of English at the University of Michigan, thanking him for a letter in which he commented on Cather’s use of a Mendelssohn oratorio in the novel Lucy Gayheart . “You are one in about seventy-five thousand,” she told Wells, the only reader who had noticed how and why Cather had made a slight change in the oratorio’s text. Wells wrote back, asking if Cather’s letter could be printed in William Lyon Phelps’s syndicated newspaper column. Cather replied on January 23:

Dear Mr. Wells:

I am sorry not to be able to oblige you, but I never allow quotations from personal letters to be printed. When, among a great number of the rather flat and dreary letters I receive, I come upon that is alive and intelligent, I am rather prone to answer it in a somewhat intimate and unembarrassed tone. I take for granted that a person who writes a discriminating and intelligent letter is the sort of person who would not use any portion of my letter for publicity of any kind.

Very sincerely yours,

Willa Cather

I should like to oblige Mr. Phelps, but I shall do that at some other time, and in some other way. I did not even know that I was writing to your English class, Mr. Wells. English professors have many wiles, but I honestly thought you were interested in the question you asked me. O tempora, O mores! (The second “O” looks like a zero, certainly!) Enough: I become more cautious every day.

W. S. C.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather , ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

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Rauner sues Rauner

Diana Rauner, wife of Illinois governor Bruce Rauner, leads a child-advocacy group suing the governor and various state agencies for breach of contract. The Ounce of Prevention Fund is one of eighty-two social-service agencies awaiting payments from the state.

Illinois has been without a budget for eleven months, nine days, seventeen hours, eighteen minutes, and thirty-nine seconds. It is not clear how long the governor will continue sleeping on the couch.

From Ellen Tebbits

Beverly Cleary, Ellen Tebbits (1951).

I like the way this paragraph sketches a season in so few words: days shorter, leaves deeper, nights chillier. I like, too, the reference to “downtown,” the semi-mysterious place where stores are, or were. And I like the way the passage presents time as both cyclical and linear, seasons coming around again, clothes outgrown.

Ellen Tebbits is our daughter Rachel’s favorite Beverly Cleary book. Having now I read it, I can understand why.

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Dowdy-world miracle (From Fifteen )
Jean Jarrett, dictionary user
Jean Jarrett, letter writer
Ramona Quimby and cursive
Ramona Quimby, stationery fan

The Incredible Sardine

[Graphic by Rosie Ettenheim. Text by Allison Guy. Click for a much larger view.]

This infographic, made for yesterday’s World Oceans Day, may be found at Oceana (in six parts) and at Rosie Ettenheim’s Behance page. Oceana is campaigning to promote responsible fishing and protect forage fish as a food source for fish, marine life, and people.

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All OCA sardines posts (Pinboard)