How to improve writing (no. 67)

Ford Madox Ford’s page-ninety test (and it is page ninety, not ninety-nine), can yield amazing results. The Ford practice: open a book to page ninety and consider the first full paragraph of any length. How’s the prose?

This past Sunday I applied the test to a book Elaine and I bought at a library sale. Was this book, about nature and music, worth our time? Here’s the first full paragraph on page ninety:

The first thing I noticed at each location was how much emphasis the other researchers on-site — each concentrating on a narrow topic — placed on the visual aspects of their study animals. For those whose scope of work involved sound at any level, the biophony — and in many cases even the individual species’ sounds — was completely overlooked. Yet I realized quickly just how varied and rich the natural soundscapes were.

The first two sentences are ponderous. Dashes are part of the problem: the first two separate placed from researchers ; the next two may have convinced the writer that sounds was not part of a compound subject. An error in subject-verb agreement results: biophony and sounds was overlooked. But were overlooked wouldn’t be much of an improvement: the passive-voice verb is a dull choice, especially if the writer wants to emphasize that other researchers missed something. Elsewhere, an overreliance on to be minimizes the writer’s agency: “The first thing I noticed . . . was.”

Reading the paragraph a third or fourth time, I noticed that an overabundance of prepositional phrases adds to the first sentence’s ponderousness: “at each location,” “on-site” (where else could the researchers be?), “on a narrow topic,” “on the visual aspects,” “of their study animals.” And I began to wonder what it might mean to describe an animal’s “visual aspects.” Do they have something to do with a creature’s ability to see? Or are we speaking of a creature’s appearance? One more thing: the paragraph’s final sentence seems to me a bit too self-congratulatory.

My best revision:

At each location, I found that other researchers did little more than look at animals. Even those whose work involved some attention to sound failed to notice the biophony and the distinctive vocalizations of individual species. It was as if these researchers were deaf to the richness and variety of natural soundscapes.

My revision takes this paragraph from seventy words to fifty-two, with no dashes. The dash problem, as I discovered by turning pages, is everywhere: 236 pages, and only twenty-odd are dashless.

The book, by the way, is from Little, Brown. The writer thanks his editor for a “finely tuned combo of eye and ear for proper voice and structure.”

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3:35 p.m.: One more change: from “distinctive sounds” to “distinctive vocalizations.” I didn’t like the repetition of “some attention to sound” and “distinctive sounds.”

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)
The page-ninety-nine test
The test applied to My Salinger Year

[Biophony? The writer defines it as “sounds originating from nonhuman, nondomestic biological sources.” This post is no. 67 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Cal is real

[Mark Trail , September 6, 2016.]

Heard yesterday, seen today: Cal is real.

Today’s strip reminds us for the umpteenth time that Mark has a bad history with boats. Comics meta-comedy.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Mark Trail and reality

[Mark Trail , September 5, 2016. Background removed.]

So far he’s just a voice, speaking from inside a small building, but Cal, like Abbey Powell, is a real person. Theodore “TC” Calvin is the owner-operator of Island Hoppers Helicopter Service, “conveniently located on the eastern shore of Oahu.” The names “TC” and Island Hoppers derive from Magnum. P. I.

Having just watched the (great) first season of the Netflix series Stranger Things , I am troubled that two people from our reality (one of whom takes his name from a television show) are now lost in the Upside Down of Mark Trail . Abbey, Cal, come home!

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Nancy Kerouac

[Nancy , February 20, 1960.]

Nancy has begun her magnum opus, On the Sidewalk .



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2:20 p.m.: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was published on September 5, 1957. Is today’s panel a matter of coincidence?

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September 8: I e-mailed Guy Gilchrist, who draws today’s Nancy and presides with John Lotshaw over Random Acts of Nancy . I’ve had no reply. I can’t find anything online to suggest that anyone else has remarked on a Nancy-Kerouac connection. I think it’s safe to conclude that the September 5 Random Act is a strange and wonderful coincidence.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[You can read Random Acts of Nancy every day at GoComics. Context for On the Sidewalk here.]

Nancy TV

[Nancy , September 5, 1949.]

A television in 1949: Fritzi Ritz was a relatively early adopter.

See also Henry and Peanuts for unsupervised children sitting too close to the television. They’ll ruin their eyes!

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy is available six days a week at GoComics.]

Labor Day

[“The American Worker.” Photograph by Edward Clark. No location or date. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a much larger view.]

I am slightly bonkers over the mid-century material culture in this photograph. The cigarette brands: Camel, Lucky Strike, Kool, Old Gold, Chesterfield, Philip Morris Commander, Cavalier, Pall Mall, Chesterfield, Herbert Tareyton, Raleigh (filter and non-filter), Old Gold, Philip Morris Commander, Winston, and Tareyton (filter). Beneath the cigarettes, Velvet, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Prince Albert pipe tobacco. The earliest possible date for this photograph: 1954, the year Winston was introduced. Notice that the one man in the picture is hatted (of course). He appears to be in need of some Gillette blades.

I was telling my daughter recently what it was like to run a cash register in my Housewares Department days. The register was more like the one in this photograph than not. Ringing up multiples of a single item was the most fun you could have: hold down the keys for the price with the left hand (as if playing a chord on a piano), and bang away on the bar with the right: Three at $1.49? $1–40–9, bang, bang, bang.

Is that Sally Draper in the corner? And can you tell that I’m an ex-smoker?

Fred Hellerman (1927–2016)

Fred Hellerman, the last of the Weavers, has died at the age of eighty-nine. The New York Times has an obituary.

I have long liked “Tomorrow Lies in the Cradle,” a sweet, tear-smeary song by Fred Hellerman and Fran Minkoff. Here is Hellerman performing the song at the Weavers 1980 Carnegie Hall reunion.



Related posts
Ronnie Gilbert (1926–2015)
Pete Seeger (1919–2014)

[Apologies for the ad, over which I have no control.]

Something phishy

Hillary Clinton’s e-mail reply to a message purporting to be from the personal account of a State Department official, a message that contained what the FBI calls “a potentially malicious link”:

Is this really from you? I was worried about opening it!

What do you when you get such a message? You delete it. You do not reply. Unfuckingbelievable.

Yes, that word goes after the un- . It’s an instance of what’s called expletive infixation and an exception to the more usual practice of placing the word before a stressed syllable. The word unfuckingbelievable is also an expression of my deep and unerasable misgivings about voting for Hillary Clinton.

Beverly Cleary, writing by hand

Beverly Cleary, writing by hand:

To me, writing involves my imagination, a handful of 29-cent ball point pens, a stack of paper and time free from interruption. I often begin books in the middle or at the end and play about with my characters in my poor handwriting until I am satisfied with their behavior, which is often a surprise to me. That is the fun of writing. I then rewrite my books in somewhat more legible typing and take them to a typist who telephones for translation of words written between the lines but manages to return pristine manuscripts. I find typing the most difficult part of writing, and once bought and returned a German typewriter that had Achtung! printed on the front. Battling a typewriter is distracting enough without having it giving me orders like an arithmetic book. Telling stories quietly and privately with pen on paper is my joy.

This passage appeared in a 1985 essay published in The New York Times , “Why Are Children Writing to Me Instead of Reading?” A good question, one that results from the classroom study of “living authors.” Cleary quotes from a letter by E. B. White to a librarian in which he wonders about the wisdom of having classrooms’ worth of children write letters to writers. A sentence from the letter that Cleary is too kind to quote: “The author is hopelessly outnumbered.” In another letter, to a child, White explained why he hadn’t written another book for children: “I would like to write another book for children but I spend all my spare time just answering the letters I get from children about the books I have already written.”

Elaine found her way to the Times essay after reading Cleary’s two memoirs. They’re on my to-read list.

On an unrelated note: it’s really hard to type while listening to the Kinks.

Related posts
Beverly Cleary : handwriting : E. B. White (Pinboard)

[White’s letter to the unidentified librarian is dated May 7, 1961. The letter to a child-reader dates from late March 1961. From Letters of E. B. White , ed. Dorothy Lobrano Guth (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). White would go on to write one more book for children, The Trumpet of the Swan (1970).]

“Somewhere in the invisible”

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday . 1943. Trans. Benjamin W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964).

This passage strikes me as perhaps the saddest in The World of Yesterday : a picture of an intellectual worker, one for whom individual freedom and European unity were the highest values, powerless as he watches the world fall apart once again.

This passage reminds me of an observation from the writer Romain Rolland, as quoted by Zweig: “Art can bring us consolation as individuals, but it is powerless against reality.” That sentence struck both Elaine and me; she wrote about it in this post.

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3:57 p.m.: A comment from a reader makes me want to add: If this passage makes you think about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, well, me too. As does what Zweig says elsewhere about a desire for “order.”

Other Zweig posts
Happy people, poor psychologists : Little world : School v. city : “A tremendous desire for order” : Urban pastoral, with stationery : Zweig’s last address book