Bushmiller, Strunk, and Wilde

A detail from Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden’s How to Read “Nancy”: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2017): at a meeting of the National Cartoonists Society, Ernie Bushmiller asked for the floor and delivered what a fellow cartoonist described as “an impassioned speech” in favor of fewer words in comic strips.

Bushmiller would have liked William Strunk Jr.’s exhortation in The Elements of Style to “omit needless words”:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

The Elements of Style, revised and expanded by E.B. White, became an American best-seller in 1959. Might Bushmiller have read that new edition? Might it have prompted his speech? There’s no date given for the cartoonists’ meeting, but Karasik and Newgarden reproduce a 1962 Peanuts strip that seems to be a comment on Bushmiller’s criticism. If Bushmiller read The Elements of Style, he would have found in Rule 17 (“Omit needless words”) a confirmation of his long-established habits of work. “No unnecessary words,” “no unnecessary lines”: that sounds like a description of Nancy.

Karasik and Newgarden describe Bushmiller as ever exacting about words:

Toward the end of his life, stricken with Parkinson’s disease, Nancy’s creator required additional help to keep his strip on schedule. Al Plastino, one of the most capable chameleons of the comics, who was hired to execute the Sunday strip, recalls, “Bushmiller would call me up and tell me to take out a word didn’t like. Then he’d call up five minutes later to tell me to put it back in. That he’d call up again and tell me to replace it with another word. He’d call me ten to twenty times a day!"

This story puts me in mind of Oscar Wilde, not Gustave Flaubert, removing a comma in the morning, reinstating it in the afternoon. But Bushmiller worked faster.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy and Strunk and White posts

[Elsewhere in How to Read “Nancy” , Karasik and Newgarden cite Rule 17 as a model for the cartoonist: “Faulkner’s prose is usually full of vigor but not necessarily concise. Rembrandt’s most vigorous drawings often contain numerous ‘unnecessary’ lines. But when it comes to comics, Strunk and White were right on the money.” Speculation about Bushmiller and The Elements of Style is all mine.]

Colorizing old strips

[Peanuts, February 10, 1971.]

One problem with colorizing old strips: art may lose the power of suggestion. Look at what’s happened to the telephone table. Aaugh.

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

[Yesterday’s Peanuts is today’s Peanuts.]

Treason?

I didn’t clap during the State of the Union address. Then again, I didn’t watch. On purpose. I would rather have watched LA to Vegas, preempted last Tuesday, on again tonight. If that be treason, make the most of it. It’s a good show.

Grammar in the writing center

Lori Salem, a college writing-center director, points to one more way in which higher education reproduces economic and social inequality: “the very students who are most likely to visit the writing center are the ones who are least likely to be served by our traditional pedagogical practices.” One problem with those practices: writing centers typically treat matters of grammar and usage as “lower order” concerns.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has placed its interview with Salem behind the paywall. But here is an excerpt from Salem’s 2016 paper “Decisions . . . Decisions: Who Chooses to Use the Writing Center?”:

Treating grammar/correctness as a “lower order” or “later order” concern means that frequently we do not address grammar much (or at all) in our tutoring sessions. For privileged students who grew up in homes where a white, middle-class version of English was spoken, this approach might be okay. But affecting a genteel disregard for grammar concerns makes no sense if we are working with English language learners, with students who spoke a less-privileged version of English at home, or with any student who feels anxious about grammar. If we regularly dismiss or defer (“later”) students’ questions about grammar, this doesn’t make those questions go away, nor does it fundamentally alter the terms on which grammar is understood in the university or in society. It simply leaves students up to their own devices to deal with those questions.

I’m reminded once again of Bryan Garner’s observation: “Standard English: without it, you won't be taken seriously.” To dismiss or defer a student’s questions about grammar is to do that student a disservice.

A related post
W(h)ither grammar

[The quotation in this post’s first sentence is from the 2016 paper. The distinction between “higher order” and “lower order” concerns appears to originate in Thomas J. Reigstad and Donald A. McAndrew’s Training Tutors for Writing Conferences (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1984): “After tutors have addressed the higher order concerns [thesis, tone, organization, development], they turn to LOCs [lower order concerns], concerns that deal with units of sentence length or smaller. The emphasis shifts from the draft as a whole to sentence structure, punctuation, usage, and spelling.”]

John Mahoney (1940–2018)

The actor John Mahoney has died at the age of seventy-seven. He is best known for playing Martin Crane in the television series Frasier. Mahoney is less known for having taught English at Western Illinois University. Here is an obituary that notes both endeavors.

Our household has an abiding affection for Frasier and its people.

For complete works

Against “selected passages”:

An anthology will never have the power to stimulate reactions that can be brought about solely by reading the complete work.

Nuccio Ordine, The Usefulness of the Useless, trans. Alastair McEwen (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2017).

Complete works: yes. An anthology may solve the problem of making work from a variety of writers available to students. An anthology may offer a curious browser unexpected discoveries. But an anthology is, almost always, a textbook. And it is much easier to fall in love with a (whole) work of literature or philosophy than to fall in love with a textbook. I always liked seeing course evaluations from students who appreciated the opportunity to read what they called “real books” — in other words, something other than a textbook.

I recently received an e-mail from a publisher pitching not just an anthology but an accompanying website, with discussion questions, “hundreds of images,” videos by the editors, PowerPoint slides ”featuring images and text,” and an “audio glossary” for unfamiliar words. All of which move a student away from an engagement with the thing itself, the text. An audio glossary: because notes in the text aren’t already enough?

A related post
Norton on my mind (about an anthology)

[“Discussion questions,” &c.: a series arranged from the shorter to the longer. Much more readable.]

Long and short

I borrowed Bruce Ross-Larson’s Edit Yourself: A Manual for Everyone Who Works with Words (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982) from the library after seeing the writer’s name in a tweet from Bryan Garner. Seventeen pages in, I have already found a useful bit of advice:

The elements of pairs, series, and compound subjects and predicates usually appear they come out of the writer’s mind — haphazardly or alphabetically. Rearranging those elements from short to long, from simple to compound, increases the ability of the reader to understand them.

Ross-Larson’s specifics:

~ Count syllables. If words have the same number of syllables, count letters.

~ Count words.

~ Place compound elements last.

~ Ignore the first three principles to honor sequence or familiar phrasing or to avoid unintended modifiers. Not “lunch, dinner, and breakfast” but “breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” Not “cream and peaches” but “peaches and cream.” Not “trade and money-market rates” but “money-market rates and trade.”

I had Ross-Larson in mind when I wrote and revised a sentence in a post yesterday. My first impulse was to proceed alphabetically:

No-name documentaries, television shows, more television shows, years-old movies announced as “new”: Netflix (streaming) resembles a crummy video store.

And then it occurred to me to see the sentence as Ross-Larson might:

Television shows, more television shows, no-name documentaries, years-old movies announced as “new”: Netflix (streaming) resembles a crummy video store.

Better his way, no?

[The three pairs of phrases are among the examples in Edit Yourself. One more, avoiding an unintended modifier: not “the remarkable Divine and Tab Hunter” but “Tab Hunter and the remarkable Divine,” a nod to John Waters’s film Polyester.]

A Netflix thought

Television shows, more television shows, no-name documentaries, years-old movies announced as “new”: Netflix (streaming) resembles a crummy video store. A few good finds, and a ton of stuff of no interest to me. If I had to walk or drive to get there, I’m not sure that I would.

From the Saturday Stumper

A bit of popular culture, from today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, 21-Across, seven letters: “’50s game craze.” I will spoil: CANASTA.

I know I’ve heard of Canasta, which turns up in at least a couple of episodes of I Love Lucy. The game was indeed a craze. The December 19, 1949 issue of Life made the call, with a report on “The Canasta Craze,” “reminiscent of the great mah-jongg rage of the ’20s.”



[Click either page for a larger view of the bewildering rules.]

Today’s Stumper, by Lester Ruff, seems not especially difficult. I have begun to doubt that finishing a Saturday Stumper is cause for minor self-congratulation. Canasta, anyone?

Hopperesque

[Nancy, May 3, 1955.]

Nancy, looking like someone in an Edward Hopper painting.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[Yesterday’s Nancy is today’s Nancy Classic.]