How to improve writing (no. 104)

From a Washington Post article, describing the efforts of a defeated former president’s supporters:

One man stood on the bridge, which crosses the Intracoastal Waterway, holding the American flag upside down — widely recognized as a symbol of his belief that the country is in distress.

I tried this sentence on a volunteer, who immediately noticed a problem: an inverted flag is not widely recognized as a symbol of that man’s belief. Better:

One man stood on the bridge, which crosses the Intracoastal Waterway, holding the American flag upside down — widely recognized as symbol of the belief that the country is in distress.

A larger problem: an inverted flag is not a symbol of anyone’s belief. Like a motorist’s flare or a traffic light or an S-O-S, it’s a signal. And the signal need not apply to nationwide distress. From 4 U.S. Code §8: “The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.”

So better still:

One man stood on the bridge, which crosses the Intracoastal Waterway, holding an inverted American flag, widely recognized as a signal of distress or danger.

*

August 11: I still have this sentence kicking around in my head. And I wondered this morning, why “the bridge, which”? There’s no previous sentence that identifies the bridge. So how about

One man stood on the bridge that crosses the Intracoastal Waterway, holding an inverted American flag, widely recognized as a signal of distress or danger.

Or clearer:

Standing on the bridge that crosses the Intracoastal Waterway, a man held an inverted American flag, widely recognized as a signal of distress or danger.

I flew a (virtual) inverted flag for different reasons in a 2019 blog post. I’m pretty sure that I learned about the inverted flag from the Canned Heat album Future Blues.

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

[I wouldn’t argue that “inverted” is better than “upside down,” but to my ear, it’s more graceful. This post is no. 104 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Raymond Briggs (1934–2022)

Writer and illustrator of The Snowman (1978), among many other books. I can also recommend Ethel & Ernest: A True Story (1999). The New York Times has an obituary.

My children always waited for the moment I would cry whenever we watched the animated adaptation of The Snowman.

“That’s our slogan”

From the Only Murders in the Building episode “Hello, Darkness.” Two neighbors in the building:

“Don’t laugh, but I’ve always wanted to be a children’s librarian.”

“I’m a librarian.”

“Shut up!”

“That’s our slogan.”

[The librarian is Howard (Michael Cyril Creighton). His neighbor (Jason Veasey) has no name, at least not yet.]

At the REC

At the last Remote Encoding Center: How the USPS reads terrible handwriting.

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)

After Willa Cather’s birthday

I missed Louis Armstrong’s birthday this year, and I just realized that I missed Willa Cather’s birthday last year. Cather was born on December 7, 1873.

Here are just two revealing sentences from a Cather letter to E.K. Brown, dated April 9, 1937. The context: Brown’s 1936 article “Willa Cather and the West” (University of Toronto Quarterly, 1936), a copy of which Brown sent to Cather. Cather calls it “an interesting and very friendly pamphlet” and says that Brown has “certainly brought a friendly and unprejudiced mind” to her work. On one point she disagrees:

I think you make a very usual mistake, however, in defining a writer geographically. Myself, I read a man (or a woman) for the climate of his mind, not for the climates in which he has happened to live.

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

Brown (1905–1951) went on to write the first Cather biography, Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, completed by Leon Edel (1953).

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

[If it needs to be said: “the West” here is the American west, not “the West” so beloved of fascists and white nationalists.]

Drawing ability

[“Ready for the Slicks.” Zippy, August 9, 2022.]

I don’t think I was yet reading Zippy when Bradford ’n’ Nan made its last appearances. Today’s strip adds new dialogue to the art of an April 2000 strip.

I admire Bill Griffith’s curmudgeonly insistence on genuine artistry in comics. Nan in the second panel: “Don’t be so old-school, Brad! Drawing ability is no longer a requirement.”

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Mar-a-Lago “under siege”!

Jeepers — I step away from the news to do the dishes and listen to a podcast and then find that in my absence the story broke that the FBI has executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Largo. “They even broke into my safe!” a defeated former president complains.

Well, if you had a safe and also had things you wanted to hide, where else would you keep them?

What’s in the safe could be — and no doubt already is — a big deal.

[“Under siege” are the defeated former president’s words, in a faux-tweet. The podcast was The Problem with Jon Stewart.]

After Louis Armstrong’s birthday

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901. I missed the date this year, for two reasons: I didn’t mark it in my datebook, and in my head it’s always somehow August 8, because I know it’s not the Fourth. Armstrong always said he was born on July 4, 1900. Such a date befitted him.

Better late than never: here’s one of my favorite later Armstrong performances: “Azalea,” recorded on April 4, 1961. It’s a Duke Ellington composition, which Ellington wrote years before with Armstrong in mind. As Dan Morgenstern describes the scene in his liner notes for The Great Summit (Roulette Jazz, 2000):

Duke mustered up the courage to pull out a lead sheet for “Azalea.” He pulled up a chair, sat down facing Louis, and held up the words and music. Louis donned his horn-rimmed glasses, smiled that matchless smile, and began to hum and sing. An expert sight-reader, he soon had the melody down. The lyric, even with Duke having moved to the piano, was a bit more challenging, but it, too, fell into place. As all this was taking shape, Ellington was positively beaming, and when a take had been made, he was ecstatic. If indeed he’d had Louis in mind when he created this hothouse conceit, he had chosen properly, for no one else could've made it credible but the incredible Mr. Strong.

With Mort Herbert, bass, and Danny Barcelona, drums. Go, listen. It’s beautiful.

Related reading
All OCA Louis Armstrong posts (Pinboard)

Dream chords

I was showing my friend Rob Zseleczky a beautiful set of chord changes: the chorus of “California Girls.” It’s a simple pattern up and down the neck of the guitar. I like the first chord for each vocal line as a major seventh. It’s not that way in the original. I don’t care.

  Bmaj7               C#m7
I wish they all could be California

  Amaj7               Bm7
I wish they all could be California

  Gmaj7               Am7           B
I wish they all could be California girls

And speaking of “California Girls,” here’s what might be the most surprising take on the song you’ll ever hear, with Mike Love, Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, and Charles Lloyd. Not from a dream.

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[More about the Beach Boys–Lloyd connection here.]

What commas don’t fix

There’s a mistaken clue in Evan Birnholz’s Washington Post Sunday crossword: 102-D, six letters, “What commas may fix.” The answer: RUNONS.

But no number of commas can fix a run-on sentence.

Here’s a lucid explanation of run-ons from Garner’s Modern English Usage :

Run-on sentences do not stop where they should. The problem usually occurs when the writer is uncertain how to handle punctuation or how to handle such adverbs as however and otherwise, which are often mistakenly treated as conjunctions.

Some grammarians distinguish between a “run-on sentence” (or “fused sentence”) and a “comma splice” (or “run-together sentence”). In a run-on sentence, two independent clauses — not joined by a conjunction such as and, but, for, or, or nor — are incorrectly written with no punctuation between them. Hence a run-on sentence might read: “I need to go to the store the baby needs some diapers.” Correctly, it might read: “I need to go to the store; the baby needs some diapers.”

With a comma splice, two independent clauses have merely a comma between them, again without a conjunction — e.g.: “I need to go to the store, the baby needs some diapers.” The presence or absence of a comma — and therefore the distinction between a run-on sentence and a comma splice — isn’t usually noteworthy. So most writers class the two problems together as run-on sentences.

But the distinction can be helpful in differentiating between the wholly unacceptable (true run-on sentences) and the usually-but-not-always unacceptable (comma splices).

Whichever way you define run-on sentence, a comma won’t fix such a sentence. If there’s no punctuation between independent clauses, a comma will only create a comma splice. If there’s already a comma between clauses, another comma tossed in somewhere won’t help.

Some years ago I wrote a two-part guide to punctuation that avoids almost all grammatical terms — even the term run-on sentence. The rules therein (just five) are meant to be especially useful to students, and they account for run-ons, commma splices, and, as they say, much more: How to punctuate a sentence, How to punctuate more sentences.

For a replacement clue, how about “Sentences that don’t mind the gap”?

[And, but, for, or, nor : add so and yet and you have all seven coordinating conjuctions, or as they’re known to teachers of writing, the FANBOYS. The words of course have other uses as well: Are we there yet? I’m so done.]