How to improve writing (no. 111)

I wrote a letter yesterday to the CEO an insurance company about the 109 minutes I spent on the phone trying to find out why a payment didn’t go through. The eventual answer, which came at the end of the fourth call: there was a general problem with processing payments.

The first paragraph began like so:

I am writing to describe my recent experience trying to sort out a problem with my mother's [company name] plan. I am not seeking an apology or a promise that your company will do better. I want only to describe my experience and make suggestions for improvement, suggestions that I hope your organization will take seriously.

After revision:

I want to recount my recent effort to sort out a problem with my mother's [company name] plan. I’m not asking for an apology or a promise that your company will do better. I want only to recount my experience and make constructive suggestions for your consideration.

Modest savings here: the paragraph went from fifty-six words to forty-seven. And the words are much better in the revision.

~ “I am writing”: There’s no need to say that. I briefly considered beginning with “Let me recount,” but I decided that I don’t want to ask for anyone’s permission.

~ “Recount” is more accurate than “describe.” Describing this experience would call for furious strings of adjectives and expletives.

~ “My recent experience trying to sort out a problem”: That’s pretty ponderous.

~ “I am not seeking an apology”: Also a bit ponderous.

~ “Suggestions for improvement, suggestions that I hope your organization will take seriously”: Again, ponderous. I think I’ve been watching too much Frasier. “Constructive suggestions for your consideration” says everything that needs to be said, and I like the touch of wit in “for your consideration.” Yes, I’m a Christopher Guest fan.

Will the CEO read the thousand-word letter that follows? I doubt it. But someone will. And God knows, they need all the constructive suggestions they can get for their user interface.

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

[This post is no. 111 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. I turned this paragraph into public prose by putting it in this post.]

“O Heaven, were my whiskers neglected!”

Murr in love:

E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, trans. Anthea Bell (1999).

Also from this novel
“Scholarly voracity” : “My little right paw” : Reading and writing in the dark

[From the notes to this edition: “Ovid’s De arte amandi and Manso’s Art of Love: Ovid’s famous verse work on the art of love is properly entitled Ars amatoria. Johann Kaspar Friedrich Manso (1759-1826) wrote a work thus entitled, and published in 1794, which is mocked by Goethe and Schiller in their Xenien.”

The play is As You Like It, III.ii. Signs of a lover: “A lean cheek, which you have not; a blue eye and sunken, which you have not; an unquestionable spirit, which you have not; a beard neglected, which you have not.”]

How to lay off of Josh Marshall

[Lay off of : in the middle-school and high-school sense. “Hey, lay offa him!”]

As I’ve written before, every time I look at Talking Points Memo, I end up rewriting one or more of Josh Marshall’s sentences. It’s true. I’ve written five How to improve writing posts about his sentences — more such posts than I’ve written for any other public writer.

But now that I know that Josh Marshall doesn’t write, I’m going to lay offa him. From a 2022 Marshall post:

Relatively early in my writing career I realized that I write in a way that is different from how most people do it. I don’t actually write. Not precisely. What I do is speak in my head and basically transcribe the sounds. This sometimes leaves funny artifacts in my writing. Like many who write fast and online I have no shortage of missing words or typos, “theirs” that should be “theres” and vice versa. But that’s not what I mean. Sometimes I will actually include words which sound vaguely similar to the intended word but are not homonyms and are totally different words. They just create a similar set of sounds if you run them together in a spoken sentence. Read English sentences they can read like gibberish. but if you speak them quickly aloud the meaning will often be clear.

People will sometimes point out that I’m clearly using transcription software that is screwing up. But in fact I’ve never used transcription software in my life. My brain is just wired in this particular way. There actually is transcribing. But I’m the one doing it.

I have no idea what it means to work in this way. But criticizing the prose that results now feels pointless. I’m gonna lay offa him.

But before I do, I have to point out that their s and there s would be better plural forms. Garner’s Modern English Usage: “The best way to form the plural of a word used as a word is to italicize it and append -s in roman type.” Also, there’s an as missing from the closing sentence of the first paragraph: “Read [as] English sentences.” And the period in the middle of that sentence should be a comma.

I still can’t believe that people pay to read Talking Points Memo.

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

“Th’ anti-Ernie!”

[“The Unholy Trinity.” Zippy, August 16, 2023. Click for larger rocks.]

Bill Griffith’s biography of Ernie Bushmiller comes out on August 29. It‘s called, of course, Three Rocks.

Venn reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

#:~:text=

A nifty way to direct a reader to text on a webpage: add #:~:text= after the URL, followed by whatever text you want to highlight.

I did just that in a post on Monday, which includes a link with this URL:

https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2022/02/seven-movies-five-seasons.html#:~:text=Parallel
%20Mothers%20(dir.%20Pedro%20Almodóvar,
%202021).

(A space between words automatically becomes %20.)

The link that results goes to a few sentences about the Pedro Almodóvar film Parallel Mothers. Now there’s need to scroll through the post to find those sentences.

Am I the last person blogging to know about #:~:text=? It appears to have begun as a Chrome feature called Scroll to Text Fragment. It works in some browsers, not all. I find that it works in Epic, Orion, Min, and Safari, but not in Brave. Strange, because Brave is based on Chromium.

An EXchange name sighting

[From The Man in the Net (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1959). Click for a much larger view.]

EVergreen and Futura: a winning combination.

But someone might see that bill as evidence of an overt act.

Related reading
All OCA EXchange name posts (Pinboard)

“Cause I Ain’t Got a Pencil”

Food for thought: Joshua T. Dickerson’s poem “Cause I Ain’t Got a Pencil.”

What is an overt act?

The term overt act makes 126 appearances in the Georgia indictment. E.g., “The speech was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.”

Black’s Law Dictionary (9th ed.), ed. Bryan Garner, gives two meanings from criminal law: “1. An act that indicates an intent to kill or seriously harm another person and thus gives that person a justification to use self-defense,” and “2. An outward act, however innocent in itself, done in furtherance of a conspiracy, treason, or criminal attempt.” And N.B: “An overt act is usu. a required element of these crimes.”

[Black’s is now in its eleventh edition. But the ninth is what I could get my hands on.]

TV in the classroom

Teaching again. I was explaining the idea of a change in identity, perhaps apropos of the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, who discovers that when he dons a pair of sunglasses and a wide hat, he’s mistaken for the ladies’ man/numbers runner/preacher Bliss P. Rinehart. I reached for an analogy: “You know how in The Wire, Walter White shaves his head and wears a black hat and calls himself Heisenberg? Wait — was that The Wire, or Breaking Bad ?”

“I don’t like either one,” a student said.

“What TV show would you recommend?” I asked. And off we went, on to a class-wide discussion of television.

This is the twenty-sixth teaching dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. In all but one, something has gone wrong.

Related reading
All OCA teaching dreams (Pinboard)

[Ellison said that the P stands for the shapeshifting god Proteus. My last semester of teaching has something to do with this dream: Elaine and I were bingeing Breaking Bad that spring. At the end of the semester, the students in my modern American lit tutorial presented me with POP! figurines of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, now residing on a shelf of William Carlos Williams. And good grief: these figurines now sell for $100+ on Amazon.]

“School Pencils? Pencil Cases?”

[Life, August 31, 1953. Click for a much larger view.]

I like the way this advertisement attempts to bridge a generation gap:

Pencils all dressed-up in brand-new colors . . . and pencils in the time-honored shades of your own school days.

Pencils to please everyone! Or almost everyone: I was never a fan of the Pedigree pencil. This post explains why.

“You saw a full page ad about Pedigree in last week’s LIFE,” this ad says. Yes, I did, and I posted that very ad in 2017: “Cheaper buy the dozen.” I didn’t know that this ad was to follow.

It’s never too early to at least think about school supplies. It may already be too late. First-day-of-school dates are various in the Untied (sic) States.

Related posts
Back-to-school shopping : A Boro Park Woolworth’s : Where are the 2017 Moleskine planners?