Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
One of the three most famous writing mottoes is “Kill your darlings.” Commonly attributed to William Faulkner and others, the sentiment seems originally to have been expressed by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
in the early 20th century. He said, “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript
to press. Murder your darlings.” No matter the verb, the sentiment is that sometimes a passage can be improved by the removal of a metaphor, turn of phrase or quip to which one has become
partial. True enough, but, in my experience, the problem of a well-turned phrase hurting the larger piece doesn’t come up all that often.
A second motto is “Show, don’t tell.” This actually has two meanings, both profound and, in my experience, always correct. The first is that, in describing a scene, you should always try
to make the reader feel that he or she is right there in the moment, rather than hearing about it second-hand. More generally, in making any kind of argument, well-chosen and well-deployed facts trump opinions
and generalizations; by extension, strong nouns and verbs serve as the main engine of good writing, adjectives and adverbs as the grace notes.
The third is a bit more complicated. I refer to “Write what you know,” and problems emerge when it’s interpreted to mean that first-grade teachers should (only?) write about being a first-grade
teacher, short-story writers living in Brooklyn should write about being a short-story writer living in Brooklyn, and so forth. That notion is rightly scorned as leading to the kind of literary solipsism
that, in fact, many short stories, novels, essays and memoirs exhibit. Read more…
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
Let’s consider the most versatile piece of punctuation — the dash. That’s right — I’m talking about the horizontal line formed by typing two hyphens in a row. It’s the
mark that — unlike commas, periods, semicolons and all the others — doesn’t seem to be subject to any rules.
You can get a sense of the dash’s versatility from the above paragraph, every sentence of which employs at least one of them. As for rules, well, there are some guidelines, but not too many.
First, make the thing the right way. There are a few ways to do it, but generally, on a keyboard, you can do as follows: previous word/no space/two hyphens/no space/following word. Word-processing programs turn
the two hyphens into an unbroken line that’s roughly the width of a capital “M” — hence the official name of this punctuation mark, the em-dash. (Some publications, including
this newspaper, add spaces around dashes.)
Do not call a hyphen (-) a dash — as, for some reason, computer-support personnel feel compelled to do when they recite into the telephone the characters you are supposed to enter. Read more…
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
Anybody who has ever logged on knows that online writing begets exclamation points. A lot of exclamation points! Mocking this punctuational predilection is easy and fun. An amusing blog called “Excessive Exclamation!!”
features photos of, for example, a Carl’s Jr. printed receipt with the words “PLEASE LET US KNOW HOW WE DID!!!” Another naysayer is Steve Martin,
who recently wryly Tweeted:
David Shipley, the executive editor of Bloomberg View and a former Op-Ed editor at this newspaper, and Will Schwalbe, authors of “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” speculate
that the trend stems in part from the nature of online media. “Because email is without affect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to
where it would normally be,” they write. But what if a particular point needs to be stressed beyond where it would normally be? Well, you need to kick it up an additional notch, with another
exclamation point, or three. The unsurprising result has been Weimar-level exclamation inflation, where (it sometimes seems) you have to raise your voice to a scream merely to be heard, and a sentence without
blingy punctuation comes across like a whisper. Read more…
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
Peter Arkle
Who knew people were so interested in commas? Commenters to my post “The Most Comma Mistakes”
raised many points, questions and objections; collectively, they concentrated my mind wonderfully. Here are excerpts of a few representative comments, edited for clarity, followed by my responses.
Ted Morton from Ann Arbor, Mich., writes:
Why couldn’t “The gay, bespectacled, celebrated British artist David Hockney is a master of color” be written “The gay and bespectacled and celebrated and British artist David
Hockney is a master of color”?
I don’t understand why “celebrated” and “British” are different kinds of adjectives unless “celebrated” was meant to qualify “British.”
This is admittedly a fine point, but in the example, I hear “British artist” as a unit, more so than “British” as an adjective modifying Hockney. If you wished to emphasize his nationality
(implying “very British,” perhaps), you could indeed use a comma after “celebrated.” A clearer instance of this point might be “His treasured, one-of-a-kind fountain pen.”
No comma after “one-of-a-kind,” even though “fountain” modifies “pen.” Read more…
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
As I noted in my earlier article, rules and conventions about when to use and not to use commas are
legion. But certain errors keep popping up. Here are a few of them.
Identification Crisis
If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times. I’m referring to a student’s writing a sentence like:
I went to see the movie, “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie.
Comma after “movie,” comma after “friend” and, sometimes, comma after “Paris” as well. None are correct — unless “Midnight in Paris” is the only
movie in the world and Jessie is the writer’s only friend. Otherwise, the punctuation should be:
I went to see the movie “Midnight in Paris” with my friend Jessie.
If that seems wrong or weird or anything short of clearly right, bear with me a minute and take a look at another correct sentence:
I went to see Woody Allen’s latest movie, “Midnight in Paris,” with my oldest friend, Jessie.
You need a comma after “movie” because this and only this is Mr. Allen’s newest movie in theaters, and before “Jessie” because she and only she is the writer’s oldest
friend. Read more…
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
Is it safe to talk about punctuation again? Eight years ago, Lynne Truss’s best-selling “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” took, in the words of her subtitle, a “Zero Tolerance Approach”
to the subject. Although Truss’s focus on errors drew the ire, if not the fire, of grammarians, linguists and other “descriptivists,” her book was, for the most part, harmless and legitimate.
Still, it overlooked a lot. Maybe more than any other element of writing, punctuation combines rules with issues of sound, preference and personal style. And as Truss didn’t adequately acknowledge,
even the rules change over time.
The two big players in the field are the period and the comma. I’ll start with the latter because the protocol for comma use is so complicated and contingent. As I said, what’s right and wrong
changes historically, and the comma shows this clearly. In the 19th century and earlier (when rules were generally more lax than they are today), comma use was pretty much a crapshoot. That is, writers rolled
one in when they felt like it, which was usually when a natural pause seemed to occur. So in the first line of “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), Jane Austen wrote:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
By about a century later, comma rules had been codified such that both commas in the sentence (after “acknowledged” and “fortune”) would be dispensed with. Read more…
