William Zinsser, RIP

Three required journalism books when I was a college student were On Writing Well by William Zinsser, The Elements of Style by Strunk & White, and the Associated Press Stylebook.

I just learned that Zinsser has died after a long and fruitful life and career. He would no doubt take issue with the passive-voice construction of my first sentence in this blog post. He will be missed. If you’ve never read his elegant book, I highly recommend it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/arts/william-zinsser-author-of-on-writing-well-dies-at-92.html

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

In Memoriam: Galway Kinnell and Mark Strand

Sadly, two great American poets have died in recent days: Galway Kinnell and Mark Strand. I know Kinnell best for his astounding poem "The Bear," a sort of narrative-inner monologue during which an Inuit hunter pursues a polar bear he has wounded by baiting seal blubber with a sharpened bone. Read it some time; it's well worth reading.

The one Mark Strand poem I recall better than any others is "Eating Poetry," which expresses the kind of irrational, exultant joy in reading and language that all writers have experienced at one time or another. Here is this great (and admittedly, somewhat bizarre) short poem in its entirety:

"Eating Poetry" by Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.

Her eyes are sad

and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.

The light is dim.

The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,

their blond legs burn like brush.

The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.

When I get on my knees and lick her hand,

she screams.

I am a new man.

I snarl at her and bark.

I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

RIP Galway Kinnell and Mark Strand.

When to stop revising … plus a Veterans Day message

One of the thorny questions a writer contends with is how to know when a work is finished. Revision is essential to good writing, but when is enough enough and how can you tell? Theoretically, revision could go on forever, but it has to end eventually or nothing would ever be published. Perhaps that point is reached when the writer finally throws his or her hands up in the air? As French poet Paul Valery famously remarked, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”

The whole question can seem ridiculous, and American poet Billy Collins penned a satiric poem, “January in Paris,” using Valery’s quote as a starting point. Collins writes:

I would see the poems of Valery,

the ones he never finished but abandoned,

wandering the streets of the city half clothed.

Most of them needed only a final line

or two, a little verbal flourish at the end,

but whenever I approached,

they would retreat from their makeshift fires

into the shadows -- thin specters of incompletion,

forsaken for so many long decades

how could they ever trust another man with a pen?

With my own writing, when I start to change words and then change them back again, I figure I’m getting close to being done. In general, I find that my first drafts are wordy and ridden of clichés. Then I tend to over-explain (a bad habit among teachers) in my second draft, which actually lengthens my already overwritten draft. Finally, in the third draft, I start to tackle the formidable job of cutting and pruning.

I fervently believe in revision. I’ve always doubted the Wordsworthian assertion that accomplished writing springs from “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” preferring to believe that writing is a craft that rewards the hard labor of revision. Accomplished writing springs from a lot of practice -- the same as accomplished singing, carpentry, baseball playing, you name it.

As yesterday was Veterans Day, I am reminded of a poem I wrote earlier this year as a tribute to SFC Dan Murphy (U.S. Army-Retired), an old friend and fellow former soldier who died after battling a long illness. I wrote the poem below in a surge of emotion the morning after Murph died. Then I started to revise it, but I soon stopped, believing that tinkering too much with the poem would ruin its emotional intensity and honesty. Here is the poem; you can judge for yourself:

Lay Down Your Rifle: A Poem in Memory of SFC Dan Murphy, Boys from Leeds, RIP May 28, 2014

Lay down your rifle, old friend,

This you have earned, your eternal rest,

And we who followed you in war or peace are left behind,

We who knew you and loved you best.

You’ve gone away on that final dawn patrol,

A ghost in the shadows no foe can see,

No pain can touch you, no weakness, nor fear.

Take this soldier’s moment to be free.

Until that day when we too shall cross the river

And slip into the trees, and rally again on some distant shore,

Lean back on your rucksack, rest at ease old friend,

But hold your ground, and stay free forevermore.

-- written by John R. (Bob) Dial, former SSG, 1-105 Infantry, 27th Brigade, 10th Mountain Division (L.I.), May 29, 2014

It’s not a perfect poem, and sophisticated critics would probably ridicule it as doggerel, but I still believe that it is complete and finished. The poem also reminds me that our freedom to write and express ourselves would not exist without the sacrifice of so many soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Happy Veterans Day to all veterans. We must never abandon them.

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

Birth of a word: systemness?

Source: Wikimedia Commons public domain photo with
text added by author.

I was all set to rail against abuse of language in this blog post (and I may still, depending on where my rambling thoughts take me as I compose; writing is thinking, after all). Recently I received an email at work containing this bullet point: “Aligning our strategies to a point of coherent systemness.” And I thought, systemness? What the %!&$ is that?!? Houston, we have achieved incoherence! Then my wife told me that “systemness” is a term she hears often in the health-care management field. So I googled systemness (there are two words that didn’t exist 20 years ago) and sure enough wikipedia (another recently-coined word) defined it as a neologism that means “the state, quality, or condition of a complex system, that is, of a set of interconnected elements that behave as, or appear to be, a whole, exhibiting behavior distinct from the behavior of the parts.” Well, butter my biscuit, who knew?

New words have continually been invented throughout the history of the English language. In fact, Shakespeare was one of the most prolific and playful coiners of new words of all time. That is not to say that “systemness” is worthy of Shakespeare, or even worthy of a dictionary entry at the moment. At best, it is management-speak jargon. If it manages to gather enough cachet in our culture, perhaps “systemness” will one day merit a dictionary listing. Again, that is not to say that each word in the dictionary is an equally worthy word. I once read this word in a piece of writing: “originization.” This will always be a horrid word, even if it were to snake its way into the lexicon. Basically, this writer was trying to think of the noun form of the verb “originate” but proceeded to lengthen the word instead of bothering to think of the perfectly good (and shorter) noun form that already exists: origin. I’m still not sure about “systemness.” My gut instinct is to despise it. But only time will tell the fate of this so-called word.

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

Animate a moribund lead sentence: don’t let your first impression become a last impression

Perhaps you’ve heard the expression “a first impression is a lasting impression”? Well, be forewarned: in writing, a first impression can become the last impression if you fail to whet the reader’s desire to keep reading.

If only I had a dollar for every dull first sentence I’ve ever read, such as:

The book I chose to write about is ...

My book report is about …

In contrast to coma-inducing lead sentences like those two above, check out the opening of Simon Winchester’s book The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary:

Popular myth has it that one of the most remarkable conversations in modern literary history took place on a cool and misty late autumn in 1896, in the small village of Crowthorne in the county of Berkshire.

Now this is a lead sentence guaranteed to generate desire in a reader to keep reading (as opposed to “The book I chose to write about is The Professor and the Madman…). How can any reader not want to learn how and why “one of the most remarkable conversations in modern literary history” took place in some remote English village nobody has ever heard of before? What’s the story behind that? Winchester, of course, continues to deliver throughout the opening chapter (the preface, actually) until we discover at the end that the meeting was between a famous lexicographer and the doctor who has helped him enormously in the task of creating his monumental dictionary -- a doctor who turns out (unbeknownst to the lexicographer) to be an inmate in an asylum for criminal lunatics. Modern literary history isn’t your cup of tea? Try the same technique with a different topic: “Popular myth has it that one of the most remarkable events in sports history took place on a dusty field in 1972, in an abandoned oil-company town in Oklahoma.” If you are a sports fan, wouldn’t you want to find out about this event lost to obscurity?

Notice too how Winchester (or maybe his book editor) knows how to pique interest using the book’s subtitle, which juxtaposes the salivating terms murder and insanity with the august Oxford English Dictionary. How can such unlikely things be paired together, the book browser wonders?

There are, of course, probably more than a thousand and one ways to entice the reader’s interest at the start of a piece of writing, but one of them certainly is NOT “The book I chose to write about is…”

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.

An everyday writing mistake that occurs every day

Here’s a mistake I see every day in student writing: confusing “everyday” with “every day.” The former is a one-word adjective and thus should be used to modify a noun. For example, writing is an everyday activity for me. The adjective “everyday” (one word) modifies the noun “activity.” Alternatively, “every day” (used as two words) is already an adjective phrase (an adjective plus a noun). The noun “day” is modified by the adjective “every.” This phrase means the same as “each day.” Writing is an activity I pursue every day. (While I’m on the topic, never write the horribly redundant phrase “each and every day” -- or even worse, "each and every single day"). For some reason, my high school students invariable reverse the usages and use “every day” as an adjective and “everyday” as a adjective phrase. I’m not sure why, but I see this error every day.

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.