A reminder of Wolcott Gibbs’ points about good writing (from James Thurber) January 19, 2010
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentJames Thurber noted 31 points about good writing made by New Yorker editor Wolcott Gibbs. They include the following (via Charles Miller on the CoJo blog):
- Writers always use too damn many adverbs. On one page recently I found 11 modifying the verb 'said'. 'He said morosely, violently, eloquently, so on' … It is impossible for a character to go through all these emotional states one after the other.
- Word 'said' is OK. Efforts to avoid repetition by inserting 'grunted', 'snorted' etc are waste motion and offend the pure in heart.
- Our writers are full of clichés, just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliché undoubtedly is one and had better be removed.
- The more 'As a matter of facts', 'howevers', 'for instances' etc, etc you can cut out, the nearer you are to the Kingdom of Heaven.
- On the whole we are hostile to puns.
- Try to preserve an author's style if he is an author and has a style.
Donald Clark Plan B: txtng (the gr8 db8) October 6, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentA review of David Crystal's study of texting: "It’s good to see some sound, academic sense in a field that’s dominated by amateur newspaper hacks like John Humphries (in the Daily Mail), John Sutherland (in the Guardian) and Lynn Truss, who see texting as some sort of illegitimate attack on language. Disgruntled Boomers, who know little or nothing about either texting or liguistics love to crow on about how it’s debasing the language and producing generation of illiterate idiots. A widely distributed newspaper story in 2003 stated that a student had written an entire essay in textspeak. Turns out this was made up and the essay has never been found. […] But the true worth of the book is in tearing down popular misconceptions. Texting, according to Crystal is:
Not new
Not restricted to the young
Doesn’t abbreviate as much as you think it does
Helps rather than hinders literacy
Produces wonderful forms of language"