WORDS

A FEW THOUGHTS ABOUT WRITING

Sam Smith

[I was asked to give a few tips for a blog writing workshop. Here's what
I suggested]

Just because we are able to speak and write doesn't mean we have to, As
someone once said, what this country needs is more free speech worth
listening to. Accumulating verbiage without regard to its content is
more likely to lead to indigestion than understanding.

Speak United States. Avoid the private languages of academia,
technocracy and corporations.

As an English teacher wisely noted, you are allowed only three
exclamation points in a lifetime. Use them carefully.

Remember that you are talking to a reader, not your therapist. Since
you're don't pay your readers what you pay your therapist, you should
give them something they will enjoy.

If you're having a hard time, write for one reader: a friend, a
relative, your child, George Bush. This helps remove the speechifying
and makes the task less confusing.

Do not use all caps except in headlines or acronyms.

If you suffer from writer's block, just sit down and write crap. Pay no
attention to style, content, or spelling. Just write something. Then
read it again tomorrow and save all the good stuff.

Capitalized words belong on anything that would go on a door or a map,
in an address book or at the beginning of a sentence. They are not for
words you just think are important.

If you're being funny or ironic, don't feel you have to say so. Never
explain a joke. It annoys your good readers and the dumb ones won't
still won't get it.

E.B. White, editor of the New Yorker used to say, if you can't be funny,
be interesting.

Avoid abstractions. If the evening was indeed 'fabulous,' give us some
solid evidence. And if you do a good enough job of describing an
incident, you won't need to call it 'racist.' Think of yourself as a
photographer using words instead of a camera. Good photographs speak for
themselves.

Stories are almost always more interesting than opinions. Use the
southern approach and argue by anecdote.

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FURTHERMORE. . .
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AP -  Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many
complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to
comparing the cost per ounce of food. Those are the sobering findings of
a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills
of students as they approach the start of their careers. More than 50%
of students at four-year schools and more than 75% at two-year colleges
lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks. That means they
could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure,
understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card
offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize
results of a survey about parental involvement in school.