A pretty good book with only a few typos

The book is Hollowing Out the Middle by Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas. They are a husband-and-wife team of sociologists who received a MacArthur Foundation grant to describe what’s going on in small town America. They pulled up stakes and lived in a small town in Iowa for at least a year, and traveled all over the country interviewing people who had originated there.

The book's cover

What’s going on is that small rural communities are facing extinction because they groom the best students to leave for the Big City and don’t replace the lost talent. That’s a huge oversimplification—which I suppose you might expect when you (I) condense a whole book into one sentence.

The book includes a significant section about what’s being done to reduce this brain drain, and the authors offer some suggestions of their own. The book is not large, and even though it’s well footnoted and has a large bibliography, the copious anecdotes and conversational style make it an enjoyable, thought-provoking read. Click the link in the book’s title to go to the book’s site, which has an Amazon link on it. I got my copy from the library.

Any book is likely to have a typo or two, but this one they should have caught. It’s such a wonderful example of disagreement, I have to share it.

The good news is that there are an abundance of ideas about how to fix rural America; the challenge is that too few Americans are aware we’re at a critical point.

Agreement is when one word is singular and another, connected to it, is plural, and they are both supposed to be singular or plural. Do you see the disagreement in that sentence?

Aside from my personal abhorrence for the expression “there are” (and its singular cousin, “there is”), the expression is plural. And what “are”? Abundance, a singular! Don’t let “ideas” fool you—that’s safely off by itself being the object of a preposition. The best solution here is to get rid of “there are” altogether and recast the clause with a real subject and verb, such as “…people have conjured up an abundance of ideas…”

Don’t let that keep you from reading the book, though.

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The best expository writing is concise. That means you don’t burden your reader with anything but content. The rule of thumb is “if you can leave a word out without changing the meaning, leave it out.” I call this stuff fluff. Fluffiness depends on context so often that conciseness is best taught by example. That’s why you find so many posts in this blog about fluff. They’re examples. Here’s today’s first example:

Luther Home of Mercy first became acquainted with the KoolDuct system during the construction of their family care homes.

KoolDuct is the brand name of a type of air duct made from insulating foam instead of sheet metal. It has lots of good qualities, and the people who build it do their job well, but they aren’t writers. Even their writers leave a little bit to be desired.

This gives an idea of what KoolDuct looks like

So do you see the superfluous word?

Becoming acquainted is what happens the first time you meet someone. After that, you are acquainted, and you don’t become acquainted again (you can become re-acquainted, though). So “first” is superfluous. Re-read the sentence without the offending word. Tighter, isn’t it? Cleaner. Less work to read.

Here’s another example. Moving companies and others sell cardboard boxes for packing things in. At least one company (today’s culprit) even prints advertising on their boxes so you will like their boxes more. The message says:

We specifically designed our boxes for easy stacking.

I could rant about paying good money for empty boxes when you could reuse perfectly good empty ones from the grocer, but this is a site about writing, not about being green. (Ahem, even though green is good.)

“Specifically” is superfluous here. “Specifically” implies they made them stackable on purpose. However, “design” also implies the stackability was on purpose. You don’t need to say you did it on purpose twice. Kill “specifically.” Go ahead, re-read the sentence without the redundant word. See?

Harrumpf.

Words and word parts go in and out of style. When a form becomes popular and people are using it in a lot of places, we say it’s productive. Several years back the advent of the miniskirt made the prefix “mini-” productive. You had mini-malls, mini-cars, mini-donuts. You can still add mini to a lot of words. (Mini even spawned micro for those who wanted something catchier than “very mini.” I won’t even show any pictures of a microskirt, but you motorcyclists who read this can google it.)

All that to mention that “e” has become popular, often with a hyphen, though the hyphen is going away. Now e, as you all know, is the famous mathematical constant, 2.71828182845904523536… the basis of natural logarithms and other interesting things. That e is different from the modern “e” and the similar-looking “e-” First was e-mail, (now email) and e-book and many more. The stands for “electronic.”

But we have a similar word that also begins with e, electric, and herein lies a certain danger of ambiguity. Ambiguity is bad unless you’re writing poetry and want to say more than one thing at once, or you’re lying, and you want to decieve someone about what you really mean. For the kind of writing I teach, ambiguity is bad. You want to leave no doubt about what you mean.

Back to “e” meaning electronic or electric. I’m casting out a warning to all you delicate readers out there. Be alert! Use the context! The last post (below) mentions an electric bicycle. It’s called an ebike.

The PG-Bikes BlackTrail – world’s fastest ebike!

My first reaction was, “What’s an electronic bike?” You don’t want your readers to have that kind of hiccup when they read. Maybe we should write out “electric” since the electronic folks beat the electric folks to the punch.

Let’s see. I need a picture. Here’s one of the first e:

(Click for an explanation)

Maybe I’m on a misuse-of-the-present-perfect kick. Or perhaps a lot of people who should know better (they write professionally) have been making this mistake lately. Today’s goof comes compliments of a pretty good publication, Gizmag. Here’s the quote:

Over the next several days, we’ll be showing you a few examples that we’ve spotted at the show, but to start things off… well, let’s kick out the jams and go with the “Oh come on, you can’t be serious” ebike. It called the BlackTrail, and with a top speed of 100 km/h (62 mph), it’s officially the world’s fastest electric bicycle – and probably the most awesome-looking, to boot.

The show is in the past, and the spotting was a group of single events. Simple past, folks. They spotted some examples at the show; nice and clean, easy to read.

How might they have used the “we have spotted” correctly? Let’s change the event to the present, so their spotting can be still going on. And let’s add the progressive to make the idea of continuing activity clear. Now they can write about some bikes that they have been spotting for us. See? now it’s correct—something that has been going on, and continues even now.

Here’s the bike, by the way. It doesn’t look all that impressive to me. Might be fun to ride, though.

I don't think he knows how to dress for bicycling, either

If you’re into electric bicycles (I use a human-powered one), you might like to follow the series. Here’s a link to the first article in the series, which they will be writing. (Oo! A future progressive!)