Old instructions

I’m not sure what approach to take on today’s topic.

Last week my brother (whom I hadn’t seen for maybe five years) and I visited the museum on the campus of the US Naval Academy. I was embarrassed at the poor quality of the writing  on many of the labels, but that’s a story for another post. One of the displays showed an instruction book for building a sailing ship. Here is a single sentence from the open page:

Some say the general method, which has been pitch’d upon by the greater number of shipwrights and others, and may be term’d shipwrights Hall Rule, is to take the length of the keel, measured from the back of the main post, to the fore-side of the stem, at the upper edge of the lower harping, by a perpendicular made from thence to the upper or lower edge of the keel, only 3/8 of the main breadth, from the outside of the plank of one side to the outside of the plank of the other side, at the broadest place of the ship, being set backward of aftward from the right angle made by such a perpendicular and base.

The intended readership was people in a skilled trade: shipwrights. No people with doctorates or fancy academic backgrounds here. The book contained illustrations, but not for this particular sentence. Think you could handle a whole book of this kind of writing? We built some pretty good sailing ships back then, too. Someone told me that the readership for The Federalist Papers, heavy reading forced on a few high school and college students, was New England farmers. I’m a bit concerned about the typical person’s reading and comprehension skills nowadays.

On the other hand, I celebrate that the technical writing trade has advanced to make even complex instructions (fairly) easy to understand, allowing people to concentrate on the task without having to spend a lot of effort deciphering the instructions. (One of my guidelines is that bad writing must not be justified with the excuse that the reader will figure it out.) After all, we build some pretty good spaceships and computers.

I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.

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I have been accused of superficiality occasionally because I advocate careful proofreading and making sure spelling and punctuation are correct. Regular readers know I subscribe to (and recommend) A Word A Day, which is 18 years old this week. Each day’s post ends with a quote, and today’s was from John Dryden’s writings:

Errors like straws upon the surface flow:
Who would search for pearls must dive below. -John Dryden, poet and dramatist (1631-1700)

John Dryden. (I'm afraid to post a picture of the example at the and of this post.)

To which I presumed to add a couplet:

But straw obscures the view below, my dear:
To plumb the depths, the surface must be clear.

On the surface, as it were, Dryden appears to advocate the position that we should look past superficial mistakes and go for the true intent of the writing. That might be true as far as it goes, but it’s still better not to have that straw interfering with your ability to plumb the depths. And John Dryden was no slouch at getting his grammar and spelling correct.

Two thoughts:

• Why would you want to distract someone from your pearls of wisdom with something so easily fixed? (Here’s an article I wrote on this subject a while back: Improve your Writing in One Step.)
• Carelessness advertises bad things about you. True or false, it reduces your credibility. To be blunt, if you are indifferent to mistakes in your writing, you look like a doofus.

I participate in Google+, and I have a circle that contains more than 500 fellow writers. Sometimes one of these folks will offer samples of their work for free on Amazon, and I always download these when I find them. One was so good I must mention it. The title is Ravenwood, and it’s by Nathan Lowell. I don’t know if it’s still free, but it’s worth whatever the price is. The protagonist is a middle-aged woman on her way to find a teacher, who is delayed on her journey by the needs of a small village. The setting is a non-technological kingdom with hints of magic. The story is vivid, exciting, and touching. I’d recommend it to anyone.

Another one of these freebies was so bad, it made me understand the difference between eroticism and pornography. (Joe: “Hey Moe—Do you have any pornography?” Moe: “Nah, I don’t even have a pornograph”) Erotic writing is well written. Pornography is badly written. I think porn merely describes the fantasies of the semi-literate writer, or follows a standard plot line to titillate a frustrated psychological appetite. The writer of this second freebie doesn’t appear to be very literate. Believe it or not, I’m going to quote some of it, a bit sanitized, all from within the space of a couple pages. (This is, after all, a family website.)

I won’t embarrass the author by repeating the pseudonym or the name of the short story:

Sabrina was Master’s protégé, he’d taken her on to teach her how to be a proper Dominatrix. [Comma splice. Should be two sentences. Don’t capitalize “dominatrix.” They got the spelling of “protégé” right, though.]

When we got to the living room, my heart sunk. [sunk? It’s “sank.” Fifth grade English]

I start taking off my clothes before she could even say a word. [It’s “started,” not “start.” I’m pretty sure this is a careless typo, because the rest of the story is set in the past—and I’m glad it’s over.]

Then the flogger hit me. I must of instinctively heard it, because I didn’t flicker so much as a muscle. [“must of“??? Stop torturing me! And you twitch muscles, not flicker them]

And this doesn’t cover lapses in characterization, logic, or flow.

I’ve never participated in the sort of stuff described in the story but it didn’t seem realistic to me. But then, I’m an innocent. And it’s probably pretty formulaic. I’m tempted to punish the writer, though.

Actually, if the writer of that story reads this, I’m sorry to have hurt your feelings. Unless you enjoy this sort of thing.

The number of people who look at this site has skyrocketed since I began mentioning it on Google+. At least three people a day now! One of my most loyal readers, Ann Marie Dwyer, has a blog called Momma’s Money Matters. It covers a wide variety of topics, articulately written, and it includes interviews of writers. I am pleased to say that hers is one of few sites on which I have not yet seen a typo. Not only that, but she has a page inviting her readers to plug their own blogs. I suggest you poke around the site and maybe become a reader. Here’s the page:

The Green Room

Take a look, and tell her I sent you.

Next post: back to grammar unless something else comes up.

Most of the time The Writing Rag is about expository writing—writing to communicate information in a manner that causes the least amount of effort for your readers. One of my rules of thumb is that if your reader has trouble understanding, the problem is with the writing, not the reader. Business letters, instructions, technical writing, essays, and (in my opinion) good journalism fall into this type of writing.

Other useful kinds of writing exist, whose intent might be to amuse, inspire, motivate (cause action), persuade (cause belief), or cause any number of other effects in a reader. To accomplish these, someone might use poetry, short stories, novels, riddles, essays. You name the genre, the writer has a reason for exposing a reader to it. Obviously some writing formats fit into more than one purpose—blog posts, for example.

For completeness, I should remind you that sometimes the writer is the reader, and the purpose might be to clarify thinking, record events, or express feelings. For these purposes we have notes, journals, diaries.

One kind of writing has the goal of creating a mindset in the reader. This type of writing is the slogan. I am tempted to give a bunch of examples, but I’d rather let you suggest a few of your favorites in the comments.

A famous slogan: Do a good turn daily.

That one was suggested by Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting. I’m not going to tell you how to write an original slogan, but if you have a nicely codified way to write one, please share with all of us in the comments.

Instead, I must cop out. I found a website that creates a slogan for you. Type in something, click the button, and you get a slogan.  Here’s the link. Go play with it. http://thesurrealist.co.uk/slogan.cgi. They even give you a snippet of code so you can put a slogan you like on your website, with a link to their site, of course. Here’s my favorite, so far:

After trying a few, I figured out that they plug your word into a selection of existing slogans, some well-known, and sometimes with amusing results. How about

You’re in the Grammar Generation!

My apologies to that carbonated sugar water.

I suppose that’s one way to create a slogan: Take a popular meme and plug your own words into it. Some of my colleagues told me about the most interesting man in the world recently, mainly because I had never heard of him and I look like his brother. So I’ll offer his meme for a slogan base:

I don’t often write letters to the president, but when I do, I use good grammar.

My third invitation to comment: What can you come up with? Share.

While I’m quoting others’ work, I may as well post another quote. This list of writing rules is from Elmore Leonard, who, though I have never read any of his work, must be an okay guy, because his first name is my middle name.

I found this at http://www.openculture.com/2012/01/writing_rules.html. The article contains several other lists of writing rules; I feel the closest kinship to George Orwell’s rules, and not because his first name is my last name.