12.16.08

Eye-Witless News

Posted in redundancy, style, wordiness, write tight, writing craft at 9:17 am by Bill Brohaugh

My friend JohnnyB over at the Late for the Sky blog was un-dumbstruck by a headline he alerted me to yesterday. (Note: Just as JB introduced his email, “First off, everyone involved is alive.” Even the poor afflicted witnesses!)

Quick recap: Kid darts into traffic. Grandfather dashes to the rescue and picks the kid up, when both are hit by a car. The headline:

Child, Grandfather Struck By Car As Witnesses Look On

JohnnyB Struck By Headline As Witness (Me) Reads On: “Isn’t that what witness means?,” JB writes. “‘Witnesses see nothing’ would be contradictory (though it would be what happens in most Cincinnati crimes).” Indeed, witnesses witness. Or give witness. But JB was also raising a larger concern—that of effective writing. The subject line of his email was a snarked “A fine piece of writing.”

JB says, “The fact that there were witnesses doesn’t even have anything to do with the story. I guess the headline writer thought it added drama.” The phrase also adds a bit of misdirection. Doing something in front of witnesses implies not accident but, as JB notes, dramatic intention. Compare “Dog bites man in front of witnesses” and “Man bites dog in front of witnesses,” the former being somewhat natural and the latter being an act of “I don’t care if you think I’m crazy.”

A couple of side notes before I mention what really frustrates me about the headline: First, the story reports, “Michael Benjamin [one of the witnesses] was there when it happened.” Because witnesses witness, being there “when it happened” is implied. Second, the story wastes the opportunity for precision and drama by beginning “A young boy and his grandfather . . . .” Boy implies “young,” but it turns out that the kid was just two. Beginning “A two-year-old boy and his grandfather” would have delivered additionally appropriate gravity to this incident.

Finally, what’s further frustrating about this story is the headlinese style of “Child, Grandfather Struck by Car”—perhaps deleting that bloated, space-hoarding word and to make room for the ever-so-needed nonsensical redundancy of “As Witnesses Look On.” Now there’s concision for you. Except. The cramped-newspaper-style headline introduces a transcript of an audio TV report—and it appears on the web, the realm of infinite space to express thoughts clearly, and in natural English.

11.25.08

Faust things first

Posted in Chaucer, Middle English, Shakespeare, assorted weird crap, humor, style at 6:34 am by Bill Brohaugh

I get bedazzled by online gadgets for their industry, their creativity, their fun, and their potential for wisecrackery. Mostly for the first three items but also for the fourth is my interest in ofaust.com (with a nod to one of the commenters at Language Log for the alert). Submit a bit of writing through the site’s interface, and O’Faust reports whose classic writing the text most closely resembles.

Fearing for the mockery such evaluations would send my way, I first tested O’Faust on the “Late for the Sky” blog perpetrated by my friend and fellow radio comedy writer JohnnyB (his song parodies are superb). JohnnyB’s “Come Fly With Me” installment was gauged to be most like Frank Baum, with 24% similarity. His “I Love LA” entry was gauged, with less confidence at 14%, to be most like Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Note to JohnnyB: my evaluation that you exist in your own fantasy world has been independently confirmed.) Oh, and a song parody. JohnnyB’s “Country (First) Rogue”—political parody of John Wasilla’s . . . um, John Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads”—gets a nicely complimentary 65% similarity to Oscar Wilde.

Feeling then safe to apply the test to my own writing in this blog, I submitted “Chile is not chilly, chili is not chilly, and never the twain shall meet,” and was given a 23% nod to Edgar Allen Poe. Chills indeed. (As an aside, for the radio show JohnnyB and I wrote for, I composed an ode to an NFL game in which the Baltimore Ravens dominated the Cincinnati Bengals: “Quoth the Ravens, never score”). My “Slurry up and wait” nudged up to 25%, and pointed to Mark Twain. My “Rerenaming names” slipped again to 23% and named—oh, shit—Frank Baum.

Deciding to conduct the ultimate test, I then submitted:

07.27.08

Serious Sunday: Poetic prose

Posted in poetry, style, write tight, writing craft at 12:02 pm by Bill Brohaugh

This post is too long delayed:

A couple of weeks ago, I was once again honored to give a presentation at The Antioch Writers Conference, a venerable gathering with some fine instructors. The staff is marvelous, as well, and I thank them for their hospitality.

I also had the pleasure of co-presenting with mystery-writer Sharon Short. Her latest, Tie Dyed and Dead: A Stain-busting Mystery, was published in February of this year. We spoke about “The Writing Life: How to ‘Pitch’ to an Agent,” though we covered other types of submissions as well.

My stay at the conference was disappointingly short. It’s a week-long affair, and schedules allowed me to sit in on only a couple of sessions the first morning. But I managed to catch one of the more compelling presentations I’ve seen at a writers conference: Robert Morgan’s introduction to a week of lectures about poetry.

Morgan is the Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University, and author of such poetry books as Topsoil Road: Poems, such novels as Gap Creek: The Story of a Marriage (an Oprah Book Club selection), and the recent Boone: A Biography. He spoke eloquently of traditional poetic forms from two standpoints: Memorability, and power. He told of a poetry class in which he asked students to recite lines of poetry off the cuff. Morgan was offered no free verse from the students, only classical meters and rhymes. Here was a group studying modern poetry, but had no modern poetry living at the tips of their brains.

As for power, one example. Morgan noted that “Language spoken with great emotion tends to become iambic.” For example: “Do not go gentle into that good night.” You can clearly hear the “da-DUM da DUM” rhythm, the “the-DRUM the-DRUM” beat of the iambs.

Note that Morgan didn’t say “poetry,” but “language.” Poetic tools and forms, rising from instinctive rhythms in how people express themselves, should be the prose-writers’ tools, as well. I have neither the space nor the poetic training to make this any sort of poetry class. Suffice to say that classical poetic forms are often more natural expressions of language than less-disciplined prose diction, and to write tight—to write so the reader swiftly understands—understand the power of infusing poetic diction appropriately into prose.

And because that’s pretty serious stuff there, and this is supposed to be something of a smart-ass blog, let me leave you with another memory from Antioch. Last year, Paul Dickson, author of many books, including several on word use (like The Hidden Language of Baseball), was talking about Hemingway covering the aftermath of a storm that had wrought horrific human damage. Dickson said, “Hemingway was so moved, he used an adjective.”