Reading One's Own Writing

This can be painful or pleasurable, depending on many factors. One factor is how prepared we are to admit we are wrong or were wrong many years ago. Another factor is whether we can stand a few inexplicably bad phrases or thoughts that are revealed after years of experience have taught us new things. I usually enjoy reading my own writing, but I don't enjoy reading the really bad things I've written. I once read a writer's advice not to re-read what you've written while you are writing, because then it gets fixed in your head and starts to sound like it's the greatest thing ever, when it's really not. I wonder if that's true of re-reading old writing. Old writing is a guide to who we were when we were younger. New writing probably shouldn't be re-read until we've had a chance to forget we've written it.

"Are," "our," Arrrrr

Have you ever run across this error?

"This is are team, not yours."

It's probably from someone writing so fast they are only paying attention to the sound of words, not their function. The words "are" and "our" are so different in usage that it's difficult to get them mixed up, unless the writer is actually thinking phonetically and trying to describe the way a word sounds, not what it means.

This is one error that really makes me go Arrrrgh.

For the record, "our" is the possessive pronoun that belongs in the above sentence. "Are" is the verb form of "to be" that belongs in such sentences as, "The chips are down here," and "Where are you, Charlie Brown?"

Passive Voice

I love the formality of this entry in the American Heritage Book of English Usage. Unfortunately, very few people will read such entries, much less apply them to their writing, and I have to disagree with the main thrust of the article, which is that passive voice is useful. Passive voice can be used to disguise the agent of action in a sentence. Therefore, when I notice extensive use of passive voice in an article, I start to wonder how much the author doesn't know. For example, "The fine was assessed..." instead of "The board assessed a fine..." Writers often use passive voice to try to soften the blow of bad news. This approach usually doesn't work, but we still try it.

What is passive voice? It's a deadening of language in which sentences are robbed of their core actors. "It has been determined that..." rather than "I decided..." Passive voice is using a phrase with a form of the verb "to be" in it when "to be" is not needed.

What are the main forms of "to be"? "am/is/was/were/are/have been/has been/had been"

Why is it bad to use "to be"? Because the verb is so common that it makes writing dull, and because it creates the impression of hiding something or of not telling the full truth.

Passive voice can be used sparingly, but it should not dominate a passage or an entire essay.

Weighing Words

Ironically, while electronic storage capacity is apparently near infinite, meaning that people can upload their writing without worrying about the space constraints of print media, online attention span is shorter, meaning that people who want to have readers need to pack more punch into each word. Thus, I've made it a goal to write shorter blog entries, forcing me to weigh words more carefully. The more I value each word, the better my writing becomes. It's better to have my mind focused by a constraint such as length than to wander around aimlessly in search of a point.

Meta-knowledge vs. navel-gazing

One question: is all this writing about writing useful? In looking at the last post and the post from my other blog about a lecture I just watched on google, I'm beginning to recognize that I'm part of a larger trend of blogging about blogging or tagging. Is this a good form of meta-knowledge, or is it just so much navel-gazing? You tell me.

Creative Labels

In posting to my other blogs, I often feel the urge to label my posts with tangential words, then usually settle on something rather prosaic. I've seen other friends post using "themes" or catchphrases. I'm not sure what style works. I know that labels work better than an archive for capturing what I'm writing about, so from now on I will be using labels more frequently. It's an interesting phenomenon -- how the web is changing the way we write, and also changing itself constantly. Improvements in technology change the way we use language, and it's for the better, I think.

Drilling Down into the Stickiness of Newfangled Jargon

Ever wonder how a word is created? It's simply used in print somewhere by some writer who hopes it will be understood and used by somebody else. Words are re-used in new ways all the time, but to create a wholly new word is an interesting phenomenon. How many times is the word "input" used in a day? Was it some IBM programmer sometime in the 1950s who coined the term? I wonder. I don't have the answer to this one. The Merriam-Webster On-line link on this page doesn't have the etymology of this word, and my home dictionaries are really terrible. There are thousands of new jargon words created for computer usage. The computer is a useful metaphor for thought processes, so I think that explains part of why computer jargon is exploding. I'm not sure all the terms will stand the test of time, though. "Drilling down" and "stickiness" are two terms I wish I never heard, even though I can use them properly, I think. Let's see if we can come up with some new terms that we think will last.