Writing for Style: Dr. Seuss

Dr. Seuss

Adapted from Richard's Grammar & Composition Blog

It has often been said
there's so much to be read,
you never can cram
all those words in your head.

So the writer who breeds
more words than he needs
is making a chore
for the reader who reads.

That's why my belief is
the briefer the brief is,
the greater the sigh
of the reader's relief is.
-- Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)

Known to children and parents as Dr. Seuss, Theodore Geisel wasn't only a writer of children's stories. Early in his career he published satirical articles, wrote advertising copy, and drew political cartoons. Even after gaining fame with books about Horton, the Grinch, and other comic characters, he kept older readers in mind as well. Oh, the Places You'll Go! (1990) may have a reading level of ages four to eight, but it's most popular as a graduation gift for high school and college students.

He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1984.

Geisel's thoughts on writing are as quotable as his books. The key to good writing, he once said, is "meticulosity"--a peculiarly Seussian quality that takes years to learn.

For Dr. Siess's thoughts on writing and poetic meter, go to Dr. Seuss on the Writing Tips page of Moore Partners.

My Work: Chariots of Tire 4

Act III in our 4-part series of Clint's tire exploits in the face of a looming deadline.

Act 3: Monday morning Clint drives to Kingston to buy another nozzle. Back at the farm, he turns on the compressor, fills the tank, hauls it down to the barn on a toboggan. He has plenty of air. But when he tries to fill the first tire, he finds the valve rotted and unable to hold any air. Clint is ready to shoot the tires and be done with it.

He calls Greg at the garage and asks if he has tire valves. Yes. When Clint gets there, Greg doesn’t have the right size so Clint drives to Roblin and finds one new and one used valve in the garage there.

Clint returns to the farm, replaces the valve and fills one tire. It takes all the air in the tank so Clint trudges back up the hill with the tank on a toboggan to refill it, then back down to the barn to loosen the valve caps, then starts the tractor and eases it forward until the valve is at the top, then wiggles the air hose up between the tire and inside fender to fill it.

Tires full. Clint returns the compressor. Snows all day Monday.

Tuesday: Clint spends the whole day on the tractor blowing snow as the temperature gets warmer and warmer. Finishes just as it begins to melt.

Wednesday: 10◦C, water running everywhere, snow weighs a ton. Can’t be moved but driveways are clear. Clint gazes out the window toward the barn, the tractor, and the full tires.

Music up, roll the credits.

My Work: Chariots of Tire 3

We finally get to Act II in part 3 of 4 of the real-life screenplay about Clint's adventures with a deadline looming.

Act 2: Friday morning. Clint takes the pig back to Greg and asks to borrow it again that night full of air. He picks it up and, by the time he gets home, all the air leaks out. So that was it – a leaky pig. It snows all night Friday.

Saturday morning. Call Ben again to plow out the driveway. He tries to keep a straight face. Clint takes the leaky pig back to the garage. Greg apologizes and tries another pig. That one leaks, too. Clint calls Ben and asks if he has an air pig. Yes, Ben has a compressor with a tank at his parent’s house that could serve as a pig. He will put the hose and a tire nozzle in his shed for Clint tomorrow when he is finished plowing everyone out. Latest Forecast: Big snow again on Monday, big melt moved up to Wednesday.

Sunday morning. Clint picks up Ben’s compressor, tank, hose, and tire nozzle. He packs everything in his trunk, drives home, plugs it in, turns on the compressor and fills the tank with air. Then he decides to practise on the car tire to make sure everything works. He bends down to put air in the car tire and OMIGAWD, what happened to the nozzle that was on the end of the hose?

He looks on the floor of the garage, he takes everything out of the trunk, including the spare tire, he puts his glasses on and looks behind the stove, under the shelves, in buckets, around recycle boxes—that nozzle has disappeared. As a last resort, he thinks. He knows it was on the hose when he picked it up.

Back to Ben’s. He looks in the driveway, in the barn, outside the barn, he sifts through the straw and the snow with his fingers. Clint’s wife looks in the open bags of dog food and cat food and at Ben’s. Nothing. Movie re-rated to R because of strong language. Big storm still due Monday, melt for sure on Wednesday.

My Work: Chariots of Tire 2

Part 2 of 4 of the real-life screenplay about a small job that grew until it reached epic proportions. Comedy, action, suspense, and horror film.

Back to Thursday evening: By this time it’s dark, so Clint and his wife go down to the barn with flashlights because the solar-powered lights in the barn just give general illumination and aren’t really strong enough for close work. Filling the front tires is easy. With about 30 pounds pressure, they’re like car tires.

But the big rear tires are a different matter. Although they hold only 12 pounds pressure on a 1958 Fordson Dexta, they also contain a mixture of air and liquid calcium chloride (CaCl). Forecast: Big storms due tomorrow and Monday. The plot thickens.

Backstory: The proper term for this mixture is liquid ballast, but most people around here just call them loaded. Liquid ballast increases the weight of the tires and provides more traction. Loading both tires adds about 340 kg to their weight and 25% to the overall weight of the Dexta.

Each tire is filled with a mixture of 60 kg. of CaCl, 110 litres of water, and 1 kg of lime to prevent acidity. This protects against freezing to -40C but makes filling them with air more complicated.

The valves of the tractor tires are on the inside. Clint crawls around underneath to loosen the valve caps with pliers, as the calcium chloride is corrosive. He loosens the first cap by touch, then looks to find he was unscrewing the valve itself. More air hisses out of the tire before he can replace the valve. He starts the tractor and eases it forward until the valve is at the top so the CaCl doesn’t squirt out, then wiggles the air hose up between the inside fender and the tire to fill it.

After some grunting and squeezing, Clint discovers that the air pig is now empty. Filling the front tires shouldn’t have taken all the air, but he can’t do more today.

Latest Forecast: Heavy snows on Friday and Monday with a melt to start Thursday that would make the accumulated snow impossible to move.

My Work: Chariots of Tire 1

As the snow hangs on, self-sufficiency in the country on a solar-powered farm has it’s advantages and drawbacks. Here’s a story of a small job that grew until it reached epic proportions. A comedy, action, suspense, or horror film? You decide.

The “ticking clock” is a Hollywood term for a deadline that adds tension to a story. The hero must prevail before the bomb blows up or the asteroid hits. Well, it was Hollywood at our place when a 15-minute job took a week with a deadline looming. Here’s the screenplay for Chariots of Tire.

Act 1: On Wednesday, our hero, let’s call him Clint, needs the tractor so he can clear the latest 50 cm snowfall with the rear-mounted snowblower. Oh my, the tires are soft, both front and rear. Common when the weather gets cold and the air pressure drops. Can’t use the tractor. He calls Ben to plow out the driveway. Forecast: Two more big storms followed by a thaw when the wet snow can’t be moved but there’s plenty of time.

Clint calls Greg at the local garage to see if they have an air pig, a reinforced cylinder like a propane barbecue tank but with a hose and tire nozzle, that can be filled with air and taken to the tire. He does. Good. Greg says he will fill it and put it in the box on the old red pick-up out in back. Clint stops by on his way home Thursday evening and picks it up.

Brief Flashback: Clint coached Greg in the local baseball league. He and Clint’s son alternated between catcher and third base. Greg was quietly reliable then and he is now—plus he is an outstanding mechanic. Clint reflects on how lucky he is to have an honest, skilled, reliable mechanic close by.

So far this is a family movie.

Writing for Style: A Compendium of Styles I-W

Yesterday I posted some of my "experts" the writers who help me get into the flow of the different kind of writing I do for my clients. Here are some of my favourite I-W experts:

Adapted from About.com

• Bernard Malamud - Rich Anecdote Through Subordination
• Joseph Mitchell - Visual Description
• George Orwell - Shifting Point of View
• Wallace Stegner - Description and Sentence Fragments
• James Thurber - Interest Through Varied Sentence Length
• Frank Trippett - Examples Without Using "Examples"
• Eudora Welty - Character Through Description
• E.B. White - Friendly Voice and Metaphor
• Tom Wolfe - Status Through Description

Bernard Malamud - Subordination from A New Life (1961)

The narrator of Bernard Malamud's third novel, A New Life (1961), is Sy Levin, a troubled English teacher who abandons New York City in search of renewal at a mythical college in the Pacific Northwest. In this paragraph from early in the novel, Levin relates his encounter with his first class on the opening day of the fall term. Notice how he makes some clauses and phrases subordinate to others.

Silence thickened as he talked, the attentiveness of the class surprising him, although it was a college class--that made the difference. He had expected, to tell the truth, some boredom--the teacher pushing the tide; but everyone's eyes were fastened on him. Heartened by this, his shame at having been late all but evaporated, Levin, with a dozen minutes left to the hour, finally dropped grammar to say what was still on his mind: namely, welcome to Cascadia College. He was himself a stranger in the West but that didn't matter. By some miracle of movement and change, standing before them as their English instructor by virtue of his appointment, Levin welcomed them from wherever they came: the Northwest states, California, and a few from beyond the Rockies, a thrilling representation to a man who had in all his life never been west of Jersey City.

If they worked conscientiously in college, he said, they would come in time to a better understanding of who they were and what their lives might yield, education being revelation. At this they laughed, though he wasn't sure why. Still, if they could be so good-humored early in the morning it was all right with him. He noticed now that some of them turned in their seats to greet old friends; two shook hands as if to say this was the place to be. Levin grew eloquent. The men in the class--there were a few older students, veterans--listened with good-natured interest, and the girls gazed at the instructor with rosy-faced, shy affection. In his heart he thanked him, sensing he had created their welcome of him. They represented the America he had so often heard of, the fabulous friendly West. So what if he spoke with flat a's and they with rocky r's? Or he was dark and nervously animated, they blond, tending to impassive? Or if he had come from a vast metropolis of many-countried immigrants, they from towns and small cities where anyone was much like everyone? In Levin's classroom they shared ideals of seeking knowledge, one and indivisible. "This is the life for me," he admitted, and they broke into cheers, whistles, loud laughter. The bell rang and the class moved noisily into the hall, some nearly convulsed. As if inspired, Levin glanced down at his fly, and it was, as it must be, all the way open.

Bernard Malamud's A New Life was first published in 1961 by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. A new edition, with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2004.

For more, go to Compendium of Styles I-W on the Writing Tips Page of MoorePartners.ca

Writing for Style: A Compendium of Styles A-H

As a professional writer, I have to write in many styles. Arresting and hyperbolic for an advertisement, flowing and persuasive for a fundraising letter, short and concise for a website. When I have to adopt a style, I read some of the experts in that style to get the “feel” of it. It works well for me and might for you, too.

Adapted from About.com

Here are some of my favourite experts A-H:

Martin Amis – Breathless Hyperbole
James Baldwin – Rich Explanation Through Phrases and Clauses
Bill Bryson – Humour and Lists
Truman Capote – Parenthetical Details
Raymond Chandler – Tough Guy
Frank Conroy – Descriptive Nouns not Adjectives
E.L. Doctorow – Visual Detail
Joseph Heller – Building Absurdity

Martin Amis – Hyperbole from Money (1984)

The narrator of Martin Amis's novel Money is John Self, a larger-than-life filmmaker whose gargantuan appetites are matched by the author's hyperbolic prose style.

In LA, you can’t do anything unless you drive. Now I can’t do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn’t possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop you ashes or pick your nose, then it's an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there’s a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug.

So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown sky line carries a smear of God’s green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hours, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF--BOOZE--NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON’T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don’t walk. Stay inside. Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren’t even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive.

Martin Amis's Money was first published in London by Cape in 1984. It was most recently reprinted in the U.S. by Vintage Books in 2005.

For more, go to Compendium of Styles A-H on the Writing Tips Page of MoorePartners.ca

Writing for Fun: Mark Twain on Spelling

Revised from Your Guide to Grammar & Composition

Mark Twain had little respect for what he called our "foolish" and "drunken old alphabet," or for the "rotten spelling" that it encouraged. Nonetheless, Twain was not convinced that the efforts of the spelling reformers in his day would ever succeed. As far as Twain was concerned, it was the alphabet itself that needed to be torn up and rebuilt from scratch.

Andrew Carnegie and the Spelling Reformers

The advantages and disadvantes of English are summed up by Harold Cox, Former Editor Edinburgh Review in his essay English As a World Language
(Cox, Harold, http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/pamflets/ses3.php, accessed Mar 18, 2008)

As compared with most other languages English has the enormous advantage of grammatical simplicity. There are no genders for nouns, and an adjective takes the same form whether applied to a male or female. The conjugation of verbs is also extremely simple. As a result the student of English has practically no grammar to learn. In addition, from the European point of view, English has the great advantage that it more or less represents an amalgam of languages. It is largely Scandinavian in origin, but also embodies a vast number of words directly derived from Latin, and many others coming to us from France and Italy, besides not a few coming from Germany. This language, thus built up from widely varying European sources, possesses a magnificent literature, unsurpassed by that of any other language in the world.

From these points of view English is an ideal language as an international medium. The trouble lies solely in the fact that our spelling and pronunciation have practically no relation to one another. Attention was called to this fact by the late Lord Cromer in a poem published in the Spectator of August 9th, 1902:

When the English tongue we speak,
Why is "break" not rhymed with "freak"?
Will you tell me why its true
We say "sew" but likewise "Jew"?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"Beard" sounds not the same as "heard";
"Cord" is different from "word";
"Cow" is cow, but "low" is low,
"Shoe" is never rhymed with "foe,"
And since "pay" is rhymed with "say,"
Why not "paid" with "said," I pray?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And in short it seems to me
Sound and letters disagree.

For more, visit the Mark Twain on Spelling page at Writing Tips on MoorePartners.ca.

Writing for Style: Be Concise

Writers who are careless of form (and the time of their readers) fail to notice that they are writing more words than are necessary to convey the proper meaning. Words are cheap but time is not and loose writing implies loose thinking.

"Clutter is the disease of American writing," says William Zinsser in his classic text, On Writing Well. "We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon."

We can cure the disease of clutter (at least in our own compositions) by following a simple rule: don't waste words. When revising and editing, we should aim to cut out any language that is vague, repetitious, or pretentious.

Some phrases can be deleted completely:

all things being equal
all things considered
as a matter of fact
as far as I am concerned
at the end of the day
at the present time
due to the fact that
for all intents and purposes
for the most part
for the purpose of
in a manner of speaking
in my opinion
in the event of
in the final analysis
it seems that
the point that I am trying to make
type of
what I am trying to say
what I want to make clear

In other words, clear out the deadwood, be concise--and, for goodness' sake, get to the point. For more examples and Four Tips for Being Concise, go to Be Concise on the Writing Tips page of Moore Partners.

Resources: History of English

Wow, where has the time gone? Coping with snow, teaching Credit Analysts from the Saudi Industrial Development Fund at Queen's, and looking after our writing clients has transformed the last three weeks into a blur. I'll try to be more reliable in posting to this blog.

In the meantime, here is an excerpt from The History of English.

A Brief History of the English Language

From http://grammar.about.com/od/words/a/historytimeline.htm

The Prehistory of English

The ultimate origins of English lie in Indo-European, a family of languages consisting of most of the languages of Europe as well as those of Iran, the Indian subcontinent, and other parts of Asia. Because little is known about ancient Indo-European (which may have been spoken as long ago as 3,000 B.C.), we'll begin our survey in Britain in the first century A.D. 43 The Romans invade Britain, beginning 400 years of control over much of the island.

410 The Goths (speakers of a now extinct East Germanic language) sack Rome. The first Germanic tribes arrive in Britain.

Early 5th century
With the collapse of the empire, Romans withdraw from Britain. Britons are attacked by the Picts and by Scots from Ireland. Angles, Saxons, and other German settlers arrive in Britain to assist the Britons and claim territory.

5th-6th centuries
Germanic peoples (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians) speaking West Germanic dialects settle most of Britain. Celts retreat to more distant areas of Britain: Ireland, Scotland, Wales.

For more, go to History of English at Writing Tips at Moore Partners.