Item: A reader* inquired whether I used sex in the headline for a post just to lure readers. Of course I did. The point of a headline is to lure readers. You think I’m going to draw throngs to this site with “Friday roundup” or “Jay Hancock”? (Sorry, Jay, but you’re no Ashton Kutcher. Perhaps you should be grateful for that.)
Item: A reader wonders what was meant by stentorian in this overripe passage from The New York Observer: For the past 19 months, since Mr. Murdoch got his hands on The Journal, he has been slowly, deliberately turning it into his newspaper. The Journal, until so recently the quiet, stentorian creation of Barney Kilgore, reported in a newsroom with the hush of the library about it by gentleman commuters generally more interested in making it home for dinner than making it to Michael’s for lunch, worried over by editors with a literary bee buzzing around in their fedoras, has been his for a year. None of the doomsday scenarios have played out.
Stentorian, the classicists among you will remember, derives from the eponymous Stentor, a herald in the Iliad famed for his loud, carrying voice. The word means “very loud,” so the writer, pairing it with quiet is either straining for the effect of oxymoron or mistaken about the meaning of the word. Feel free to suggest a substitute in the comment field below.
Alternatively, suggest how this passage might be pruned into something offering more meaning and less affectation.
Item: As I have been plodding through Robin Lane Fox’s The Classical World this week (up to the Peloponnesian War), I came across a construction that I recognize from the newspaper copy that it used to fall to my lot to untangle: [I]n 449 the new temples did start to be built on Athens’ Acropolis. ... Ah, so many programs I’ve seen started to be carried out. This combination of active voice and passive voice — inanimate object does something while being acted on — may not be an error of grammar, but it is certainly maladroit. An editor would probably smooth this out into In 449 Athens did begin building new temples on the Acropolis.
No charge, Professor Fox.
Item: In case you missed the hoo-hah over the putative millionth word in English, watch here as Geoffrey K. Pullum and commenters at Language Log explode this stunt for one more time.
Item: On June 4, Twitter carried this tweet from @APStylebook to its thousands of followers: @johnemcintyre disagrees with Stylebook on our split verb guidance. What do you think? (Find it under "verbs.") I saw two tweets in agreement with my post attacking the “split-verb” non-rule that has been repeatedly denounced by linguists and prescriptivists alike. How about it, AP?
*My practice when I use material from readers’ messages is not to name the reader unless I’m given specific permission to do so.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Newspapers have no sex
A reader, apparently mistaking me for the Answer Man, has written to ask my views on personification, saying that she has been challenged on her preference to avoid it in business writing. “The World’s Largest News-Gathering Organization told us ...” is the example she supplied.
The Associated Press has long been wary of personifications, ruling specifically in its stylebook that hurricanes and ships are neuter, not female.
The Chicago Manual of Style says simply, "The poetic device of giving abstractions the attributes of persons, and hence capitalizing them, is rare in today's writing." (We’ve lost something there, as in Samuel Johnson’s lament that teaching involves such demands of patience “to recall vagrant inattention, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd misapprehension.”)
It is more common today in American English to write that a committee has issued its report than to write their report, even though committees comprise purportedly human beings. I am dubious about personifying nations, governments, universities, corporations, organizations, clubs, committees, or other groups, as if they possessed discrete identities.
At the same time, it is commonplace to write that a report, which has no voice, says something. Told, in the example cited, is something that I would shy away from on the ground that a news organization does not speak with a single voice, while recognizing that most readers would take the word in stride.
You clicked on this post just because of sex in the title, didn’t you? Grow up.
The Associated Press has long been wary of personifications, ruling specifically in its stylebook that hurricanes and ships are neuter, not female.
The Chicago Manual of Style says simply, "The poetic device of giving abstractions the attributes of persons, and hence capitalizing them, is rare in today's writing." (We’ve lost something there, as in Samuel Johnson’s lament that teaching involves such demands of patience “to recall vagrant inattention, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd misapprehension.”)
It is more common today in American English to write that a committee has issued its report than to write their report, even though committees comprise purportedly human beings. I am dubious about personifying nations, governments, universities, corporations, organizations, clubs, committees, or other groups, as if they possessed discrete identities.
At the same time, it is commonplace to write that a report, which has no voice, says something. Told, in the example cited, is something that I would shy away from on the ground that a news organization does not speak with a single voice, while recognizing that most readers would take the word in stride.
You clicked on this post just because of sex in the title, didn’t you? Grow up.
The Greeks started it
As with so much else in Western culture, the cult of the celebrity — its degenerate state deplored in yesterday’s post, “Who cares about Ashton Kutcher?” — had its origins in ancient Greece.
Robin Lane Fox, writing in The Classical World, says that the spirit of competition that led to the creation of multiple festivals in the sixth century B.C. also produced “a culture of the ‘celebrity,’ ... not a culture of great warriors but one of great sportsmen, poets and musicians. By contrast, there are no ‘celebrities’ in the world described in the Old Testament or in the Near Eastern monarchies.” Cities honored their champions with victory parades and celebrated their careers in stories. That tradition, too, lives on in what the 20th century called boosterism.
Robin Lane Fox, writing in The Classical World, says that the spirit of competition that led to the creation of multiple festivals in the sixth century B.C. also produced “a culture of the ‘celebrity,’ ... not a culture of great warriors but one of great sportsmen, poets and musicians. By contrast, there are no ‘celebrities’ in the world described in the Old Testament or in the Near Eastern monarchies.” Cities honored their champions with victory parades and celebrated their careers in stories. That tradition, too, lives on in what the 20th century called boosterism.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
That Jay Hancock can write up a storm
Unaccustomed as I am to praise of writers’ work — hey, I was a copy editor, a fault-finder; they didn’t pay me a princely sum to coo over the prose — Jay Hancock’s Baltimore Sun column stands out on the arid, featureless plain of business journalism.
Today’s column on why Maryland should not be thought of as a Southern state any longer, linked to legislative leaders’ desire to affiliate with the Eastern rather than the Southern division of a trade group, shows some of his typical touches.
His opening sentence plays with the South’s historic flirtations with secession: Isn't it time Maryland seceded from the South?
He emphasizes his basic contrast by seizing on a telling statistic:
In a South characterized by social conservatism, only 41 percent of Marylanders reported attending weekly church or temple services in a recent Gallup Poll. That was slightly below the national average and far under the upper-50s percentages for the Deep South.
He never passes up a chance to take a shot at unsound policy and witless behavior:
Maryland is the home of smart growth and Columbia, one of the first planned communities. Should Columbia share a regional designation with Houston, home of stupid growth?
Beyond statistics and public policy, there are social conventions and mores to take note of:
Virginia is still reliably Southern, despite analysts who say it's being transformed by yuppies and carpetbaggers in Arlington and McLean. The analysts were saying the same thing two decades ago.
Order an iced tea in Tysons Corner (no smart growth there!) and you'll get it sweetened whether or not you ask for it.
And yet he acknowledges that the separation from the South is far from absolute — he observes that Maryland is still, if vestigially, a tobacco-growing state.
Though I particularly enjoyed today’s effort, his work is regularly gratifying.
When the all-taxes-are-evil crowd started moaning that a drop in the number of millionaires in Maryland must certainly be a result of a recent income tax surcharge, Mr. Hancock pointed out that “[t]hey're bugging out because of Maryland's estate tax, which applies to a bigger portion of a dead person's hoard than the federal estate tax or those in other states.”
It was a delight to watch him play with the political labels — conservative, liberal, socialist, pinko, right-winger — in a column, “Let’s cut spending and raise taxes,” that put forward intelligible and sensible points of view that spread across the entire spectrum.
And if you, like I, have a recent college graduate in the family, share his column, “Advice to grads: Strap yourselves in for the long ride ahead.” It will be more valuable than any number of banal graduation addresses by notables the graduates will cease to remember in a fortnight.
Today’s column on why Maryland should not be thought of as a Southern state any longer, linked to legislative leaders’ desire to affiliate with the Eastern rather than the Southern division of a trade group, shows some of his typical touches.
His opening sentence plays with the South’s historic flirtations with secession: Isn't it time Maryland seceded from the South?
He emphasizes his basic contrast by seizing on a telling statistic:
In a South characterized by social conservatism, only 41 percent of Marylanders reported attending weekly church or temple services in a recent Gallup Poll. That was slightly below the national average and far under the upper-50s percentages for the Deep South.
He never passes up a chance to take a shot at unsound policy and witless behavior:
Maryland is the home of smart growth and Columbia, one of the first planned communities. Should Columbia share a regional designation with Houston, home of stupid growth?
Beyond statistics and public policy, there are social conventions and mores to take note of:
Virginia is still reliably Southern, despite analysts who say it's being transformed by yuppies and carpetbaggers in Arlington and McLean. The analysts were saying the same thing two decades ago.
Order an iced tea in Tysons Corner (no smart growth there!) and you'll get it sweetened whether or not you ask for it.
And yet he acknowledges that the separation from the South is far from absolute — he observes that Maryland is still, if vestigially, a tobacco-growing state.
Though I particularly enjoyed today’s effort, his work is regularly gratifying.
When the all-taxes-are-evil crowd started moaning that a drop in the number of millionaires in Maryland must certainly be a result of a recent income tax surcharge, Mr. Hancock pointed out that “[t]hey're bugging out because of Maryland's estate tax, which applies to a bigger portion of a dead person's hoard than the federal estate tax or those in other states.”
It was a delight to watch him play with the political labels — conservative, liberal, socialist, pinko, right-winger — in a column, “Let’s cut spending and raise taxes,” that put forward intelligible and sensible points of view that spread across the entire spectrum.
And if you, like I, have a recent college graduate in the family, share his column, “Advice to grads: Strap yourselves in for the long ride ahead.” It will be more valuable than any number of banal graduation addresses by notables the graduates will cease to remember in a fortnight.
Who cares about Ashton Kutcher?
Not to pick particularly on Mr. Kutcher, who portrayed a dolt on a television series and later became the incumbent husband of Demi Moore, but he appears to be representative of that group of people we call celebrities, whose activities are followed avidly by the news media. They draw legions of followers on Twitter, and yet their appeal remains obscure.
The appetite for this sort of thing used to be sated by supermarket tabloids and People, but now Baltimoresun.com has a “Celebrity News” category on its main page, and CNN.com goes in for such breathless bulletins as “Britney Spears dating her agent.” (Media commentator Steve Yelvington tweeted today: “CNN Headline News has devolved into a video National Enquirer. Beware: The next level is alien abductions.”) One of my dearest former colleagues is responsible for editing celebrity coverage at a publication that I think I will not name. This cannot be wholesome.
Please, please do not think that I am scorning gossip. Gossip, which I think an anthropologist would attest is virtually universal in human societies, serves an invaluable function in establishing and solidifying communal values, all the while brightening our drab, dreary, featureless, forgettable little lives. My mother, the late Marian Early McIntyre, for a quarter-century the postmaster of Elizaville, Kentucky, spent a goodly portion of the workday monitoring the comings and goings of the citizenry and reporting on her findings. And in large organizations, such as newspapers, run by managers comically incapable of communicating effectively, gossip is just about the only means to find out what is going on.
Moreover, when we’re able to talk about a governor of New York carrying on in extravagant assignations with hookers, or the governor of New Jersey conducting a homosexual liaison with a subordinate, we can witness a wholesome leveling-down of the great and the mighty.
But Angelina and Brad and Jen?* Paris Hilton? The aforementioned Mr. Kutcher? It cannot say something very pleasant to contemplate about ourselves that we should devote so much attention to figures of such slender substance. We lack the gossip worthy of a great nation.
*Actually, Angelina Jolie, whatever her manifold personal eccentricities, is an actress of some power, and Brad Pitt has had some agreeable roles. But I have never fathomed the appeal of Jennifer Aniston, who came to notice in a TV series that a friend described one night at dinner as “you know, that show with half a dozen people living together, with each one dumber than the last.”
The appetite for this sort of thing used to be sated by supermarket tabloids and People, but now Baltimoresun.com has a “Celebrity News” category on its main page, and CNN.com goes in for such breathless bulletins as “Britney Spears dating her agent.” (Media commentator Steve Yelvington tweeted today: “CNN Headline News has devolved into a video National Enquirer. Beware: The next level is alien abductions.”) One of my dearest former colleagues is responsible for editing celebrity coverage at a publication that I think I will not name. This cannot be wholesome.
Please, please do not think that I am scorning gossip. Gossip, which I think an anthropologist would attest is virtually universal in human societies, serves an invaluable function in establishing and solidifying communal values, all the while brightening our drab, dreary, featureless, forgettable little lives. My mother, the late Marian Early McIntyre, for a quarter-century the postmaster of Elizaville, Kentucky, spent a goodly portion of the workday monitoring the comings and goings of the citizenry and reporting on her findings. And in large organizations, such as newspapers, run by managers comically incapable of communicating effectively, gossip is just about the only means to find out what is going on.
Moreover, when we’re able to talk about a governor of New York carrying on in extravagant assignations with hookers, or the governor of New Jersey conducting a homosexual liaison with a subordinate, we can witness a wholesome leveling-down of the great and the mighty.
But Angelina and Brad and Jen?* Paris Hilton? The aforementioned Mr. Kutcher? It cannot say something very pleasant to contemplate about ourselves that we should devote so much attention to figures of such slender substance. We lack the gossip worthy of a great nation.
*Actually, Angelina Jolie, whatever her manifold personal eccentricities, is an actress of some power, and Brad Pitt has had some agreeable roles. But I have never fathomed the appeal of Jennifer Aniston, who came to notice in a TV series that a friend described one night at dinner as “you know, that show with half a dozen people living together, with each one dumber than the last.”
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Omnium gatherum
The title is mock-Latin for a miscellany — omnium, all, combined with gather them — and a tipoff that this post is not devoted to a single subject.
Item: Grant Barrett, the lexicographer, has launched a Web reference on words, an online dictionary called Wordnik. It aggregates meanings from various dictionaries, perovdes etymologies and illustrative sentences, gives readers the opportunity to contribute material, and offers a number of other interesting features. Give it a try. You may well want to bookmark it.
Item: We told you that skimping on the editing would wind up embarrassing publications. A former Sun colleague observes on Facebook: “Headline at the top of washingtonpost.com says that ‘Sonia Mayor's’ confirmation hearings will begin July 13.”
Item: I complained in a tweet this morning (Feel free to follow me, @johnemcintyre on Twitter): “Ticker on WBAL describes a fire as having been ‘intentionally set.’ So ‘set’ is not enough for them to indicate intention?” Since then, a couple of respondents have questioned whether set always indicates intention to start a fire. What say you?
Item: At Headsup, "fev" shows us once again why sports headlines should not make childish plays on players’ names.
Item: Yesterday, in a narrow vote of 277 to 263, members of the Newspaper Guild at The Boston Globe rejected concessions demanded by the parent New York Times Company. An article in The Times quotes Dan Kennedy of Northeastern University as saying that both sides contributed to an ugly outcome, the company by appearing remote and arrogant, the union by giving in to anger and resentment.
I have no stake in this, but I would like to suggest to my fellow journalists at The Globe that, based on recent experience, any employee of a daily newspaper who imagines that he or she is indispensible and enjoys job security may soon be carrying personal possessions to the curb in a cardboard box.
Item: Grant Barrett, the lexicographer, has launched a Web reference on words, an online dictionary called Wordnik. It aggregates meanings from various dictionaries, perovdes etymologies and illustrative sentences, gives readers the opportunity to contribute material, and offers a number of other interesting features. Give it a try. You may well want to bookmark it.
Item: We told you that skimping on the editing would wind up embarrassing publications. A former Sun colleague observes on Facebook: “Headline at the top of washingtonpost.com says that ‘Sonia Mayor's’ confirmation hearings will begin July 13.”
Item: I complained in a tweet this morning (Feel free to follow me, @johnemcintyre on Twitter): “Ticker on WBAL describes a fire as having been ‘intentionally set.’ So ‘set’ is not enough for them to indicate intention?” Since then, a couple of respondents have questioned whether set always indicates intention to start a fire. What say you?
Item: At Headsup, "fev" shows us once again why sports headlines should not make childish plays on players’ names.
Item: Yesterday, in a narrow vote of 277 to 263, members of the Newspaper Guild at The Boston Globe rejected concessions demanded by the parent New York Times Company. An article in The Times quotes Dan Kennedy of Northeastern University as saying that both sides contributed to an ugly outcome, the company by appearing remote and arrogant, the union by giving in to anger and resentment.
I have no stake in this, but I would like to suggest to my fellow journalists at The Globe that, based on recent experience, any employee of a daily newspaper who imagines that he or she is indispensible and enjoys job security may soon be carrying personal possessions to the curb in a cardboard box.
Monday, June 8, 2009
My good friends
A colleague who is considering signing up on Facebook wonders whether there might be a journalistic conflict of interest. Once in, as I am, one will be writing about fellow bloggers and other writers who are also Facebook friends. Would this involve any compromise of integrity?
I suspect not, but I hadn’t considered the issue.
Keep in mind the elasticity of that word friend in the context of Facebook. It very nearly encompasses as many categories and individuals as John McCain’s ritual vocative “my friends” during last year’s presidential campaign.
Some of the 400-plus people I'm linked to on Facebook are, in fact, what one would call personal friends. Some are professional colleagues from The Sun, the American Copy Editors Society, and other newspapers; some are fellow teachers; some are my former students; some are fellow bloggers; and some are readers of my blog — the word fan sounds odd, I know — with whom I have scarcely any acquaintance but who asked to be "friended." So it would be a mistake to identify Facebook association with any particular degree of intimacy.
From my perspective, Facebook membership can indicate an association akin to the kind of praise and recommendation other bloggers and I already engage in by pointing out one another's work. Or to put it this way: If I were reviewing a book by an acquaintance, I would disclose that in the review and let the reader make appropriate judgments. I'm not sure that a Facebook association would be any more compromising. If you disagree, please comment.
Whether anyone would want to put up with the inane quizzes and other crap that Facebook throws at its members is a separate issue, as is toleration of friend as a verb.
I suspect not, but I hadn’t considered the issue.
Keep in mind the elasticity of that word friend in the context of Facebook. It very nearly encompasses as many categories and individuals as John McCain’s ritual vocative “my friends” during last year’s presidential campaign.
Some of the 400-plus people I'm linked to on Facebook are, in fact, what one would call personal friends. Some are professional colleagues from The Sun, the American Copy Editors Society, and other newspapers; some are fellow teachers; some are my former students; some are fellow bloggers; and some are readers of my blog — the word fan sounds odd, I know — with whom I have scarcely any acquaintance but who asked to be "friended." So it would be a mistake to identify Facebook association with any particular degree of intimacy.
From my perspective, Facebook membership can indicate an association akin to the kind of praise and recommendation other bloggers and I already engage in by pointing out one another's work. Or to put it this way: If I were reviewing a book by an acquaintance, I would disclose that in the review and let the reader make appropriate judgments. I'm not sure that a Facebook association would be any more compromising. If you disagree, please comment.
Whether anyone would want to put up with the inane quizzes and other crap that Facebook throws at its members is a separate issue, as is toleration of friend as a verb.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
The philosopher's mummy
On this date in 1832, the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham died at the age of 44. Pursuant to his instructions, his body was preserved; it now sits, dressed, in a glass case in University College London. (Image.)
If your interest extends beyond the sensational — the drive-by stare — to the historico-socio-politico-medico-theologico elements of the philosopher’s mummy, an essay by James E. Crimmins on Bentham’s will and the pamphlet “Auto-Icon” offers a considerable fund of information.
If your interest extends beyond the sensational — the drive-by stare — to the historico-socio-politico-medico-theologico elements of the philosopher’s mummy, an essay by James E. Crimmins on Bentham’s will and the pamphlet “Auto-Icon” offers a considerable fund of information.
Friday, June 5, 2009
The old order
Thirty years ago, David Halberstam published The Powers That Be, a book on Time magazine, CBS, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. It was a look at “the kingdom of the media,” a realm that may not yet be one with Nineveh and Tyre, but which is certainly much diminished in wealth and power.
I have been thinking about the dwindling of that cozy world of the mass-market giants — the metropolitan dailies, the television broadcasters, the news magazines — since Tuesday night’s Abell symposium on the future of local news, sponsored by the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. Here’s an account of the proceedings by Joan Jacobson, a former Baltimore Sun reporter.
The audience contained a majority of Sun people, and Sun alumni considerably outnumbered current Sun employees in attendance. Among Sun alumni there was a fair contingent older than I am. Because of the demographic — and I know that it is not seemly for someone of my age and propensities to mock cootdom — I suspect that audience responded to the panelists with a mindset informed by the world Halberstam described, not the world in which journalism now functions.
Two members of that panel earned my sympathy. The first was Monty Cook, the incumbent editor of The Sun, partly for just showing up. Many in that audience were clearly bitter about the successive reductions in the paper’s staff and scope, particularly the layoffs that occurred at the end of April. Their questions showed a profound skepticism about the company’s current attempt to straddle the print and electronic platforms, but he made his case gamely. I’m skeptical myself, because no one knows whether the new strategy will work; but I also know that no previous strategy has succeeded.
The other was Mark Potts, the blogger at Recovering Journalist. (If you read Ms. Jacobson’s article, you had better also read Mr. Potts’s account.) It fell to him to demonstrate, to even greater skepticism than Mr. Cook faced, that local electronic journalism is already beginning to take over the tasks that daily newspapers used to see as their monopoly.
There was a good deal of shaking of heads that displayed gray hair and male-pattern baldness. But I noticed from some of the subsequent Twitter traffic that that small-under-forty demographic in the audience found Mr. Potts to have made the most compelling points.
The old powers that be are being shouldered aside. They might yet adapt to a new and less hospitable environment, and they might be supplanted by newcomers, some of which have not yet even emerged. Looking backward, I think, will not serve those struggling to survive.
I have been thinking about the dwindling of that cozy world of the mass-market giants — the metropolitan dailies, the television broadcasters, the news magazines — since Tuesday night’s Abell symposium on the future of local news, sponsored by the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. Here’s an account of the proceedings by Joan Jacobson, a former Baltimore Sun reporter.
The audience contained a majority of Sun people, and Sun alumni considerably outnumbered current Sun employees in attendance. Among Sun alumni there was a fair contingent older than I am. Because of the demographic — and I know that it is not seemly for someone of my age and propensities to mock cootdom — I suspect that audience responded to the panelists with a mindset informed by the world Halberstam described, not the world in which journalism now functions.
Two members of that panel earned my sympathy. The first was Monty Cook, the incumbent editor of The Sun, partly for just showing up. Many in that audience were clearly bitter about the successive reductions in the paper’s staff and scope, particularly the layoffs that occurred at the end of April. Their questions showed a profound skepticism about the company’s current attempt to straddle the print and electronic platforms, but he made his case gamely. I’m skeptical myself, because no one knows whether the new strategy will work; but I also know that no previous strategy has succeeded.
The other was Mark Potts, the blogger at Recovering Journalist. (If you read Ms. Jacobson’s article, you had better also read Mr. Potts’s account.) It fell to him to demonstrate, to even greater skepticism than Mr. Cook faced, that local electronic journalism is already beginning to take over the tasks that daily newspapers used to see as their monopoly.
There was a good deal of shaking of heads that displayed gray hair and male-pattern baldness. But I noticed from some of the subsequent Twitter traffic that that small-under-forty demographic in the audience found Mr. Potts to have made the most compelling points.
The old powers that be are being shouldered aside. They might yet adapt to a new and less hospitable environment, and they might be supplanted by newcomers, some of which have not yet even emerged. Looking backward, I think, will not serve those struggling to survive.
Antique writing equipment
This is a “Who cares?” post on a gloomy, wet weekday, so you might be well advised to skip it.
Despite all the writing with Microsoft Word on the computer — blog posts, job applications, e-mail, the manuscript of my long-gestating book on editing — the computer has not entirely effaced previous technology. I should show my children my Bud’s Research Paper Typing Guide.
It is a laminated second sheet to put behind a blank sheet in a typewriter. What shows through on the blank sheet are a black border indicating the top, bottom, and side margins; a vertical dotted line indicating the center of the page, and a set of numbers, 1-51, on the left to help calculate how much space to allow for footnotes. It bears many indentations from a Remington manual typewriter.
And it is about as useful as a shaker of sand to blot ink on the page.
The Remington is long gone, and there is a Brother electronic typewriter on a shelf that I haven’t used in years.
I have a Waterman fountain pen, fine nib, that I use for personal correspondence. Before I was laicized by The Sun, I used it to sign formal documents, such as performance reviews and pardons.
Pilot’s liquid-gel pens, both blue and black, have become a favorite, especially the 05 fine points, which are close to ideal for my cramped, precise handwriting. For paper grading: red for condemnation and green for advice.
I own a couple of Cross ballpoints, but their ink tends to blot irritatingly and get on my hands.
For making notes in books, Paper Mate Sharpwriter, Dixon SenseMatic, and Pentel mechanical pencils, which can be found all over the house, are handy.
While I make notes and sketchy outlines by hand, I almost never draft anything except by keyboard. Lowell Denton told me when I first worked at The Flemingsburg Gazette in the summer of 1968, “John Early, you’ve got to learn to write on the typewriter, because you’re never going to have the time to write it out by hand and then type it.”
I told you that this was a “Who cares?” post. If you’re still reading, you’ve only yourself to blame.
But if you’re keen to waste more time, you can comment on your own tastes in writing equipment.
Despite all the writing with Microsoft Word on the computer — blog posts, job applications, e-mail, the manuscript of my long-gestating book on editing — the computer has not entirely effaced previous technology. I should show my children my Bud’s Research Paper Typing Guide.
It is a laminated second sheet to put behind a blank sheet in a typewriter. What shows through on the blank sheet are a black border indicating the top, bottom, and side margins; a vertical dotted line indicating the center of the page, and a set of numbers, 1-51, on the left to help calculate how much space to allow for footnotes. It bears many indentations from a Remington manual typewriter.
And it is about as useful as a shaker of sand to blot ink on the page.
The Remington is long gone, and there is a Brother electronic typewriter on a shelf that I haven’t used in years.
I have a Waterman fountain pen, fine nib, that I use for personal correspondence. Before I was laicized by The Sun, I used it to sign formal documents, such as performance reviews and pardons.
Pilot’s liquid-gel pens, both blue and black, have become a favorite, especially the 05 fine points, which are close to ideal for my cramped, precise handwriting. For paper grading: red for condemnation and green for advice.
I own a couple of Cross ballpoints, but their ink tends to blot irritatingly and get on my hands.
For making notes in books, Paper Mate Sharpwriter, Dixon SenseMatic, and Pentel mechanical pencils, which can be found all over the house, are handy.
While I make notes and sketchy outlines by hand, I almost never draft anything except by keyboard. Lowell Denton told me when I first worked at The Flemingsburg Gazette in the summer of 1968, “John Early, you’ve got to learn to write on the typewriter, because you’re never going to have the time to write it out by hand and then type it.”
I told you that this was a “Who cares?” post. If you’re still reading, you’ve only yourself to blame.
But if you’re keen to waste more time, you can comment on your own tastes in writing equipment.
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