Le Steak de Paris
Maeve Brennan writes about this restaurant several times in The Long-Winded Lady, more than about any other.
Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady
To read The Long-Winded Lady in 2012 is to read about a lost Manhattan.
The lifespan of my interest in The Lifespan of a Fact
“What to make of a writer who claims to have changed a seemingly factual ‘thirty-one’ to ‘thirty-four’ because ‘the rhythm of “thirty-four” works better in that sentence’? Nothing, because that detail alone (on page 16, the second page of the text) made it easy for me to suspect that this book is not worth my time.”
Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day
On sentence length.
Quick 50 Writing Tools
From Roy Peter Clark and The Poynter Institute: Quick 50 Writing Tools, a bare-bones presentation of the content of Clark’s book Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (2008).
How to improve writing (no. 38)
I’ve been reading cereal boxes at breakfast since childhood. But it’s only in recent years that I’ve started to edit while eating.
Postal abbreviations
MA or Mass.? Christopher Lasch’s advice.
Christopher Lasch’s Plain Style
Close attention to one’s words, a healthy (not paralyzing) self-consciousness, is what Plain Style seeks to foster in its reader.
How to improve writing (no. 37)
“Like at the post office.” Ugh.
LAX English
“Please maintain visual contact with your personal property at all times.”
“[B]eautiful and surprising and deep”
A passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.
“They mess you up”
For the first time in a long time, the word “mess” has appeared in a Michiko Kakutani book review.
Florence Wolfson Howitt (1915-2012)
A diarist.
How to improve writing (no. 36)
When the context is serious, and a pun would do no more than call attention to its maker’s cleverness, block that pun.
Betty Flowers: madman, architect, carpenter, judge
Betty S. Flowers says that one who writes must be, in turn, madman, architect, carpenter, and judge.
Margaret Edson on writing
“Sitting by yourself, forcing the swirl of thoughts into a linear, systematic journey forward — it makes you smarter.”
“Rewording”
“Rewording” without attribution is plagiarism, though perhaps in a hapless and unsophisticated form.
Barthes on pens
In the end, I always return to fine fountain pens.
From The Waste Books
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s writing habits: sounds like proto-blogging.
National Handwriting Day
Thus a sample of my 1967 handwriting.
Jessica Mitford on the Famous Writers School
From the July 1970 Atlantic, Jessica Mitford’s “Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers.”
Writing about writing
If you’re going to write about writing, write well. Someone at the Huffington Post didn’t.
James M. Cain on Los Angeles
A catalogue of signage, from James M. Cain’s “Paradise,” a 1933 essay on Los Angeles.
Philip Gove on student writing
“There’s an almost invariable rule that writing prepared under assignment and therefore artificially under pressure has certain forced awkwardnesses that make it quite different from genuine human utterances.”
Marco Arment on blogging
Good advice for anyone who writes online.
Literature and word-processing
From the New York Times: “Jimmy Carter set off what may have been the first word-processing-related panic in 1981, when he accidently deleted several pages of his memoir in progress by hitting the wrong keys on his brand-new $12,000 Lanier.”
“Don’t be a brute”
Writing is still not word-processing.
“change modify revise alter rewrite amend chop to pieces change”
The strongest drive.
Reducing the number of — Cutting words
A New York Times article on college-application essays, edited to fit the 500-word limit of college-application essays.
Dale Carnegie 2.0
Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People has been updated as How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age.