How to improve writing (no. 98)
“Hypothetically speaking, would you be in support of or not in support of an exception to the Senate’s filibuster rule with regard to legislation involving voting rights?”
Joan Didion (1934–2021)
From “On Keeping a Notebook.”
Distraction-free devices
In The New Yorker, Julian Lucas wonders whether “distraction-free devices” can change the way we write. I was distracted by errors of fact about Ralph Ellison and Frank O’Hara.
How to improve writing (no. 96)
And ad for Whitley Neill London Dry Gin.
A John McWhorter page-ninety test
I thought to try the page-ninety test with John McWhorter’s Nine Nasty Words: English in The Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever.
A notebook and a pencil
When Gary Paulsen was a teenager, a librarian gave him a library card, then a book a month, then a book a week, and then a Scripto notebook and a no. 2 pencil.
Rewrite that sentence, PBS
“Designer Ed Welburn’s passion developed early, as a small child.”
iA Writer keyboard commands
From Bicycle for Your Mind.
The perfect writing font(s)
Just one example of the thoughtfulness behind iA Writer, whose creators understand that writing is not word-processing.
iA Writer
Did I mention that I should have started using Markdown years ago?
How to improve writing (no. 93)
As I wrote in no. 75, “Every time I look at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, I end up rewriting one or more sentences.” And so it is today.
Accounts, multiple and definitive
Do we need multiple biographies of Philip Roth? Can one biography of Bob Dylan be “definitive”?
Pen and paper and
From Judith Flanders’s A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order: everything that used to be needed for writing with ink.
✓
Amitava Kumar writes about writing and the power of the check mark. Jerry Seinfeld did the same thing with a big X.
How to improve writing (no. 92)
From The New Yorker: “A couple of weeks ago around dinnertime, neither my husband nor I were in the cooking mood.”
Recently updated
More tedious discussion of the phrase “a pair of twins.”
Work and fame
Contradictory bits of advice.
How to improve writing (no. 91)
Sometimes when I look at an old post, I wonder how I could have missed what now seems so obvious.
How to improve writing (no. 90)
It’s easy to overuse semicolons.
Obama pens
Black Uni-ball Vision Elite rollerball pens with a micro-point.
Teaching writing by the sentence
I like the model of writing instruction described in this Times article.
Recently updated
“Is it right to speak of a ‘pair of twins ’?”
How to improve writing (no. 89)
Two identical twins?
RBG on writing
How to improve writing (no. 88)
Rewriting the sentences on a box of Tetley tea.
Something I guess I wrote
Lines, which I guess I wrote, in a text file of odds and ends.
Roger Angell, closing in
A celebration for the writer Roger Angell, who’s nearing his hundredth birthday.
“The sentence of the year”
A sentence by Ed Yong, writing in The Atlantic about “How to Pandemic Defeated America.”
“If you have to write”
From Stranger on the Third Floor.
Torch, passed
A great opening, by Alexandra Schwartz, writing in The New Yorker about a Bill de Blasio appearance on WNYC.