29 May 2016
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Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
On the Cover of a Notebook
29 May 2016
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H.P. Lovecraft's 20 Most Common Mistakes of Young Authors
Once again, BrainPickings.org brings me this interesting read about H.P. Lovecraft's advice to young writers and the most common mistakes they do.
- Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos.
- Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep.
- Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved.
- Ambiguous use of pronouns.
- Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.”
- Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs.
- Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.”
- Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.”
- Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.”
- The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.”
- The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.”
- False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.”
- Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.”
- Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.”
- The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.”
- Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.”
- Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.”
- Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest.
- Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness.
- Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its.
Read more...
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Enormous Smallness
love is a place
love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places
yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds.
by e.e. cummings
---------
Lifted from a Review of Enormous Smallness: A Story of E. E. Cummings — an uncommonly delightful picture-book celebration of Cummings’s life by Brooklyn-based poet Matthew Burgess, illustrated by Kris Di Giacomo (the artist behind the wonderful alphabet book Take Away the A).
Read the full article HERE.
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First Paragraph: Benazir Bhutto
1
The Path Back
As I stepped down onto the tarmac at Quaid-e-Azam International Airport in Karachi on October 18, 2007, I was overcome with emotion. Like most women in politics, I am especially sensitive to maintaining my composure, to never showing my feelings. A display of emotion by a woman in politics or government can be misconstrued as a manifestation of weakness, reinforcing stereotypes and caricatures. By as my foot touched the ground of my beloved Pakistan for the first time after eight lonely and difficult years of exile, I could not stop the tears from pouring from my eyes and I lifted my hands in reverence, in thanks, and in prayer. I stood on the soil of Pakistan in awe. I felt that a huge burden, a terrible weight, had been lifted from my shoulders. It was a sense of liberation. I was at home at long last. I knew why. I knew what I had to do.
-----
First Paragraph is a new feature on this blog. For me, the first paragraph, or even the first sentence, should catch my interest for the book to merit my attention. Is it the same for you? :) Well, then, let's explore first paragraphs of books together.
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The Student Theme
by Ronald Wallace
The adjectives all ganged up on the nouns,
insistent, loud, demanding, inexact,
their Latinate constructions flashing. The pronouns
lost their referents: They were dangling, lacked
the stamina to follow the prepositions' lead
in, on, into, to, toward, for, or from.
They were beset by passive voices and dead
metaphors, conjunctions shouting But! or And!
The active verbs were all routinely modified
by adverbs, that endlessly and colorlessly ran
into trouble with the participles sitting
on the margins knitting their brows like gerunds
(dangling was their problem, too). The author
was nowhere to be seen; was off somewhere.
"The Student Theme" by Ronald Wallace, from The Uses of Adversity. © The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.
Via: The Writer's Almanac
The adjectives all ganged up on the nouns,
insistent, loud, demanding, inexact,
their Latinate constructions flashing. The pronouns
lost their referents: They were dangling, lacked
the stamina to follow the prepositions' lead
in, on, into, to, toward, for, or from.
They were beset by passive voices and dead
metaphors, conjunctions shouting But! or And!
The active verbs were all routinely modified
by adverbs, that endlessly and colorlessly ran
into trouble with the participles sitting
on the margins knitting their brows like gerunds
(dangling was their problem, too). The author
was nowhere to be seen; was off somewhere.
"The Student Theme" by Ronald Wallace, from The Uses of Adversity. © The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.
Via: The Writer's Almanac
The Student Theme
by Ronald Wallace
Via: The Writer's Almanac
The adjectives all ganged up on the nouns,"The Student Theme" by Ronald Wallace, from The Uses of Adversity. © The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.
insistent, loud, demanding, inexact,
their Latinate constructions flashing. The pronouns
lost their referents: They were dangling, lacked
the stamina to follow the prepositions' lead
in, on, into, to, toward, for, or from.
They were beset by passive voices and dead
metaphors, conjunctions shouting But! or And!
The active verbs were all routinely modified
by adverbs, that endlessly and colorlessly ran
into trouble with the participles sitting
on the margins knitting their brows like gerunds
(dangling was their problem, too). The author
was nowhere to be seen; was off somewhere.
Via: The Writer's Almanac
Avoid Those Adverbs, Please
I was watching Balikbayan on QTV last night, and in one teaser, a female newscaster blurted:
There is nothing wrong with the adverb there, but it is unnecessary. The "I" already implies that the speaker is there in person.
Every time I hear or read adverbs, I'd remember Stephen King and his aversion to adverbs. In his book, On Writing, he says that if you can't describe an event well enough, no amount of adverbs is going to help your prose.
One of his famous lines, "The road to hell is paved with adverbs."
There is nothing wrong with the adverb there, but it is unnecessary. The "I" already implies that the speaker is there in person.
Every time I hear or read adverbs, I'd remember Stephen King and his aversion to adverbs. In his book, On Writing, he says that if you can't describe an event well enough, no amount of adverbs is going to help your prose.
One of his famous lines, "The road to hell is paved with adverbs."
Make That "in"
Cadet Antonio Trillanes IV was in charge of indoctrinating the newcomers on the Honor System in the Academy.It should be: indoctrinating in
Using "indoctrinate" in a sentence:
1. Some parents are critical of attempts to indoctrinate children in fundamentalism.
2. Some people have been indoctrinated by television to believe that violence is normal.
