More Writing Tips

My folder of writing tips, trivia, and likes and dislikes is filling up again! Here’s a sampling:

  •  I often hear self-proclaimed experts complain that we’re losing the original meanings of some useful words. Before you sign on to that preservation project, think about all the common words that have permanently lost their original meanings. Here are a few: candidate (which used to mean “dressed in white”), manufacture (“made by hand”), and manuscript (“written by hand”). You can’t fight change!
  • Amazon.com quite naturally wants people to write and publish so that it can sell more books! So it makes sense that they’ve created a series of excellent instructional posts for writers. This post about self-publishing is especially good: http://amazonauthorinsights.com/post/166083874000/writing-insights-part-four-publishing-your-book
  • Now, currently, and at this time are useful ways to refer to something happening in the present. But they’re often unnecessary, and they can make your writing sound pompous. “He lives in Massachusetts” means the same as “He is currently living in Massachusetts” – and the simpler version sounds a lot more natural.
  • Many writers use actually to add emphasis to a sentence (“I actually like the new lineup”). It rarely works well. My advice is to be cautious with actually.
  • I came across “Cantabrigian” in a New Yorker article and had to look up the meaning. One day I irritably mentioned “Cantabrigian” to my sister and remarked that nobody could possibly know what it means. She smiled gently and said, “A Cantabrigian is a resident of Cambridge.” I’d forgotten that she used to work at a Harvard medical clinic – in, of course, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, I’m going to encourage you to avoid words that are unfamiliar to your readers – or to figure out a way to slip the meaning into the sentence.
  • “Cantabrigian” doesn’t look like “Cambridge” (at least not to me!). With the help of Google, I found out why the spelling is so different. Over time, the original name “Grontabricc” evolved into “Cantabrigge” (giving us “Cantabrigian”) and finally to “Cambridge.”
  • Anyone would think that Cambridge got its name from the river Cam. But exactly the opposite happened: Cambridge came first, and then people started talking about the river Cam. Linguists call this process is called a “back formation.”
  • Want another example of a “back formation”? The word “enthuse” came after – not before – the words “enthusiasm” and “enthusiastic.” When I was in high school, I was warned never to use the word “enthuse” – it was suspect because of its shady origins as a back formation. Over time many “back formation” words have become respectable, and that’s exactly what’s happening to enthuse today….I’ve even seen it in the meticulously edited New Yorker magazine.

                      Cambridge, Massachusetts

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