I.A. Richards is a familiar name from my college years. He was an important critic in the heyday of the New Criticism (which has long since stopped being “new” but is still a useful approach to literature).

My friend Jane McGinnis sent me an intriguing article that included Richards’ 100 Words Most Important in English. You can read the article here: https://www.thoughtco.com/important-words-in-english-1692687

Although Richards predated postmodernism, his list includes four words important to postmodern thought: copy, name, natural,  and use.

One omission from the list surprised me: imagination. Every moment of our lives is an imagining. There are no neutral events – there’s a sense in which we are always dreaming. Richards seems not to have read Carl Jung or James Hillman – but that’s not a complaint. Nobody can read everything!

What I’m hoping you’ll do is come up with your own list. (It doesn’t have to be 100 words!) Can you see something in a word that others can’t?

I’m thinking of Hillman, of course (imagine, soul, destiny, childhood) – and Derrida (write, copy, natural). Heck – I could include John Lennon with imagine. And I will.

And then there’s Paul Tillich. How many minds did he open when he wrote so powerfully about the words salvation, sin, and grace?

What words have special meanings to you?

In my last post, I talked about a picture as a stimulus for writing. My friend Janis Koike sent me this wonderful piece about a special picture – several pictures, actually. This is a fine example of what you can do with a picture. (Have you tried it yourself yet?)

Mollie

Here’s a problem my husband spotted in a gardening column he was writing for our newspaper. Florida is a great place for gardeners because you can have flowers all year-round. Charlie recommended three winter annuals: Shasta daisy, snapdragon, and petunia.

Then he realized a novice gardener might think he meant Shasta daisy, Shasta snapdragon, and Shasta petunia. So he rewrote the sentence with Shasta daisy at the back: snapdragon, petunia, and Shasta daisy. Problem solved.

(If you’re a knowledgeable gardener, you might not see the problem. So let me give you a similar sentence: Chocolate milk, ice cream, and candy. This sentence could be read two ways: chocolate milk, chocolate ice cream, and chocolate candy – OR only the milk has chocolate flavoring.)

Charlie’s thinking process makes an important point. Many people overestimate the importance of formal grammar. They assume that if you know the parts of speech and can diagram sentences, you’ll be a good writer.

But formal grammar wouldn’t have helped my husband with that sentence. He needed to read the sentence while pretending to be a reader who knows nothing about gardening.

It’s not easy to set aside everything you know and read a sentence from another point of view. That kind of thinking requires an almost Zen-like emptiness of mind.

Schools don’t generally teach student writers to think that way, but they should. It’s a good habit to develop, and now – at the beginning of a new year – might be a good time to resolve to do it!

When I was teaching college English, a favorite writing assignment was writing about a picture. Students could use any picture they wanted – even one they wished for but didn’t have.

Most of the papers were astonishingly good. It’s something I wish I’d learned much earlier: A lot of what we label “poor writing” isn’t caused by weak skills. The real problem is a dull topic.

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One of my end-of-the-year projects has been scanning and organizing old photos. Here’s one of my favorites – a picture of my husband when he was four years old:

I didn’t know Charlie (my husband) until we met in our twenties. But I know the rapturous little boy in the picture very well. Everyone else is seeing an ordinary little fish on a line – not even worth keeping. But to four-year-old Charlie, it’s a magical moment.

He still loves fish – any type of aquatic life, in fact. It doesn’t have to be exotic or impressive. On a trip to the Everglades years ago, we had to stop at every puddle so that he could check it for crayfish.

If you have a free evening, consider spending it with some old photo albums. Can you find a picture that makes you say, “Yes – that’s mom” (or dad, or Uncle Stan, or your best friend)? Do you have a picture that reveals something essential and important about you?

Let’s take it a step further. Can you think of an anecdote that perfectly sums up someone you know – or can tell us who you are?

I remember a date with Charlie shortly after we started going together. We were walking home from a restaurant in New York. A man in shabby clothing staggered past us, obviously drunk. Charlie left me standing there, put his arm on the man’s shoulder, and gently guided him across the street until the man pointed to a doorway and went inside.

That’s Charlie, and that heart of his is one reason I married him.

Do you collect stories? Is your writing crammed with them? They add interest to everything you write. More important, they bring your writing to life.

It’s not January 1 yet, but here’s a New Year’s resolution for you: Promise yourself that you will become a collector and a connoisseur of stories. You’ll be amazed at the difference they make in your writing – and your readers will be just as impressed.

Christmas is less than a week away! Today we’re going to look at some language issues hidden within a traditional Christmas carol:

This is one of our oldest carols, dating back to at least the 16th century. Take a close look at the first line. That comma looks wrong, doesn’t it? It seems like it should be “God Rest You, Merry Gentlemen.” In fact that’s how it’s punctuated in A Christmas Carol, the classic novel by Charles Dickens.

But the research indicates that this is the correct punctuation. Back then, rest could mean “keep.” So the first line is saying, “God keep you merry, gentlemen.”

In the second line, we seem to be seeing a mistake in word order. It should be “Let Nothing Dismay You.” There are two possible explanations for the wording. The anonymous person who wrote this Christmas carol might have been having a poetic moment. Or perhaps this type of word order was a common usage in the 16th century, when this carol was first composed.

Of course I don’t know which explanation is correct. But I can point out that this kind of transposition – “Let nothing you dismay” – was common in Elizabethan times. In Act IV, Scene 5 of Hamlet, Ophelia says, “Say you? Nay, pray you mark.” (If that seems nonsensical to you, it’s deliberate – Ophelia has gone mad from grief when she says this.)

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Everyone who’s sat through a Shakespearean play – or sung “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” – knows that language changes over time. Nobody can stop that process – not even those of us who adored our high-school English teachers and think their rules and principles should live on forever.

“God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” is particularly interesting because it includes two kinds of changes. The evolution from “God rest you” to “God keep you” is a usage change. It has nothing to do with the deep structure of the English language. The meanings of words change all the time.

If you’re old enough to have watched All in the Family when it was a brand-new situation comedy, you witnessed one of those changes. Before Edith Bunker came along, the dictionary meaning of dingbat was “a printer’s ornament.” Now it means “a silly person.”

Deeper structures of language – what we call grammar – change very slowly. (Here’s an example: whom is disappearing.) The meanings of some of the words have changed over the centuries, but Shakespeare constructed his sentences pretty much the way we still do today: subject + verb + object.

And that’s why “Let Nothing You Dismay” in our Christmas carol is so interesting. It’s a true grammatical change. No matter how sophisticated a writer you are, you’ll probably never write a sentence like “Make sure the dress you fits.” That kind of construction has disappeared from English – probably forever.

You might be wondering why anyone would bother making a distinction between usage and grammar. Here’s why it matters: I’ve met many people who think that grammar is an essential subject for writers. They spend hours – days – months – years – memorizing grammar terminology and learning how to diagram sentences.

But English grammar is largely based on word order. If you grew up speaking English, you learned most of the grammar you need to know by the time you started kindergarten. Grammar theory isn’t going to help you write better.

Usage, on the other hand, is both important and difficult to master. Even if you’ve been speaking English all your life, your usage information might need an update or a refresher. (Almost all of my “Instant Quizzes” deal with usage issues.)

I hope you’ll have a wonderful Christmas! Enjoy this beautiful season, and let nothing you dismay.

Today’s post is going to be sort of a roller-coaster ride. I’m going to be talking about a comma, but that’s not my real purpose. I hope you’ll hang in!

Compare these sentences. (It will probably help to read them aloud.)

We’re looking forward to seeing our cousins who live in California.

We’re looking forward to seeing our cousins, who live in California.

In the first version, we have many cousins, but only some of them live in California.

In the second version, all our cousins live in California. A tiny comma changes the meaning of the sentence!

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A topic in the news right now is a possible government shutdown. Some politicians are using the shutdown idea to push Congress into funding a massive wall along our southern border.

While the politicians are arguing, we’re going to look at a sentence in a recent Associated Press article about the proposed shutdown: 

Ryan likely lacks sufficient votes from Republicans who will lose their majority at the end of the month.

*   *   *   *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  

When I read this sentence in our newspaper last week, I immediately went to my husband with a question. (He’s more savvy about politics than I am.) Which Republicans are losing their majority, and what does that mean?

He gave me a blank look and reminded me that the entire House is turning Democratic next month. Republican Senators and Representatives can lose seats, but they don’t lose “their majority.” Only the entire party can do that.

So I showed him the sentence:

Ryan likely lacks sufficient votes from Republicans who will lose their majority at the end of the month.

We finally realized that a missing comma was causing the confusion. The journalist was trying to say that the whole Republican party will be losing their majority:

Ryan likely lacks sufficient votes from Republicans, who will lose their majority at the end of the month.

The sentence would have been perfectly clear if it had included that comma.

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At this point you’re probably expecting a lecture on commas. Amazing, isn’t it – a tiny punctuation mark can change the whole meaning of a sentence!

True. But that’s not the point I want to make today. Instead I want you to think about why the person who wrote this article made that error. Remember – I was so confused that I stopped reading and went to look for my husband and an explanation. Not a good thing!

Of course I can’t definitively say what went wrong. But I’m going to propose that it was a simple human error. We all make them!

My goal today is to challenge the widespread belief that punctuation (or spelling, or sentence diagramming, or any other language practice you want to name) is the only thing separating us from hopelessly muddled thinking. Yikes! It’s the end of the world!

No, it isn’t. The person who wrote that sentence knew exactly what he was thinking and what he wanted to say. He just didn’t get there.

To put it another way: There was nothing wrong with his thinking. There was something wrong with his sentence.

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I’m rattling on about all of this for a reason. I know many people who want to write but are afraid to try. There’s a widespread feeling that if you don’t have a deep and mystical understanding of language, you shouldn’t even try to be a writer.

You don’t know how to punctuate? Shame, shame, shame! Your thinking is sloppy, you have nothing worthwhile to say, and you’d better find something else to do with your spare time.

To which I say: Nonsense. Yes, you need to know . But you can learn (or hire an editor!). The important thing is to trust your brain, your experience, and your yearning to express yourself through words. There’s nothing wrong with you. The problem is mechanics, and it’s fixable, my friend!

Today I’m going to talk about my current publishing project. But my sneaky agenda is to review some publishing principles you should know if you’re hoping to publish a book of your own.

In 1998 the University Press of Florida issued a scholarly book I’d written about Bernard Shaw – Pygmalion’s Wordplay: The Postmodern Shaw. Twenty years have gone by, and my book is now out of print. That means the publisher is no longer stocking and selling it.

The contract I signed in 1997 stated that the UPF owned all the rights to my book – until it went out of print. Then I could ask for them to be returned to me. (I had to make the request in a letter.)

While the book was still in print, the copyright belonged to the UPF. That meant nobody – not even me! – could copy significant chunks of the book. So – for example – I couldn’t issue an ebook version of my book, even though I was the author. I had signed those rights over to the UPF.

But now they’ve come back to me, and I am indeed republishing my book as both a paperback and an ebook (two ebooks, actually – one through Kindle and one through Smashwords).

Here are some facts and thoughts about re-publishing:

• A print book like mine needs to be digitized first (turned into a Word document) so that you have a file to work with. You can pay a service to do this for you. I was fortunate that my friend Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín did the job for me.
• When you convert a digitized file, many mistakes can creep in. Allow time to fix them!
• Because I now own all the rights to my book, I can do anything I want with it.
• I made a few changes and corrections and added a new preface.
• I completely reformatted the book. That meant converting the digital file Gustavo sent me into a .txt file to clear the old formatting. Then I converted it again – into a Word file – and chose a different typeface, new headings, and so on.
• Georgia is my favorite typeface, and I often use Calibri for headings. But because I wanted a more academic look, I chose Century Schoolbook for this book and Baskerville Old Face for the headings. 
• Most scholarly books use a small typeface. But I like readability, so I chose a larger size.
• I often quoted word-for-word from plays, essays, and books by Shaw. Many are still in copyright, so I had to get permission from the Shaw Estate to use them. In 1998 I paid a fee to do that. This time the Shaw Estate generously waived the fee. (It helps that Shaw’s works will go out of copyright in 2020!)
• Books don’t go “out of print” anymore. Publishers use POD (print-on-demand). That means instead of storing physical books in a warehouse, they just print them as needed. The only storage needed is space on a computer for the digital file. So publishers keep books indefinitely.
• One advantage of digital files is that it’s easy to update them. In the old days, you couldn’t make a single change when you republished a book – changing the plates (as they were called) was too expensive.
• I’m using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) for my paperback. I endlessly tell writers not to pay anyone to publish their work. You can do it free on KDP, and the services are excellent.
• “Vanity presses” are pay-to-publish companies that will do editing, formatting, cover design, and marketing for you. But you’re better off finding freelancers to do those tasks (or you can do them yourself, as I do).
• I used a free cover template from KDP.
• Through Google Images I found a free picture of an Edwardian lady for the cover. (I gave a small cash gift to the artist.)
• I’ll be issuing the book in two ebook formats. KDP will publish it as a Kindle. Smashwords will publish it in multiple electronic formats so that anyone with a Nook or another device can read it.
• The book is automatically copyrighted. All I had to do was put a copyright notice in the front of the book: © Jean Reynolds 2018. For extra protection, I can register it with the copyright office – instructions are posted online.

I’ve often wished that writers were more grounded when they bestow advice about writing. We tend to sit high on a hill, looking down with amused benevolence at the amateurs who are struggling to put words to paper.

The truth is that we’re all amateurs. Each new writing task means starting from scratch – figuring out how to engage our readers and choose strategies to organize and present our material.

Time to descend that mountain! I am getting ready to republish a 1998 book I wrote about Shaw: Pygmalion’s Wordplay. In my next post I’m going to talk about what “republish” means (hint: it involves dealing with formatting and copyright issues). Today I’m going to look at a single sentence I decided to revise.

* * * * * * * 

The original 1998 book has a preface where I introduced myself and explained why I’d written the book. Now – 20 years later – it’s time for another preface explaining why I’m reissuing it. Here’s one sentence from that new preface:

I wish I could capture the exhilaration I felt while I was exploring the mysteries of language that Shaw was grappling with.

Not bad! I like “exhilaration,” “mysteries,” and “grappling.” But I don’t like that with at the end. A stickler would probably be annoyed because it ends with a preposition, but that’s not my problem. Or – more accurately – that’s not how I would explain the problem.

I end sentences with words like with, of, for, up and so on all the time. My problem is that the sentence sputters. I’m a big advocate for strong sentences. Pump that iron! It’s a skill that doesn’t get enough emphasis in school.

So here’s the revision I came up with:

My one regret about this book is that it doesn’t convey the exhilaration I felt as I learned more about the mysteries and conundrums of language.

The sputter is gone (yay!). But it’s awfully stodgy for a sentence that’s supposed to be about exhilaration. “I wish I could capture” (my original wording) is much livelier than “My one regret about this book is that….”

Worse, my revised sentence doesn’t mention Shaw. I want readers to see him as often as possible when they’re reading my book.

Here’s the revision that finally found its way into the preface:

I wish I could have captured the exhilaration I felt while I was writing this book – how much fun it was to watch Shaw dive into the mysteries and conundrums of language.

A dash (my favorite punctuation mark!) makes the sentence less stodgy and more human. Short, punchy words (fun, watch, dive) nicely balance the longer, more academic words (exhilaration, conundrum).

I subscribe to Medium, an online resource for articles about a huge range of subjects, including writing. I was dismayed to read this advice recently from a writer who’s published many articles: she never revises more than twice. (I can tell – she rarely gets it’s/its right).

Sheesh. This is an unusual post for me – only 8 revisions before I hit the Publish button. Usually I do between 18 and 30. Mind you, that’s not a rule. I’m always eager to get my posts up there for you to read. But I also want to make them as readable and lively as I possibly can.

I think Shaw would back me up there.

Verb changes from past to present sometimes confuse writers. I often see mistakes like this:

Joan tiptoed to the bedroom window without waking Sam. Or so she thinks. He’s lying there perfectly still, pretending that he was asleep. INCORRECT

“Tiptoed” is past; “he’s lying there perfectly still” is present tense. 

When you’re telling a story, you can’t jump back and forth between present and past. Those sentences should be written like this:

Joan tiptoed to the bedroom window without waking Sam. Or so she thought. He was lying there perfectly still, pretending that he was asleep. CORRECT

But that doesn’t mean you can’t mix tenses (past, present, future) in the same sentence. Here’s an example combining past and future that I would find perfectly acceptable:

Although the dress rehearsal went badly, tonight’s performance will be much better.  CORRECT

It’s true that there are so-called authorities who insist on a one-tense-per-sentence policy. But that’s not how the real world works. This is how that example sentence would look if we let them have their way:

Although the dress rehearsal went badly, tonight’s performance would be much better.  INCORRECT

“Would” is the past tense of “will” (isn’t language amazing?), so we now have a perfectly consistent sentence. The problem, though, is that nobody would ever say it that way.

Bottom line: Be cautious about mixing tenses – and remember that real-world English usage trumps every rule.