Likewise, the difference between “Let’s eat Jennifer” and “Let’s eat, Jennifer” is whether Jennifer will be in a stew pot or a dining chair. You saw the comma there, right?
Tag Archives: writing
Errors in English Usage
The Common Errors in English Usage website clarifies a lot of things.
I still hesitate over “precede/proceed,” but the explanation for which to use when is easy to remember.
Andre Norton Revisited
When I was about 11 years old, I wandered up to the science fiction section of a hole-in-the-wall branch of the Jefferson County (Colorado) Public Library. I came away with two books by the author Andre Norton, The Time Traders and Galactic Derelict.
Written in the late 1950s, they are now considered part of the “Ross Murdock series,” also known as the “Time Trader series.” The better-known (?) Witch World series was just coming out, and I did not encounter them until later.
When I discovered later that “Andre” was a woman first known as Mary Ann Norton, I briefly had her confused with the English writer Mary Norton who wrote the “Borrowers” series, which my older sisters had read.
They were both fantasy series, after all, and so perhaps “Andre” was her space-opera pen name and “Mary” was her “cozy” pen name — or so I reasoned. I was totally wrong — they were completely different people.
So last week I was in a nearby city’s public library, looking for an SF title that someone had recommended, and there on the shelf was a newer edition of Time Traders and Galactic Derelict bound together.
Time Traders had been my first encounter with the term, the “Beaker People.” Norton makes this ancient culture (or cultural period) into a “guild of free traders.” (SF writers seem to like guilds of free traders — it’s an enduring meme.)
So if life were a novel, I would have carried that memory forward and become an archaeologist. Didn’t happen.
The plot I did not remember at all, just a couple of images. There are lots of near-misses and close escapes, with language like this: “A white-hot flash of pain scored his upper arm.”
What I did not remember was that the time travelers encounter Neolithic conflict between the religion of the Great Mother, served by priestesses at megalithic sites, and the sky/storm god Lurgha, whose worship is pushing its way in and which is exploited by their Russian counterparts. (There is a Cold War atmosphere, despite the 21st-century setting.)
It’s not a major plot element, but did it plant a seed?
Babies, Bathwater, and the Reclaiming Community
Of all American Witchcraft traditions, Reclaiming seems to be the most prone to self-criticism. Perhaps that is because, as Anne Hill writes in her brief blog-memoir, The Baby and the Bathwater, there was always much conflict over different visions for Reclaiming.
What started with one foot in the Faery/Faerie/Feri Witchcraft tradition of Victor and Cora Anderson also co-existed with a social vision of growing organic vegetables in a solar-powered paradise fueled by consensus decision-making, pushing the boundaries of gender-theory and overcoming enemies with the power of love and passion.
Hill, one of the original group’s long-term members, writes things that only an insider could say. The Baby and the Bathwater combines blog posts that she wrote from 2006 to 2010, including the comments that readers left on her Blog O’Gnosis.
We’ve seen good people come and go over the years, and have noticed that mostly the good people go after they realize that Reclaiming is a victim of its own idealism and there’s nowhere to “advance” once you have experience and skills. I said that I have been struggling to clarify my present-day involvement with Reclaiming, particularly trying to discern what is baby and what is bathwater and not throwing away that which is of lasting value.
My friend responded instantly: “But there is no baby in the bathwater,
and there never has been.” I was stunned at that, and have been thinking about it ever since. Can it be true that what started as a grand experiment in creating a spirituality that was Goddess-centered, egalitarian, politically and socially radical would have absolutely nothing to show for itself 25 years after the fact? Could it be that a community and religious movement which has been at the center of my identity for over two decades consisted all along of nothing but our intense willingness to believe our own promotional language?
The Baby and the Bathwoter sees an up side to Reclaiming too, as Hill visits groups seeded in other areas and savors their enthusiasm. You can download the PDF file for $2.99.
Polytheistic Writing Sought
I am passing this along as a favor to the editor.
Gods are real.And these gods are everywhere, in all aspects of existence, all aspects of human life.”
Minneapolis writer is compiling an anthology of modern, polytheistic experiences, tentatively titled Return of the Gods: The Varieties of Polytheistic Experience
Seeking thoughtful, original, and previously unpublished non-fiction essays recounting first-hand encounters with Gods, ancestors, spirits, disembodied intelligences, and sacred presences in nature.
You may hail from a Hindu tradition, an indigenous tradition, a Pagan tradition, an African-based tradition, another tradition, or no tradition at all
Electronic submissions only.
Please submit only final, proofread copy, double-spaced, maximum 5,000 words.
Please send your story as an MS Word attachment to williammcgillis [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject line: Return of the Gods.
Please refrain from submitting if you are not open to edits.
Please ensure that your story file includes your (less-than-75 word) bio along with contact details, including postal address and email address.
Compensation: All selected contributors will receive a complimentary copy of the book upon publication
Deadline for submissions: June 21, 2012.
The Valentine Code
Valentin’s Day came this week, and I owed M. a dinner out, so we went. In our case, that means a longish drive, half on gravel roads, to a restaurant with soft lighting and an actual wine list. Just doing our part for the Romantic-Industrial Complex. Snow was in the forecast, but did not arrive.
She half-apologized for not getting me a card, but that’s all right, I had not bought her one either. Normally I would shy from buying a card with the word “special” on the front, and now I know why—in the World of Hallmark, it is a sort of code:
S: Are there any words writers are banned from using on a Valentine?
DD: We tried to avoid “soul mate terminology” because you don’t know how well a couple is going to know each other or how well they’re getting along. Some one might not feel comfortable using the word ‘love’ which is where the word “special” comes in. You’ll see that again and again on greeting cards: “for a special mom” or “for a special person.” The word special can mean anything from “you’re the most beautiful person to me” to “I’m glad I don’t live that close to you anymore.”
Thought Crime in the Writing Classroom
I taught writing for twenty years. I heard some shocking stuff—especially in the “Creative Nonfiction” class, which occasionally produced some, shall we say, highly confessional material.
And there was one outright psycho student who, lucky for me, fixated on a different professor as the cause of all her problems—not to mention accusing him in her writing (for me) of being a Satanic serial killer—and showed up at his house one night at 2 a.m. with a large knife.
I even had freewriting assignments that might have resembled “a place for a writer to try out ideas and record impressions and observations,” [containing] “freewriting/brainstorming” and “creative entries.”
But no one ever used his or her journal to discuss his or her sexual attraction for me (sigh).
If a student had done so, I would never have described the writing as “unlawful.” Immature or inappropriate maybe, but not something that would get a student kicked out of not just my class, but all his on-campus classes.
But Pamela Mitzelfeld, who teaches English 380, “Advanced Writing,” at a school in Michigan, felt she had to swing the big PC hammer on student Joseph Corlett.
Oakland University near Detroit has suspended a student for three semesters, barred him from campus, and demanded he undergo “sensitivity” counseling because he wrote in a class assignment that he found his instructors attractive. While the course specifically permitted students to write creatively about any topic, the university bizarrely chose to classify his writing as “unlawful individual activities.” Joseph Corlett came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.
To call the university’s decision to suspend Corlett for three semesters for his thought crime a “wild overreaction” is putting it mildly. I hope that FIRE roasts them.
The philosopher Hypatia faced a similar problem with unwanted sexual attraction, the story goes, and dealt with it much more directly.
The “New Yorker rule”
M. and I work together on many editing projects. Yesterday, the author of a journal article, reading her galleys, said that she thought that expressions such as “sui generis,” “axis mundi,”* and “Weltanschauung” should be italicized as foreign expressions. (I had them in roman.)
I consulted the holy scriptures, where in chapter 7, verse 52, I read, “Foreign words and pases familiar to most readers and listed in Webster’s should appear in roman (not italics) if used in an English context. . . . German nouns, if in Webster’s, are lowercased.”
I assume that the online Webster’s is all right. But what about “most readers”?
I propose “the New Yorker rule.” Although The New Yorker is not an academic journal, its writers and editors seem to expect a level of comfort with common phrases from other major world languages (Chinese excepted, thus far).
Therefore, if The New Yorker puts a phrase like “sui generis” in roman, so shall we. A quick search of the phrase on their website will tell us. They do capitalize Weltanschauung when writing in English, however, which is a deviation from the true Chicago path.
* I have read too much Eliade to ever put axis mundi in italics anyway.
The Care and Feeding of Writers
“The writer was first domesticated by the Chinese, in 3400 B.C. Although the keeping of writers has been popular among the aristocracy for millennia, it has become widespread in the last few centuries as the working masses have accrued more time and resources to devote to the care of others.”
A Hit, a very Palpable Hit
I just plugged the paper that I am writing on sexuality and contemporary Paganism in to the website at this link, and it was scored as 77-percent Shakespearean.
Too many words such as “Wicca” were not in his extensive vocabulary. Try it with a sample of your own prose.
(Via Odious and Peculiar.)