In his poem “To a Louse,” Robert Burns describes watching a louse crawl on a lady’s bonnet while in church. There is some humor in the image of the woman being unaware that she’s got vermin roaming around on her hat, and Burns ends the poem with (translated from Burns’s Scots): “And would some Power give us the gift/To see ourselves as others see us!” I thought of this the other day, when my … [Read more...]
Qualifiers and Word Clutter
I was pleased to see an op-ed in the New York Times a few weeks ago that addressed weak language construction. That is, using the phrase “I feel like” to precede stating an opinion, belief, preference, et cetera. The writer made the essay more political than I would have liked; I was hoping for an in-depth discussion of how we all use qualifiers and word clutter when we speak and write. I have … [Read more...]
What I’m Reading
I seem to be caught in a time warp with what I’m reading these days. It began with my interest in women detectives. A couple of months ago I searched Google for fictional women detectives, looking particularly for books set in the earlier part of the twentieth century. Among others, I found The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie King, first published in 1994. I read it, loved it, and mentioned it to … [Read more...]
Words or Pictures
A couple of years ago, I gave the students in one of my adult writing classes an assignment—for the next class, they were to bring in a short piece, 1-3 pages, of something that they had difficulty writing. Maybe dialogue, maybe first-person point of view, maybe a fight scene (fight scenes can be quite challenging). The first student who read, John, had a page-long description of a tree-covered … [Read more...]
Books and Music
In a conversation I had with my mother and older brother, my brother talked about the books that had the biggest impact on him when he was growing up. Since I read a lot as a child as well, and since my entire professional life has revolved around books, they looked expectantly at me to see what books I would name that influenced me as a teenager. I quickly riffled through my memory banks, … [Read more...]
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