Writing Tips

Although the practice is acceptable today, polite society in 18th-century America did not tolerate those who played with their genitives. Especially in public. The faux pas was so serious that a violator could be forever banished from intellectual circles.

A while back, I compared fewer to less (See Tip: “Still Another Three Words Many Writers Misuse”), and we saw that fewer applies only where we can separate something, like trees, and that we use less only where we cannot separate something, like shade.

About twelve years ago, the editors at The Modern Library asked me to write introductions for the Jack London classics Klondike Tales and The Sea-Wolf. London’s experience and imagination were broad and vivid, his style terse and dramatic:

Ninety years later, the debate still rages over whether it happened in an Amilcar or a Bugatti. Amilcar went wheels up in the 1930s, but Bugatti thrives today, and on the Bugatti website one senses they’re a little proud that the bizarre accident might have occurred in a Bugatti Type 37, a two-seat roadster with thin tires and wheels, cross-spoked like a bicycle’s and anchored by a large butterfly nut. Just like the Amilcar. But let’s go back to the beginning and meet our protagonist.

You know that moment’s hesitation, that flash of panic, when someone asks, “How are you?” and you aren’t sure whether to say, “I’m well,” or “I’m good"?

At the state fair this summer, let’s suppose that Toby Keith and Willie Nelson sing a duo, “Beer for My Horses,” except Toby sweats, picks, winces, and whines with his lips on the microphone, while Willie signs autographs and Toby has to step around him. That wouldn’t be fair, would it? You and I could sign autographs. Yet every day, we stick little pairs of words in our writing that do just that: one sweats, picks, and does all the hard work, while the other often just gets in the way.

What do the Marketing Director at the Rome Tourist Office, author of West with the Night Beryl Markham, and one of Prince William’s many unauthorized biographers have in common? Probably nothing. But if we had to guess, which ones would it be? 

Lillian Hellman popularized the term in the second volume of her memoir. In the opening scene of Julia, taken from Hellman’s book, Jane Fonda explained the meaning of the term: pentimento.

I promise not to go to the mailbag each week, searching desperately for an interesting question I can answer and pretend it’s my Writing Tip for the week. However, last week’s Tip “Sun Valley Serenade”--that writers engage readers not by giving information, but by withholding it--prompted a response containing this sentence:

If we gave Hemingway a dime for every time he used a comma where we all were taught we should use a comma, he could buy only one Cuba Libre with two limes for each of us. Which he has graciously offered to do here at Sloppy Joe’s, as we talk about “probably the most exciting topic in all of punctuation.” I’m quoting Hemingway. He can hardly contain himself.