The pandemic has been an interesting time. My spouse and I launched a new venture together, and it’s taken up quite a bit of my time. As a result, LSE has taken something of a side seat. Thankfully, my subcontractors and collaborators are wonderful, talented, flexible people, and it’s been nice to work on some select projects with them on more of a part-time basis.

The upshot is that for the foreseeable future, I’m going to be devoting my time to building something elsewhere.

Those of you who subscribe to my erstwhile RSS feed may also note that my name has changed. I’ve dispensed with my nickname, which I loved. But the source of the “W” is now, to me, a source of heartbreak and disappointment. Besides, many of you already know my name. In case anyone is out there searching for “E.A. Williams,” author of some fun and useful articles about Borat and Bakhtin, writing-program assessment, and writing-teacher mentorship, that’s me. Feel free to email me with questions about my dissertation, too. Sometimes, people have problems finding me. I really should get on Orchid…

At any rate, I don’t intend to shutter LSE altogether. I’ll be back with some additional posts from time to time. I hope that all of you are doing very well!

And that’s why if you’re in the biz, as I am, having a realistic contract is non-negotiable.

What do I mean by “realistic”? Well, the contract that I give to my clients says that I will make every reasonable attempt to give them an error-free product. It also stipulates that they have up to 4 weeks after I deliver what I, the contractor, deem to be the final draft to request revisions. Why me? Because every once in a while, you’ll have a client flake, and the finality of your project could be in limbo until they resurface. I’ve only had that happen once to me, and maybe someday I’ll get around to writing a name-and-shame post, but I prefer to leave those karmic ties severed.

I digress.

That kind of language can clarify that writers and editors are only human. And as a client of mine recently said to me, “I understand that there are different styles” of writing. A client may have liked what they saw in your portfolio, but the product you turn around to them ends up being, well, not what they’d hoped for. In that case, you better also have language in your contract that says that you, as the contractor, will determine whether to offer a refund or to rewrite/reedit/repreform the services. That needs to be your decision. Why? Because otherwise you could be at the mercy of an unreasonable, not to mention angry, client. And because you might have cleared out your whole calendar for that one big project; if the client wants a refund, then you’re without rent money for however many weeks that you were working on it. That means no money coming in for weeks past and weeks future. Look, you got hired for a reason, and your client needs to respect your labor. That’s why you need that kind of language in your contract.

I’ve had three attorneys in two states—one from an award-winning national firm—refine my engagement letter language. If you want their names, send me an email.

Why have I dusted off the blog to tell you this? Well.

For the first time ever, I’ve had a client say “This doesn’t work” about a LinkedIn profile that I wrote. He graciously said he’d pay me for the work anyway. But like I said to him, that’s just not my style. I’ve got it relatively good in that I don’t have to worry about making ends meet. But if I were just getting started, I might really need the chance to redo the profile and earn my money. In this case, the client had already rewritten what he wanted for a profile and sent it to me, so I just copyedited it and sent it back to him with a note saying that I wouldn’t be charging him for work that he’s dissatisfied with. We mutually agreed to terminate the engagement, in other words.

Right now, I’m also editing a dissertation off the clock and an academic article for an early-career academic, also off the clock. Again, I’m lucky in that I don’t need the money. My objective is to be helpful. As long as I’m making enough money editing and writing other projects, I don’t need to make a lot from people who genuinely need help (young academics, especially). Nor do I want to insist on being paid for work that doesn’t work. Nothing about that would please Saint Philip Neri, I think. Each case is different, but in some cases, it’s better just to cut my losses, learn my lessons, develop some new trainings to improve my skills, and live to edit another day.

During one of our initial conversations, she expressed some concern about the length of her resume.  It was bleeding onto a second page.  "How long should it be?" she asked.

The answer, as always, was, "It depends."

• Have you been working in your field for more than 10 years? Then your resume can be a bit longer. Less than that, and you're in a grey area until you hit about the 5-year mark. Anything below 5 years, and I say that it should be on one page. This is mostly because recruiters who are hiring for the kinds of positions that you'd be applying for aren't looking for your whole career history; they just need to know if you have the requisite skills and seem to be a safe bet, and they will make that determination very quickly. That's why it's important to fit your most-essential information onto one page.

• What are others in your field doing? Search Google Images for examples of resumes in your field. Do people with your amount of experience typically have 2-page resumes? If so, then it's probably safe to let your resume be 2 pages long. If not, then 1-page is the way to go.

Let's say that your resume is 2 pages long but shouldn't be, according to those two criteria.  What can you do to trim your resume down?

• Use margins strategically. Your resume doesn't need to have 1" margins. Expand those to .5" margins on all sides. You just gained 2 more inches of space.

• Adjust font size and style. Don't go below 11-pt font for text, but perhaps the lines between paragraphs could be 8-pt. And some fonts require more space between letters than narrower fonts. Find the option that prioritizes readability but also doesn't require wasted space.

• Get your priorities straight. You might want to brag about this or that accomplishment, but is it going to demonstrate the quality of your fit for the positions that you're applying to? If not, it's on the chopping block. Start eyeing your job duty descriptions with the same critical eye: if there's any verbiage that doesn't clearly and directly connect to the position descriptions for the jobs that you're applying to, it can go. Similarly, know what needs to stay. Be strategic about what you cut so that you're trimming fat that isn't related to the job description at hand.

• Have someone else read your resume. Tell them to look for wordiness, and maybe ask for their help in rephrasing things. You might think that there's only one way to word something, but asking for fresh eyes to review your resume can help you trim out unnecessary words.

Of course, if you need help creating a resume that speaks to your audience and reflects your strengths, you can always ask me for help.  I work on resumes for anyone from C-suite clients to their interns.  If you're in a rush, though, you can use these tips to give your own resume a bit of polish.

This post will be relatively short and sweet, but there isn't an author out there who won't benefit from it.  Whether you're a nonfiction writer of literature, an academic writer of scholarly papers, or someone who writes for fun, you need this threshold concept, this paradigm shift, this parted veil: Your paper doesn't propose anything.  It doesn't argue anything.  It doesn't suggest or find anything.  You do. 

Passive Voice and Anthropomorphism: Hiding the Author

In the sciences, folks are often told to write in passive voice or at least to avoid referring to themselves as the researchers and authors of any given study.  This is so they can front the science and not themselves.  Science is supposed to be unbiased, so what does it matter if "I found a positive correlation" or "a positive correlation was found"?  To make sure that science isn't about the scientist, just elide the scientist altogether when writing about the findings---the thinking goes---and the science will be as objective as it truly is.

This is, of course, poppycock.  Anything done by humans is inherently subjective and biased.  Any study they create, and findings they interpret: subjective, at least in part.  We can try to make study methods as replicable as possible, and we can try to be fair about our analyses, but all of that is still going through the filter of human knowledge and decisions, so there's at least a degree of subjectivity.  It's okay.  We've been doing great with our subjective experiences, scientific methods, and analyses for a long time.  Some of them put us on the moon, even.

So don't blame the scientists, okay?  But just know that there's a tendency in that direction, and if you don't have the full context, your boundaries get set in the wrong places and next thing you know, you're off the rails.

And by "off the rails," I mean "anthropomorphizing your text."

The American Psychological Association points to precisely this problem in their style manual.  In the [flips to the front cover of the book] 6th edition of the APA style manual, section 3.09, they warn y'all: "do not attribute human characteristics to animals or to inanimate sources."

This means that the following things did not happen in your study:

• "Previous research argues that new research is needed."

• "This learning style leads students to better development."

• "This study compares two phenomena."

Each one of these demonstrates an anthropomorphism.  None of the grammatical subjects here are the actual agents of the actions (check out the verbs) described here. 

• The previous research is just words on pages; those words can't argue because the are the argument.

• The learning style doesn't take students by the hand either literally or metaphorically; teachers use the learning style to do that, or students take the learning style and use it for their own development.

• The study doesn't compare anything. The study is just words on pages. The researcher does the comparison, and the study is the means by which he or she does so. The article that the researcher writes about the study also doesn't compare anything; it is the comparison, in verbal form.

I correct this in academic writing all the time.  Some of my publisher clients have told me to give up, and they're absolutely right.  But it's still a concept worth considering.  When it comes to anthropomorphized writing, where did the person actually doing the thinking and writing behind the text go? 

You're Still in Charge of Your Writing

When you anthropomorphize your writing, you're kind of buying into the Romanticist idea that those words popped out of the sky, were filtered through your brain (passively), and appeared on the page.  Convenient, if you want to be able to pretend as if your book is larger than life or if you want to disavow it later.  Now, most of you aren't trying to do that when you anthropomorphize your texts.  You're just looking for a quick way to describe your book's contents.  Fair enough.

But think about it for a second.  Imagine you've written a book (if you haven't; if you have, think about your last book).  You're trying to describe the book on Amazon.  You write: "This book explains that..."  Wait.  The book explains?  No way.  You explain.  These are your ideas.  Hit that delete button and try it again.  "In this book, I explain that..."  Still sounds a little too personal, too subjective?  Delete key.  "This book contains a detailed explanation of..."  Now that's accurate.  It's not even in passive voice!

So how might I correct those earlier examples?

• "According to an analysis of previous research, additional research is needed."

• "This learning style is used by teachers to guide students to better development." Or "teachers have used this learning style to guide students to better development."

• "Two phenomena are compared in this study."

Yes, avoiding anthropomorphizing your text may require more words, but at least it's accurate. 

PS: APA even allows for the use of first person to avoid passive voice and anthropomorphizing texts.  To wit: "use a pronoun or an appropriate noun as the subject of ... verbs" that inappropriately attribute agency to texts. 

Not long ago, I overheard someone say that shall is only used with the first person.  I scratched my head, assumed this person didn't know what he was talking about, and went about my merry way.  That was foolish of me in many ways.  First, I assumed that I knew more or better without evidence.  That is, I didn't know this person's full background.  Turns out, he teaches linguistics, so there was at least some chance that he was right or that he at least had a reason to say something that, to me, sounded utterly wrong.  Second, I assumed that I had an exhaustive understanding of usage.  I do not.  No one does.  Third, in assuming as much, I was giving up any chance at learning (a) what the truth is and either (b) why the custom/rule is as he said it is or (c) why he'd say it is if it's not.  I was being lazy at best and self-righteous at worst.

So here I am, several weeks later, looking at someone else's use of shall and wondering "Was that guy right?"  The question, once ignored, now nagged at me.  I picked up my grammar books.  No information there.  That told me that this must be a usage issue, a matter of custom and/or culture.  So I picked up my soon-to-be-erstwhile CMS 16th edition and turned to the usage section.  Nothing under shall.  Then I unshelved my Oxford American usage handbook, and lo and behold, clarity.

Here's the skinny on shall v. well, according to Bryan A. Gardner: "Grammarians formerly relied on [a] paradigm, which now has little utility."  That paradigm is that when shall is used with the first person (i.e., I or we), it indicates futurity (i.e., that something will, indeed, happen in the future).

Example: I shall go to the store later today.  But he will not.

However(!!), when shall is used with the second (you) or third person (i.e., he, she, it, or they), it connotes a command or promise, an obligation.  It suddenly has what might be described in speech-act theory as illocutionary force---it does something in addition to meaning something.

Example: I will not agree to that contract, and if you wish to remain in business with me, you shall not, either.

Will indicates futurity for second and third person but not first.  When used with first person, it has the illocutionary force of indicating a promise or command.

The distinction is very fine, highly contextual, and therefore easily disregarded.  I'm not saying it's not a useful distinction; I'm saying I'm not surprised that people have stopped honoring it (did they ever?  I do wonder).

Gardner includes this pertinent quip from "Professor Gustave Arit of the University of California":

The artificial distinction between shall and will to designate futurity is a superstition that has neither a basis in historical grammar nor the sound sanction of universal usage.  It is a nineteenth-century affectation [that] certain grammarians have tried hard to establish and perpetuate. ... [T]hey have not succeeded.

Ouch.  So, does the distinction exist?  Sort of.  Am I surprised that I hadn't happened upon it?  No.  I wouldn't fault any of my linguistics or English professors for not teaching it.  Was the person whom I heard articulate the rule as easily dismissed as I thought?  Well, no.  He may only have had one side of a story that is increasingly not being told, but "wrong" is too strong.  In the end, having the distinction in mind is useful, even if I continue to use shall to connote promises or commands and will to indicate futurity in a sort of blanket way.  I won't go around correcting anyone who hangs on to this person-based paradigm.

What is Grammarly?

Grammarly is a company that is heavily invested--to the tune of approximately $110 million, primarily from five venture-capital firms--in "using artificial intelligence to help people with the substance and content of what they write," according to CEO Brad Hoover.

My gloss on this is that Grammarly is a glorified version of the frankly adorable paperclip in ancient iterations of Microsoft Word, except that the paperclip gave users pointers about how to use Word in addition to pointing out typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors.  Grammarly sticks to the errors (Wikipedia says that Grammarly checks 250 million rules, but I can't verify that anywhere else, so consider it hearsay at this point).  I would also be remiss not to note that this claim is problematic insofar as changes to grammar do not necessarily equate to "substan[tive]" changes to meaning, let alone writing.  Chomsky proved that decades ago.

What is it, as a service?  Imagine paying a monthly fee to have Word check your spelling and grammar.  Imagine paying a monthly fee so that you can have a plugin for your browser that does what Word does in checking your spelling and grammar as you, say, type an email (or a blog post).  That's what people pay for when they pay for Grammarly.  The algorithms that the company uses to help narrow down the probability that certain conditions have or have not been met in any combination of words (i.e., that sentences are grammatical or not) are maybe better than Word's, more refined, more nuanced, more-regularly updated (but does it constitute the development of artificial intelligence?  Well, the mere use of algorithms does not artificial intelligence make), but even proving the validity of that assertion would depend on which test is being administered.

What's So Problematic about Grammarly?

Nothing, except that it's only marginally helpful.

"But wait!" you say.  "I use Grammarly, and just like in the commercials, it saved me from using a typo or misplacing a modifier in that email to my boss.  Yikes!"  Sure, but Word might have been able to help you catch that, too.  For free.

What's really problematic was a problem that started well before the point at which you, the Grammarly user, thought to yourself, "I better make sure my boss doesn't catch any errors in what I write for work."  Here's a brief summary of the layers upon layers of problems that led you to Grammarly:

1. You weren't taught properly to rely upon--not just how to use but that you need to use--a proper handbook.  Anything that you feel unsure about, you could look up in a writer's handbook like The Everyday Writer or A College Grammar of English, depending on your needs.  A cheap handbook that I love to recommend is The Easy Writer by Andrea Lunsford.  Everything that Grammarly "knows" is in that handbook, and you can get it for less than the price of one month's subscription to Grammarly.
2. You weren't taught the basics of grammar.  When you open up a handbook to learn about why "which" needs a comma but "that" doesn't, you may be thrown off by terms like "restrictive."  And what's a "modifier," anyway?  "Gerund"?  Who is "Gerund"? Your parents (and you) should have gone to your school board and demanded to be challenged in your English classes.  Shakespeare is important, too, but understanding grammar is far, far more important insofar as you need to understand the fundamentals of the linguistic tools you use to navigate your world each day of your life.  Which leads to the next point...
3. The education and teacher-training system set you up to be ignorant.  This is partly because of standardized testing and the need to teach lots and lots of things to students.  Learning grammar takes time, especially if it's not intuitive (chemistry isn't intuitive for me, so I empathize).  Frankly, I'd bet that if you had a map of the U.S. and put a dot for each city/town in which at least one school has an expert in English language or even someone with more than six hours of English-grammar college-level education, the map would have fewer than 50 tiny specks.  Instead, we have teachers who aren't equipped to teach anything about grammar and usage, so why do we assume our students will know it?  Don't blame the teachers, though...
4. I put a lot of blame on my own field, rhetoric and composition, for downplaying the importance of teaching the formal aspects of language for the sake of promoting the cultural aspects of communication.  Yes, it's true that there are multiple dialects of English and that communities should have the right to the use of their own dialect, that no dialect is inherently better than another.  However, if our students can't describe the ways in which a dialect operates and differs from another dialect--if they can't identify articles, verbs, syntactic complexity, etc., and analyze why, rhetorically, speakers and writers might use those elements for a purpose in any given context--then our attention to the cultural aspects of communication are pointless, because we're just telling people that something is a certain way without empowering them to understand how it is.  The "social turn" in my field should have been a time when we doubled down on teaching grammar, linguistics, and usage and then coupling them with cultural rhetorics and linguistics; instead, we chucked the one that looked like science and embraced the one that we thought was important by itself, for itself.  I argue that our students would be more empowered if they could explain how and why they are communicating or how and why others' communication affects their identities and rights; right now, few can.
5. Because of the highly conditional nature of language--a function of the highly conditional nature of human social and cognitive contexts--what counts as an error to one person may not to another at any given point in time.  It wasn't until grad school that I learned how to use an em dash properly.  Now I find out that I'm applying the rule I learned far too stringently--that it's okay to use as an extendo tool like this.  It drives me nuts when people do it, even though it's something I used to do all the time.  I have a different set of rules in my head.  What rules does Grammarly have?  How adaptable is its "reasoning"?  Can you talk back and forth with the algorithm about what the rhetorical repercussions are of having used an em dash in the way that you did, in any given context?  Can Grammarly's alleged AI help you weigh the cost-benefit for a nuanced audience?  How do you know that something is an error?  How does Grammarly know?  Who gets to decide what's right and wrong in language use?

Grammarly fixes exactly none of these problems.  It doesn't educate the user.  It doesn't advocate for better teacher education to empower writers to be able to control their own language.  It takes money from people and puts a bandaid over all of this.  What's more, when people use Grammarly, they can't tell whether the fixes proposed by the Grammarly system are actually fixes.  In this way, Grammarly is kind of like going to a psychic.  Your psychic might be 100% right that you shouldn't marry your fiance, but you don't know that, and there's no way for you to verify it until it's too late.  Similarly, unless you can open up a handbook and point to the place where the handbook explains that no, you don't need a comma before a coordinating conjunction that splices two independent clauses in most cases (or what "coordinating conjunction" and "independent clause" even mean), among any number of additional rules about commas, then you don't know whether Grammarly has given you an accurate fix when it suggested deleting that one comma.  You are at Grammarly's mercy, in that case.

Don't Even Get Me Started with the Plagiarism-Detection Service

Companies like Turnitin and, now, Grammarly are compiling gigantic databases of writing.  This should give each of you pause.  What are they doing with your writing?  Is your privacy protected?  Which copyrights have you given away by virtue of having used these services?  Read all about it here.

What's the Solution?

I suppose we have to find a time machine and go back to the '80s and tell rhet-compsters not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  There isn't enough R&D funding for that at the moment, I hear, so instead you have a range of options that are better than Grammarly:

• Less-costly options:
  • Merely using Word (or whatever word processor you prefer)
  • Using a handbook.  This will take more time than using Word, because you'll have to spend time with it, learning about grammar, before you can really get optimal use out of it.
• More-costly options:
  • Take a class on writing, but look at the syllabus first to make sure that there's plenty of attention paid to grammar and usage
  • Better yet, take an introductory linguistics class.  Then buy a handbook; you'll suddenly find it much more approachable. 
  • Ideally, you'd be able to secure the services of a professional editor.  I negotiate payment plans for students (and, really, anyone else who knows they're going to have difficulty paying a single lump sum for professional help), and many other copyeditors will, too.  Yes, it will be more than $15/month, but the monthly subscription price that you're paying to Grammarly is really just for wishful thinking.  If you're only using Grammarly, then you'll still need to have your writing checked over by a professional to ensure that it's actually correct because, hey, you don't know enough to know whether the automated advice given to you by Grammarly is worth anything or not.  Kinda undercuts the value of the subscription, doesn't it?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news for those of you who thought that Grammarly was the panacea for your writing woes.  What I'm trying to tell you is that it's actually much more important that you understand how writing works so that you'll be able to evaluate whether you're getting good advice, whether it's from an algorithm or from a copyeditor such as me.  Both the algorithm and I can make suggestions for improving your grammaticality, but I can make suggestions and changes that affect your writing qua writing, not qua grammatical strings of words that may or may not be meaningful or effective.  And I can teach you about how I've done it, if you want to know.

And I will, if I name her, because I'm gonna read (but not drag) one of her latest posts about how to improve your website copy.

In the advice she gives in that post, she's missing a big secret, and it's something that I used to teach even my introductory-level English students.  So regardless of whether you're an entrepreneur trying to get more hits or a freshman in college trying to understand why this writing class that you're forced to take even exists, this post in the Oratoria is for you.

It's the Rhetoric, Folks

Take a look at my second sentence in this post:

I like her work, generally, so I don't want to seem ungrateful for the gems she shares with us.

This sentence is rhetorically off the mark.  How so, you ask?  My English 101 students could have told you.

On day two (or so) of English 101, I told (NB: I don't teach anymore) students about rhetoric.  Aristotle defined it as the art of knowing the available means of persuasion in any given situation.  Today's rhetorical studies is less concerned with persuasion than with "communication of meaning," which encompasses persuasion.  But the rest of the basic elements are still important.  Based on that definition, what can we see that Aristotle emphasizes?

• Audience: In order to persuade someone, I have to know what they believe, think, like, are moved by, etc.  In order to communicate with them successfully, I have to know what language they speak (even better: what dialect of that language), what their mood is, what they care to hear about at any given moment, etc.  I have to know their motivations for listening.
• Topic: What am I trying to persuade them of or communicate to them?  What are the details of that topic that they'd be interested in?  Uninterested in?  Repelled by?  Curious about?  Aristotle spent hours and hours lecturing about how to appeal to very specific demographics of the typical audiences that his students might encounter, as proven by the hundreds of pages of class notes from his lectures that now comprise his Rhetoric. 
• Purpose: Why do you want to communicate?  Why is the other party listening and, perhaps, responding in a specific way?  What are you trying to achieve?

Those are the basics.  For any given item of writing--from a grocery list to War and Peace--my English 101 students knew how to break down any communication and understand it rhetorically.

In my sample sentence, there are a few problems, mostly to do with audience.  First, I don't identify who "us" is.  Secondly, I seem to assume that my audience will be persuaded by my discussing what I like, which is the topic of that particular sentence.  Speaking of topics, that sentence is shaky, because its topic seems to be what I like, while the rest of the introduction of this post is headed in a very different direction.  That set-em-up/switch-em-up approach isn't always problematic, but it's certainly risky, especially vis-a-vis purpose.  Why did I need to do that re-direct?  Why did I need to explain what I like and don't like?  Why did I need to shift gears suddenly thereafter?

This is, admittedly, a very, very close reading of just one little sentence, but my point is that my English 101 students were equipped to do that.

Oh, the Errors You'll Catch

So I'm watching this video post by this guru, and she's giving out very helpful advice: people should write their businesses' websites with the customer in mind, not themselves.  What does that mean?  Well, for example, my "About" section on this site is tucked away behind two pages; it's past the page about my company, Laughing Saint Editorial LLC, on a sub-page of that sub-page.  Why?  Because what I do for a living is about providing a service, not about providing a spotlight for myself.  It's you, the customers and readers, who come here looking for (here comes purpose) information about my services and about how to survive in the usage jungle.  (NB: Someday, I'm going to write a book titled Oh, the Errors You'll Catch: How to Survive in the Usage Jungle.)  So instead of writing about how I like copyediting, I write about what my services are and what they provide to you when I'm writing the main pages.  I do the same thing for my clients: your website (rather than your LinkedIn profile) is about your customers, so I'm going to write your website copy with a lot of "you" and "your," a bit of "our" and "we," and almost no "I" or "my."

The guru, in explaining that, was 100% right.

But, right at the very end of the post, she mentioned that being "cute" and funny on your website is pretty much required for catching customers today.

Woah, there.  Not so fast.

Clearly, she knows her own audience: they like her quirky style, and her brand is all about being personable.  Her audience expects this, but not all audiences are her audience.  Not all industries are her industry.

If I'm writing a website for someone in an insurance firm, I will not be using cute, funny copy on the website.  If I'm writing a website for a financial-services firm, I will not be using cute, funny copy.  If I'm writing a website for a community organization dealing with emergency services, I'm not going to use cute, funny copy.

Why not?  Because it wouldn't serve my purpose.  It might confuse readers, because rhetoric also includes issues of tone, genre, and timing.  If you're looking for a bankruptcy attorney, do you want that person to be cute and funny when they're trying to solicit business?  Apparently, this guru thinks you do.  My experience says differently.

Research and Field Testing

Thankfully, we could do a rhetorical analysis of other websites in any given industry to see what the norm is, and we can follow up with clients and in focus groups to ask people what their response to website copy is.  We don't have to trust a guru's gut (Not Trusting the Guru Gut will be the next book) about what's effective for any given purpose and audience. 

If cute and funny end up winning the day in every industry, sector, and audience, so be it!  I know, though, that if had asked my students about whether that was a sound rhetorical analysis, they'd have frowned.

Do Your Homework

So, instead of going to the copywriting service that this guru was recommending, which shall also go nameless here, you should find a copywriter who's got some knowledge of rhetoric or some very detailed knowledge about the audience you're trying to communicate with or the industry/sector that you're trying to reach.  Finding just anyone and figuring out too late that that person thinks a blanket approach to writing website copy will do...  Yeah, you don't want to find yourself in that position.  It'll be an expensive bag to be left holding.

My Students Almost Never Plagiarized.  Here's Why.

There's probably as much moral outrage connected to plagiarism as there is confusion about what actually constitutes plagiarism.  That's not a stable combination.  But as a teacher, I rarely had students plagiarize in my classes.  This was for three reasons:

1. I made them write drafts, sometimes in class, so no one could show up to class with a complete paper out of the thin, blue sky.  They'd fail a substantial portion of the paper grade if they did.  We also talked explicitly about what plagiarism is, and they knew that part of the reason they were doing drafts was to help them avoid plagiarism.  There was no mystery to the process, because I wasn't trying to catch them or trick them.
2. I had unique paper prompts that required writers to synthesize and/or address unusual topics and/or incorporate their own experiences.  This is the number-one way that teachers can avoid cases of plagiarism.  Not having unique assignments that ask students to do something truly unique (like incorporate their personal experiences into their analysis or to analyze things that few other folks would think to analyze) is a good way to avoid getting paper-mill papers.
3. I warn students in the first few days of class that I am a rhetorician with enough training in linguistics that I can analyze their rhetorical/linguistic/discursive fingerprints based on samples of their in-class writing and compare that analysis with a similar analysis of any paper they turn in that I think might be plagiarized.  Armed with forensic linguistics, I would tell them, I could bring charges of plagiarism that would be pretty hard to deny even in the absence of a matching source if the analysis indicates that plagiarism had, indeed, occurred.

But when I did catch students plagiarizing, it was usually because they were:

1. Ignorant about the topic they were to write about.  These were the students who'd bailed on class or hadn't done the readings.  They were stealing other people's ideas (yeah, I said it: stealing) because they didn't have any of their own to put into words.
2. Ignorant about what constitutes plagiarism.  Yes, sometimes you have students (especially from foreign cultures) who just don't understand how our culture defines plagiarism, no matter how much we discuss the basics of plagiarism in class.  They might not realize that it's not okay to take a sentence from a paper they'd written in high school and plop it into a new paper, or that they have to provide actual citations for all materials--directly quoted or otherwise--that didn't come from their own brains or aren't common knowledge.  My response to this was, typically: "Except for common-knowledge issues, if you can cite a source for any idea or words you're writing, then you must."
3. Out of time.  Maybe they knew the material inside and out.  Maybe they knew what plagiarism is.  But maybe they put off writing the paper and just don't have the time to write 6000 words in the next 3 hours or whatever before class, so they decide to lift someone else's ideas or words without proper attribution.  Yikes.  That's why plagiarism penalties exist, indeed.

All of that is understandable, if not always excusable.  We hold students to a high standard, and it's our responsibility as teachers to teach students what those standards are so that students can live up to them.  We're also here to help them do that "living up to" part, too.

Here's the thing: We cannot do that if we, their teachers, are plagiarists.  We have to hold ourselves to the highest standard if we want to be taken seriously.

Who's Afraid of the Humanities?

Nary a month goes by but that there's an op-ed piece in a major newspaper or academic trade publication about how important the humanities are.  Ever wondered why that is?  It's not as if there are op-eds about how unnecessary the humanities are, right?  Well, it's true that after the boom times of the 1990s, university budget cuts struck humanities programs first.  These programs weren't flashy (no robots getting built by philosophy professors, even though their work makes AI possible), they didn't get big grant funds (no pharmaceuticals being created by cultural-studies experts, even though their work informs how we categorize disorders and diseases), and they appeared to be more expensive than they were worth (even though some courses, like first-year writing courses, are huge money-makers for universities, largely because they're so cheap to teach and because students are conscripted into them).  Right before I went on the job market for a tenure-track job, the economy crashed, and English and other humanities departments around the country dried up.  Suddenly, our scholarship wasn't as valuable as it had been; it wasn't worth the same level of investment in the form of professorships and departmental funding.  So it goes.  The humanities really are vulnerable to the money-focused forces that steer contemporary universities. 

The problem isn't that we're not actually valuable.  It's also not that we're not inherently valuable, by which I mean that the humanities aren't valuable for their own sake.  Humanities scholarship is valuable, and humanities scholars have to be able to articulate the nature of that value in order to persuade others of it.  Torrential rainstorms of ink have been spilled in the effort to articulate that value, so I'm going to keep it brief here, but the best reason I can think of to indicate the value of the humanities is this: Imagine that everything we know about human culture didn't get passed down to the next generations.  Imagine that in two generations we don't know anything about what we were doing at any point beyond 200 years ago.  Imagine that we didn't understand anything about ourselves and how we got to where we are.  Sounds dangerous, right?  Not to mention wasteful.  That's what abandoning the humanities means.  We're worth investing time, effort, and, yes, money in.

Self-Plagiarism (Especially in the Humanities) Is Damn Ugly

The following scenario is hypothetical, okay?  But let's say that in the course of being the loving, diligent copyeditor of a book written by a group of smart, capable, insightful scholars in the humanities, I see a bit of code that indicates that a few words have come from an online source.  I used to see this code in my students' papers all the time when they'd copy and paste a quotation from whatever online source they were reading.  With proper attribution, this is not a problem.  In fact, with proper attribution, signal phrases, and fully integrating whatever was copied into their ideas and sentences, the inclusion of those outside words--whether they were copied and pasted or not--would constitute successful academic writing.  The code in and of itself wasn't the problem for my students.

So let's say I decide, "Well, I better double check that these words don't need to be cited, since they seem to be copied and pasted."  Because the words aren't cited.  Why would they be copied and pasted, then, I might wonder?  Let's say that I then search the interweb for the words, and find that, lo and behold, that exact phrase has already been published in an article on the same topic in a peer-reviewed, academic journal that specializes in publishing information about this topic.  Gasp!  And not cited??  This is not okay!

What I've just described to you in this hypothetical situation is plagiarism.  The author of the chapter hasn't given attribution to the exact wording of a pretty distinctive phrase that comes from another source that, in all likelihood, the author came in contact with in the course of doing research for this article.  Standard plagiarism that an editor can query: "Does this sentence require attribution?  It comes from an outside source.  Please provide complete citation information."

But let's say I look at the byline for the article from which this phrase has been flat-out plagiarized, and I find that the article was written by the same person who's written the chapter that I'm currently copyediting.

Um, no.  No, no, no.  Say it ain't so.  This humanities scholar has self-plagiarized.  This person has just repeated themselves verbatim in a totally new work of "scholarship."  And, let's go to the worst-case scenario: let's say that this person is a rhetoric-and-composition scholar with a tenure-track position and has even written a textbook about academic writing.

Let's say that happened.  Just, like, hypothetically.

This is truly ugly.  It's hypocritical.  It's professional malpractice.  It's self-sabotage.  Any humanities scholar, especially someone who specializes in rhetoric and/or writing, has no excuse.  They have no appeal to any of the three reasons why students might plagiarize.  Let me count the ways:

1. Self-plagiarists in the humanities, especially writing-studies specialists, cannot claim ignorance of the subject matter they're writing about.  Clearly, as someone who's published on this topic before, they should be able to think of new things to say about this topic.  If they can't, they should take several seats and let someone else who has something new and fresh to say have a chance.  But this is one of the many problems of the academy today: publish or perish leads to a glut of echo-chamber publications.  It leads to cliques of scholars publishing each other's scholarship once one of them gets into an editorial position.  Perhaps self-plagiarizing humanities scholars think that no one is actually reading their work, at least not closely, and they'll never get caught.  That's woefully abject in its cynicism.
2. They cannot claim to be ignorant about what constitutes plagiarism.  If you're a professional academic, you've encountered dozens of definitions of plagiarism.  It's your job to enforce plagiarism policies in your classes.  You can't say that you didn't realize that just repeating your own words and not providing a citation to that information is dishonest.  You can't say that you think there's no harm in trying to get ahead in the publish or perish game by cutting corners, by trying to seem as if you've got new, fresh ideas when in fact you're just repeating yourself.  This is why outsiders don't take the humanities seriously.  Things like this.  When we don't actually bring new, worthwhile knowledge to the table.  This is why.  This.
3. They cannot claim to have run out of time.  Behind on that deadline?  Either ask for an extension or sit down and let someone else have a go.  I'm in the middle of an epic battle with myself about whether I'm ever going to get a chapter submitted for a certain edited collection.  But I'm not going to steal someone else's words or try to pass off words that I've already published somewhere else in order to have another publication line on my CV.  Neither would I steal just one sentence.  It's not going to save me that much time.  In the time that I saved by not trying to think of a new way to phrase that same idea, I'm not going to be able to fit in another student advising session or another email or another meeting or time enough to prep a whole class, etc.  It's not saving that much time to self-plagiarize just one line.  So why bother?  It's just lazy and ugly, and it suggests that what we do is cheap and not worthy of building upon.  It suggests that even we "really" know that what we do is just the same thing over and over.  As long as we get the publication glory, right?

So, I'm not saying anything.  I'm just saying.  If you're a scholar in the humanities and you're thinking of self-plagiarizing, don't.  Wait to write when you actually have something new to contribute.  Give someone else a chance, if the best you can do is repeat yourself.  If we're in this cosmic cocktail party together, then just remember that no one likes to chat up the person who just keeps saying the same thing over and over.  What's the point of listening to that?

The point I made in response to him was descriptive (though he took it as prescriptive): the phrase is already being misused, so don't get too hung up on correcting everyone, because that's a Sisyphean task. 

The philosopher was not amused.

What is Usage?

Usage has to do with how we use language--from punctuation to turns of phrase--to communicate.  It's governed by convention, not divine law and not dictionaries.  It changes over time.  What you learned about the "right" (read: customary) way to say or write this or that can differ greatly from the way that someone else who lives a few blocks, states, or continents away from you.  I'll never forget telling a flatmate of mine in London to stop talking about her "pants" because the Londoners in the room were getting uncomfortable thinking that she was talking about her underwear (to them, she meant "trousers"). 

Do you have a pet peeve about a phrase that gets commonly misused (or so you think)?  They're everywhere.  Some of my favorite examples:

• "for all intensive purposes" should be "for all intents and purposes"
• "flushed out" should be "fleshed out" ("I fleshed out the details")
• "moment being" should, to my ears, be "time being" ("I'm home, at least for the time being")

Some pet peeves might turn out just to be regional variations that you didn't know about.  My hillbilly kinfolk say "you'ns" to indicate the plural second-person.  Think that's annoying?  Sorry, but it's not wrong, at least not according to certain dialects of regional English.  It's just not customary to use outside of that regional variation.  For all I know, "moment being" might be the same way.

Here's what you can't attribute what you think is a misuse of English to:

• stupidity
• neglect
• moral failure
• an untrained mind
• poor parenting
• economic background
• poor education.

The philosopher was convinced that he had it "right," and he did, in a technical sense.  But people who say "beg the question" in a non-technical sense probably don't have his extensive and excellent training in philosophy.  It's not because they're dumb or lazy or had parents who didn't discipline and/or love them sufficiently.  It's because they just don't know.  People rarely like getting usage wrong; we hang so much judgment on using "correct grammar" (which people usually use incorrectly to refer to both "correct" and "grammar," so add that phrase to my pet peeve list), so it's unlikely that the misuser is doing so on purpose.  Hard to judge someone for not doing something right that they didn't know was wrong.

Correcting Misusers

Oh, wait.  The subheading here and the title of this post kinda beg the question, don't they?  We're assuming that we should correct people who misuse language conventions!  I don't accept that assumption, actually, so let's approach this issue somewhat algorithmically.

How to determine whether you should correct someone's usage:

• The most important question must be: do you know FOR A FACT that the phrase (or whatever) in question has been used in a way that does not adhere to current convention?  Could you point to a passage in a handbook, for example, that unequivocally proves that whatever you're about to lay down a correction for is, in fact, in need of correction?  If not, abandon your intention.  In this case, you do not possess the requisite knowledge, expertise, or validation to issue a correction. 
  • What can you do instead?  At best, you could ask a question: "Oh, that's interesting.  You said 'beg the question.'  I thought it was only used to refer to logical fallacies.  Have I gotten that wrong?"  Always, always assume the position of humility.  Do not ask, "Where did you learn to say it that way?" or "Were you aware that it's actually...?"  Your objective is to make, not alienate, friends, right?
• Is the person you want to correct a loved one to whom you are not a parent?  If yes, then...
  • What can you do?  Don't correct them.  Why would you want to?  Just let them be.  That said, parents get the right to correct their children's everything: behavior, attitudes, use of salad forks, and language.  Parents, you still need to answer question 1 in the affirmative before you correct your kid's language use without an appeal to a handbook or authoritative resource.  But if you think that your kid has misused a phrase or word, you can say, "I don't think that 'beg the question' means what you think it means.  Go get your English handbook [or tablet or dictionary, etc.] and look it up and come tell me what it says."  That way, you'll both learn things!  And you'll be modelling for kiddo that it's okay not to know things and to risk being wrong.  Takes a lot of strength, that.
• Is the person you want to correct someone over whom you have some kind of managerial authority?  That is, you're his boss or you're her mentor or you're their teacher.  In that case...
  • What can you do?  Never, ever, ever correct that person in front of other people.  Again, the less-enlightened among us still judge others for their "correct" usage of conventions.  Be aware of that before you go shaming someone for misusing "flushed out."  That said, in large office settings, if you're the boss, you might be able to get away with a general email that says something like "I want to make sure we're using 'flush out' correctly.  Unless we're talking about plumbing, we ought to avoid it.  Let's make sure we're using 'flesh out' from here on to refer to adding details or looking at additional information.  That'll help us stay consistent across the whole office."  But in individual contexts, I would recommend adding a comment about a misuse as an afterthought to something else: "It really was a great first draft.  I'm glad we've spent the last 30 minutes discussing it.  By the way, before we talk about when we're having our next conversation, I noticed that you use 'flushed out' when I would have used 'fleshed out.'  I looked it up in my usage dictionary, and where you have 'flushed out,' it should be 'fleshed out.'  I wanted to make sure I mention it to you so that you adjust this draft.  It's important to impress your readers, so I wanted to make sure that you've got the tightest prose possible."  Wordy?  Yes.  Tactful?  Mostly.  Better than red ink with no explanation for the correction or why it was important to make?  Totally.
• Is the person a stranger to you?  Then stop.  You'll exhaust yourself trying to be everyone's real-time, flesh-and-blood copyeditor.  It's not your job to make usage great again.  Change comes to all things, and if "flesh out" becomes "flush out," what's the difference?  If "begging the question" has both a technical and a colloquial sense, the Earth will continue to spin around the sun without your correcting this hapless (mis)user.

There are surely other scenarios I'm not thinking of, but the upshot is this: how should you correct someone's usage?  Generally, you shouldn't.  You should only intervene--and then, tactfully and empathetically--when the quality of your/your employee's/your student's/your child's work and/or reputation are at stake.  And that's if and only if you know for sure that the correction you're making is actually a correction and not, say, just your imposition of your own personal standards.

Life's short.  There are some battles worth fighting.  "Begging the question," in most (but not all) circumstances, isn't one of them.

Neither right nor wrong

As with most usage issues in English, it's not as if there's a definitively right or wrong way to use singular "they."  I say that with my descriptivist hat on: I'm trying just to describe how English gets used, not lay down proscriptions about whether it should be used in this way or that.  The "should" approach is called the prescriptivist approach.  We'll get to that.  But the upshot is that you'll never hear me or anyone from the Laughing Saint Editorial's crew say that singular "they" is right or wrong per se.  We're going to talk about whether it's appropriate once we get into the prescriptive side of things later on.

So, what are you going to learn in this post?  A little bit about what other experts say, a little about gender theory, and a little about yourself.

Please ignore Grammar Girl

I've got a post I'm saving up about why Grammar Girl isn't your friend (do you use WebMD instead of a doctor?  No.  So you shouldn't use Grammar Girl and assume you've gotten accurate grammar/usage advice.  I digress).  That said, we do need to start this conversation by looking at what experts (i.e., not Grammar Girl) have said about the use of singular "they," both descriptively and prescriptively.

I'm a rhetorician with a background in linguistics (my dissertation director was a nationally-recognized linguist who helped create the Dictionary of American Regional English, and I have something like a master's worth of coursework in English grammar, including English-language history and functional, cognitive, and generative grammars), which means I think of language/linguistics as the foundation of rhetoric.  Rhetoric is, more or less, how we use communication--verbal and otherwise--to do things.  Note the importance there of the word "use."  "English language usage" refers to customs of language usage, not the rules (flexible and dynamic though they may be) of grammar, which is really about how words get put together to make sense (but whether they achieve some purpose, well, that's a question for rhetoric and usage and style rather than grammar).  Grammar is how the Lego blocks fit together; rhetoric is whether you've used your blocks to make a castle or a bridge and why you'd want to build one or the other.

So, before we can understand whether and how to use (!) singular "they," we have to understand its basis in language and the history of the language.  The fact is that singular "they" has been used in the English language since before "correct spelling" was a thing.  There's something like four centuries of time lag between the two, actually: singular "they" is at least as old as the 14th century, and spelling and other matters of language use were being codified in the 18th and 19th centuries.  That's just the descriptive facts.  So the historical argument suggests that there's precedent both for using singular "they" and for not using it, as language standards started to be implemented.

Since history won't save you, how about the brain?  Here's a great analysis from the Bible of approachable linguistics scholarly news, Language Log, about how using the singular "they" has been shown to require increased processing time (meaning: it does seem to take a handful of milliseconds longer to understand what "they" or "their" refers to when it refers to a singular noun).  But we're talking about milliseconds, not a complete breakdown in semantics (how sentences make meaning).  So cognitive arguments aren't going to save you, either, because it would be patently risible to claim that understanding singular "they" creates such a significant cognitive burden that singular "they" should never be used.

What about semantics, though?  Can you argue that the use of singular "they" creates vagueness in sentences that can't be overcome?  Actually, I think this is the best argument against using it.  Note that the sentence "The student took their book to class" makes perfect sense to some folks.  To me, it causes at least momentary confusion: Wait, did this person intend to use "their"?  Are we suddenly talking about some other group of people?  Did I miss the change in subject or meaning?  Grammatically, we can change the rules (or change them back) such that "they" is officially alright to use in singular contexts, but just like I have to read some sentences a couple of times before I understand whether "read" is past or present tense, I might have to read a sentence that uses singular "they" a couple of times before I'm assured of whom we're talking about, and there might still be some ambiguity.  Furthermore, at the moment, we don't allow for "themself," which would be the singular reflexive form of the plural pronoun, which suggests to me that we're still not there, descriptively, when it comes to the singular use of the plural pronoun.  I could be asking for too much (we use "themselves" as the singular reflexive instead), but I think that when we get to "themself," we'll be fully in singular "they" semantics.  Right now, we're not.

On the ground

That said, when it comes to language use on the ground, some folks use singular "they" to promote a gender-neutral perspective.  In many ways, I support this, but that's not my only reason for using singular "they," though I don't use it all that often (see the semantic argument against it, above).  That said, I do use singular "they" not only in speech but occasionally in my Oratoria posts and elsewhere.  There are good reasons to use singular "they," just a few of which include:

1. Respecting other people's wishes when it comes to the pronouns they prefer.  Don't be a self-righteous jerk: if someone asks that you use "she" or "they" or "he," just do your best to do that.  There's no reason to make a big deal about it.  If that person changes their (!) mind about it later (an argument I've heard against having to keep up with personal pronoun choices), what's it to you?  You can be forgiven slip-ups, in that case, but remember that most of the time, making that kind of change isn't something an individual takes lightly, so don't plan on being asked to adjust more than once per person.
2. Accepting linguistic (and social) change.  It's not so much that words change, but our use of and rules for them change.  Happens all the time.  Don't imagine that you've got the form of English that G-d loves best.  Unless you've got some stone tablets lying about that you wanna tell us about, and those tablets are about grammar and usage, there's no reason to be upset about language change.  Unless you're trying to use language as a tool of oppression or control, that is.
3. It fits the context you're writing or speaking for.  If I'm editing a blog post written for a website geared to people in their teens, I'm giving a pass to singular "they."  If I'm editing a book written by one of my clients in the business world, there shall be no singular "they" if I have anything to say about it.  The Chicago Manual of Style is unequivocal about their rejection of singular "they" (I have to believe it's because it occasionally creates ambiguities that can't be resolved semantically/grammatically), for example.  So is The New Yorker.  As a rule, for me, I decide to allow singular "they" if and only if:
   1. It doesn't create ambiguities that can't be resolved easily by the reader
   2. The applicable style guide allows for it
   3. The audience is likely not to have a fit about it
   4. The writer wrote it (i.e., I won't go adding it where it isn't already).

So, it's not as if this is a right-or-wrong issue.  It's really a matter of rhetoric: how do you plan to use singular "they," and why?  Will it work in your specific context?  Those are the salient questions.

But using "content" to stand for "meaning" or "text" or "information," for example, drives me nuts.  This is a personal problem, I realize, and fundamentally it's a knee-jerk reaction to something that's different from what I've experienced in the past.  That said, I'm going to vent my spleen against "content" and try to articulate why I think we ought to avoid what I think are its most obnoxious uses.

So You Want to Write Marketing Copy, er, "Content"

In marketing and business, it's important to be first.  I get it.  That's part of the motivation for neologisms that come from these sectors: You coin a term, it takes off, it gets used in a million hashtags, and your ad team and/or (ideally) whatever product or service you're advertising is the new hot stuff.  I think this need to be first is part of what drives the innovative use of words in ways that don't conform with the ways they used to be used.  It's why "gifting" is alright as a verb and "grow your business" has taken the place of "increase the amount of business you're doing": it's a new and unusual way to use a word (in these cases, turning a noun into a verb and vice versa).  If you're part of the "in" crowd in marketing, you'll be able to speak the language, and the shibboleths change regularly.  "Content" is one such marker, as are terms like "marketing collateral," "friction," and "storyscaping."  If you can use these words in a sentence in front of a large room of people who work in marketing without checking the faces of the audience to make sure that what you said made sense, consider yourself already part of their priesthood.

When I first started hearing "content" in the context of marketing a few years ago, I had to stop to process the word's meaning.  It was simply so different from what I was used to.  Over the years, as I heard about "content generation," "content marketing," "content mapping," etc., etc., I did not become inured to what what to me was a strange usage.  I became increasingly irritated by it.  To me, "content" means something along the lines of "stuff within a container," not "writing" or "text."

Why "Content"?

There's an easy explanation for why we might use the word "content" to stand for what it usually stands for in marketing, which could include but is not limited to writing, text, information, graphics, art, certain types of documents/texts (e.g., blog posts, whitepapers, emails, flyers, tweets), and ideas.  In other words, "content" sometimes stands for the ideas themselves and sometimes for the media through which those ideas are communicated.

Note the wording I used there: the media through which ideas are communicated.  I actually wrote "the media in which those ideas are communicated" and erased it (rather: deleted it).  There a few common metaphors for writing that are well-studied in the field of rhetoric and composition, and two of the best-known such metaphors are the "container metaphor" and the "conduit metaphor."  Both are represented in my changed sentences: the container metaphor is apparent if I write something like "the media in which ideas are communicated," while the conduit metaphor is used in a phrase like "the media through which ideas are communicated."  Both metaphors are perfectly natural, because we regularly take abstract ideas -- like the notion of communication -- and talk about them as if they were physical things -- like a pneumatic tube that can serve as a conduit from my mind to yours, or a box that I can place something in and then hand to you -- which makes it easier to talk about those abstractions.  Happens all the time.  Nothing inherently wrong with using a metaphor to help you communicate.

I won't rehash what Philip Eubanks has said well about the pros and cons of the conduit metaphor (you can read it for yourself if you're lucky enough to have access to College Composition and Communication vol. 53 no. 1), and I'll only touch on what Darsie Bowden wrote many years ago (1993) about the container metaphor here (CCC vol. 44 no. 3).  Essentially, Bowden says that while the container metaphor makes sense, according to metaphor theory, and while it can be useful, if we use it without maintaining a critical awareness of its limitations, we might be eliding some important aspects of communication.  In short, we end up thinking that communication is just a thing in a box, and we risk thinking that the value of the communication is in the fact of its existence, not in the actual ideas being communicated or the means by which they are communicated. 

I'll quote her extensively here in a moment, but first, think about your Twitter feed, especially if you don't use lists to help separate the wheat (the accounts that provide links to original, useful, timely information) from the chaff (accounts that post rehashed retweets of marginally interesting posts that are really just there for the sake of posting and, perhaps, catching one more person's attention, getting one more retweet, or gaining some sort of attention of questionable significance and value).  "Content" there can really be a massive waste of time, space, and energy, content for the sake of content, not communication.

Here's a quote from Bowden's article:

When students are encouraged to "pour" what is in their heads onto paper, they are being encouraged to view not only the text as a container but the mind as well.  More importantly, they are being asked to subscribe to a view of knowledge that enables its transfer from one container to another (from mind to text).  Within the container schema, knowledge becomes a commodity that can be transferred from mind to paper.  Once transferred and "contained," knowledge then acquires a character of locatability, which enables it to exist-conceptually, at least-both within the mind and within a paper.  Knowledge becomes static and decontextualized.  It can exist within a paper or inside a person's head and have little or nothing to do with the social and historical world outside.

In other words, "content" can quickly become devoid of value.  How many tweets have you seen that have been retweeted from six degrees of separation from the original post, and the article linked was published five years ago and is only of marginal relevance?  That's what Bowden refers to here.

If Not "Content," What?

A modest proposal: Instead of "content," let's start getting specific.  I don't say that I'm a "content-generator."  I say I'm a writer and editor.  My friends who are "content managers" are, more accurately, brand managers who specialize in communicating in a variety of media, through language and graphics, to many different audiences.  My sub-contractors who write "content" are, in fact, writing articles, blog posts, resumes, cover letters, websites, etc.

And here's why getting specific is important: When we get specific about what we do, it's easier to command respect for it.  I'm not just generating content that can be put into a box and shipped off to wherever.  I'm not FedEx, and neither are the many documents that I write and edit.  What I do takes expertise and specialization, even if it's writing clickbait (try writing a clickbait article yourself and see how difficult it is; it's far easier for someone with training in rhetoric and genre theory, I promise you).  What my sub-contractors do takes flair, creativity, and time.  My friends who work in graphic design and video production don't just make content that's easily consumed and passed by (through?); they're working with art that affects some of the most deeply-recessed parts of our human cognitive processing of communication and emotion that we have trouble describing what their work does to us.

Getting specific about what we're doing when we're "generating content" may help us start thinking about what exactly is valuable about the communication that we're generating and sharing.  If I say that I'm writing a blog post, that triggers the concept of "blog post" in the mind of whoever I'm talking to; suddenly, standards and expectations are part of the mix.  "Content," however, is so vague that it's functionally devoid of standards and expectations.  It simply is whatever I say it is.  There's freedom in that, but there's also an easy way to side-step having to meet, let alone confront or raise or change, expectations.  If we start getting specific -- saying "I create customer-testimonial videos and other graphics for online marketing campaigns" instead of "I create content for online marketing campaigns" -- we might encourage ourselves to be sure that what we're creating is worth its description.  It's a bridge too far, perhaps, for me to say "And this might lead to fewer phatic retweets of ancient articles that contribute nothing new or original to any worthwhile conversation," but a girl can hope, right?

Regardless, increased specificity is rarely harmful.  For the next week or so, if you find yourself saying "content," stop and ask yourself what you mean by that word.  Try substituting in something more specific.  It will be hard at first and will take more time and words.  But it might be worth it, especially if you're describing your own work.

But it does make me sad that I'm not still in the classroom teaching students my awesome method for remembering when and why, more or less, to use a comma before "which" and when to use "which" rather than "that" in the first place.  So I've decided to share my method here instead!  I hope that all you undergraduate writers and writing teachers will find it useful.  Remember: sharing is caring!

Don't Trust Your Gut

The conversation usually began like this: I'd ask my students how they know they should use "that" instead of "which."  More often than not, they would have no concrete idea of why; they just used their intuition, if they were native speakers, and while trusting your gut may have been good enough for Stephen Colbert, it's not sufficient for command of the rules/common standards of US English. 

Here's one of my favorite examples to use in class:

This spacesuit, which I wore yesterday, was made in 1965.  It is kept in the museum that I told you about last night.

For not-entirely-arbitrary reasons, in US English "which" is a non-restrictive relative pronoun in contexts like these, and "that" is a restrictive relative pronoun (as opposed to being a demonstrative, as in "Look at that spacesuit," but I digress).  Accepting that seemingly-but-trust-me-not-totally-arbitrary rule is step one.*

What Makes "Restrictive" Restrictive?

What, after all, is being restricted?  In short: the meaning of the word that the pronoun stands for.  In the first sentence, when we start the second clause, after the comma, we need to re-establish the grammatical subject, and it sounds clunky to say "This is the spacesuit, the spacesuit I wore yesterday," so we use a pronoun to cut down on the wordiness (and yeah, you could remove "which" and "that" altogether from these sentences, but you're just eliding the re-establishment of the grammatical subject if you do so, and I'm trying to explain the grammar to you, so play along with me here).  In the case of the first sentence, the use of "which" should indicate that the additional information about the object being described--the spacesuit--is information that is not necessary for identifying the object.  That is, the fact that I wore the spacesuit yesterday does not restrict the meaning of "spacesuit" in this sentence to the object being described; it is merely a further detail, not a detail that distinguishes this spacesuit from any other.  The restricting/defining information in that sentence is probably (depending on context) the fact that it was made in 1965.

Now, what about that second sentence?  Well, the fact that I've used "that" should indicate that the additional description of the object being described--the museum--distinguishes or restricts the meaning.  Without that additional information--namely, the fact that I told you about the object (in this case, the museum) last night--you could be confused about which museum I'm referring to.  The fact that I had to add extra information to restrict or specify the meaning of "museum" means that I need to use the restrictive relative pronoun "that."  If I'd used "which" in the second sentence, it would suggest that we both already knew which museum we were talking about, and the fact that I told you about it last night would have been already-assumed or non-restrictive information.

These are just some basic examples.  Distinguishing restrictive from non-restrictive can get pretty tricky.  For example, restrictiveness can also be a property of other types of appositive phrases that aren't headed up by a relative pronoun, but that's a bridge to cross on another day and in another post...

If You Have to Trust Your Gut, Follow This Rule

What I used to tell my students was that if they could understand when to use "which" and when to use "that," they'd have better control of the language.  But, since the restrictive/non-restrictive principle gets tricky, I also gave them what I called the back-door rule.  If they couldn't figure it out but had a pretty good feeling in their guts that they should use "that" or "which" in any given case, they could remember to use commas before "which" using this simple rule, which (hey, hey!) I drew on the board:

This worked particularly well for the science-minded in the class.  It's a basic chiasmus, or crossing of opposites to achieve balance.  If you think of non-restrictive and no comma as being "negative" and their opposites--the use of a comma and the use of restriction--as being "positive," then you can easily remember that the positive always goes with the negative.  Restrictive "that" should have a negative--no comma.  And the negative non-restrictive "which" should always include or add a comma.  You might be relying on your gut to tell you whether to use "which" or "that," but at least your punctuation will be right, and most instructors grading papers (whether they're teaching history, physics, or English) who get bent out of shape about such things only care about whether the punctuation is correct because, frankly, they couldn't distinguish restrictive from non-restrictive if their lives depended on it.

So there you have it!  Here's hoping my neat little diagram is helpful!

*One important note: the rules about using "that" or "which" exclusively as restrictive or non-restrictive relative pronouns, respectively, don't apply so uniformly in UK English.  They're a bit more liberal with "which" as a restrictive relative pronoun out there!

But what happens when it doesn't work that way?  What happens when pile of blocks at the bottom of the screen looks like a jumbled mess? 

A jumbled mess is what an impossible sentence feels like.  There are words there, yes, but they don't make sense, or they've been used to make all the sense all at once, or their sense is ambiguous at best.  Trying to straighten them out just seems to make them harder to deal with. 

So You Think You've Got an Impossible Sentence.  How Do You Fix It?

In an ideal scenario, I can talk or write to the author of the impossible sentence in question.  I'll read the sentence aloud or have the author read the sentence aloud, and then I'll say something like: "So, I wasn't sure of what you meant in that sentence" or "There was a lot going on in that sentence."  And the clincher: "Forget the writing.  Step outside the paper for a moment.  Don't think about the imaginary audience you're trying to impress or convince.  Just between you and me, what are you really trying to say in this sentence?  What is it that you're trying to get it to do?"

I get one of two types of responses to that question:

Type 1: The long explanation about whatever is being asserted in the impossible sentence. Sometimes it takes my student or client two, four, six, or more sentences to explain what he or she was really trying to say.  My response to that is straightforward: "How many sentences did it take you to explain that to me?"  Wait for response.  "And you're trying to fit all that into one sentence?  Try writing all that out, just like you said it.  Then determine whether it's so long and detailed that it needs to be its own paragraph.  You can polish up the language later, after you get the ideas clarified."

Type 2: The brief explanation about whatever is being asserted, plus a long explanation about why it was necessary to put that idea in that particular place in the paper.  This is the more-likely response for writers who have an impossible sentence that repeats an idea that's stated elsewhere in the paper (i.e., that's repetitious).  Depending on the circumstances, I would suggest that the author use multiple sentences to explain the idea and how it connects to other ideas in the paper (see Type 1, above), or I'd recommend leaving out whatever has been unnecessarily repeated.

Possibly Making Sense from an Impossible Sentence

Here's an example from a recent paper I edited (the words have been changed to protect the innocent, but the parts of speech and punctuation in this sentence are the same):

The artwork is a golden arch with an obvious curve, the work different from Freud’s principle of impulse control but it can rapidly abstract viewer’s gaze.

That's a whopper.  In this case, I didn't have access to the writer to ask "What are you really trying to say here?" about the sentence.  So I had to employ the Tetris strategy: What are the main blocks of this sentence?  How do they make sense independently?  How can I rearrange and reshape them so that they achieve a pragmatic and semantic purpose?

I identified the following blocks: the artwork, the golden arch, the golden arch's curve, the principle of impulse control, the viewer's gaze, and the rapid [something] of the viewer's gaze.

Already, I can see that I don't understand the vocabulary choice for "abstract," which is like being able to see the left-hand side of a straight-line piece in Tetris without being able to see its right-hand side (is it an L-shaped piece, or is it just straight?).  Here's how I rearranged the sentence to give it some clearer meaning:

The artwork is a golden arch with an obvious curve.  Its appeal is not based on Freud’s principle of impulse control, despite the fact that the artwork immediately draws the viewer’s gaze to the work’s abstract features.

I made sure to append a note to that change asking the author to ensure that the edit preserved the intended meaning.

In short, if you're looking for a quick fix to a sentence that's hard to read or doesn't make sense, set back and ask "What are you really trying to say here?"  If the answer takes more than one brief sentence, consider breaking your impossible sentence into smaller bits.  If it requires lots of apologia about trying to connect the dots to other ideas in the paper, try simplifying your points and eliminating redundancies. 

If all else fails, you can always ask your friendly neighborhood copyeditor to take a look and provide some solutions!

Before I get too wound up, let me clarify: Today's lesson is especially geared to less-experienced writers, especially high-school and college-level writers, in addition to new teachers of English who're struggling to articulate why they feel queasy when they see a sentence that begins with "Also."  Even if you don't fall into one of these categories, keep reading, because I explain a principle about transitions that's helpful for everyone.

What's the problem with also?

There's nothing inherently wrong with the word also.  I'm not here to argue that it should never be used, that it's best to avoid it, or any of the other typical, universalizing, overly-generalized dicta that other writing gurus are in the habit of nailing to doorposts.  Despite my opening "jihad" metaphor, what I really want is not for us to abolish the word also but to understand that it is a top contender for Weakest and Therefore Most Useless Transition Word and should probably be avoided on those grounds.

What's the difference between transition also and other uses of also?

First, let's clarify that also, as a part of speech, is an adverb, so it's got lots of uses, functionally (rather than grammatically) speaking. 

Here's an example of also put to good use:

There are three good paths for walking to the store, but there are also two good paths for biking there.

In this case, "also" modifies the coordinating conjunction, indicating not a contradiction but an addition that is different.  "And" could replace "but," but the use of "but" carries with it a functional emphasis on contradiction, and "also" manages to squeeze in some of the additive sense that "and" would have added.

Now, here's an example what I'm calling transition also:

There are many reasons to adopt this policy.  Also, several experts have called for similar policy measures to be taken.

What the writer is trying to do here is tie the first sentence to the next one.  Sometimes, I see "also" used like this but with a semicolon instead of a period used between the two sentences/independent clauses.  Doesn't matter; the problem is still the same: the transition here is weak and vague.

I used to tell my students that also could be used to tie together any two sentences and make it seem as if there's a transition there without there actually being any there there (so to speak).  My favorite example of this was:

I went to the store today.  Also, the house caught on fire.

Huh?  What's the relationship of these two ideas?

See, that's the principle of transitions: they should always clarify what you think the relationship of Idea A is to Idea B.  If your transition misses the mark either by being vague or inaccurate, you're not doing your readers any favors.  You're suggesting that the path from Idea A is up some stairs and around the corner when in fact the way to Idea B requires crossing a highway and walking six blocks.  There's a slight difference between "and" and "but also" and a much bigger difference between "therefore" and "however."  It's up to you to help your readers know where they're going in your writing.

Still not sure how also is vague?  Try substituting another more-specific transition word in its place.  The results reveal just how comically vague also is:

I went to the store today.  Therefore, the house caught on fire.

I went to the store today.  However, the house caught on fire.

I went to the store today.  Alternatively, the house caught on fire.

I went to the store today.  Consequently, the house caught on fire.

How can you remediate transition also?

I see transition also all the time in my EFL students' and clients' writing.  Whenever I see it, I ask the writer, "What's the relationship between Idea A and Idea B?  Why did you put this sentence [or phrase] after the first one?"  In the case of my favorite example, it's hard to explain how going to the store is related to the house catching on fire.  If there's no way to explain it, I'd tell the writer to reconsider organization: Maybe one of the sentences needs to find a more appropriate place in the paper.  If the writer can articulate the reason, then I suggest that we make that reason clearer.  Chronology seems to be the most likely reason for putting Idea A (about going to the store) next to Idea B (the house catching on fire), in my example, so I might suggest using "Subsequently" as an alternative to "Also."

So, the next time you find yourself writing "also," especially at the beginning of a sentence, stop to wonder whether you're using it as the glue that ties ideas together (not just in a list or in phrases like "and also" or "but also").  If you are, ask yourself whether there's a more-specific term you could use to express that relationship.  Your readers will thank you.

Why the change?  Most of my returning clients know that 2016 was a very difficult year for me: illnesses, an unexpected relocation, and an unexpected death.  In the wake of having my reset-button hit, I decided that LSE needed a fresh start and a change of focus, too.

What's changing?  When I started LSE, I knew that I could rely on my experience and expertise in rhetoric and composition to meet almost any editorial need, and I knew quite a few fellow freelancers, graphic designers, speech-writers, and writers who would be excellent partners in developing more-involved projects or projects outside my areas of expertise.  But I've decided to shift the business's focus to the areas of editing and writing that I care about most: working on professional documents with small- and mid-sized companies (mostly in finance and other for-profit areas), working with academics (primarily for journal articles), and writing education.

What about that "education" part of the change?  It was always my intention with LSE to give away my knowledge about writing, editing, linguistics, and the discipline of rhetoric and composition.  That's why the Oratoria exists!

LSE is still here to help make writing joyful for you.  No matter what kind of writing and editing project you have, no matter what sector or what discipline, you can always reach out to LSE to get advice.  We’re open for consultations. Even if LSE isn't the right place to get affordable help with your project, chances are that we can put you in touch with another service that can help you, and as the LSE founder, I’m always happy to give you my honest, professional opinion about your project.

Want to know how LSE can help you with that writing project you've been putting off?  Eager to get a project off the ground in the new year?  Contact us today!

LSE: What’s the title of your book, and when did you first decide to write it?
Mbuba: Policing in Eastern Africa: A Focus on the National Police Service in Kenya.  The project is the culmination of my sabbatical research. I sought to fill a void in comparative and international policing, as there were no comprehensive academic reference materials on policing in Kenya.

LSE: Where is the book currently in the publication process?
Mbuba: The book is currently under consideration for publication. What remains are a few photos to be added and any feedback from the potential publisher.

LSE: What are your hopes for the finished book?  Whom do you hope to reach, and what effect do you hope this book will have on them?
Mbuba: I hope to have the book adopted for teaching in higher education institutions in Kenya and the larger region of Eastern Africa and to have it used as a reference by scholars of comparative and international law enforcement. The effect of this work will be to provide students with a baseline text about policing and to make available comprehensive data for use by scholars.

LSE: You’d mentioned during the editing process that you enjoyed reviewing the first pass of the edits and proofreading markups.  What was it that you found enjoyable?
Mbuba: It was absolutely enjoyable to learn from my own grammatical errors and to see the various effective ways of communicating an idea.

LSE: How did the proofreading/editorial process help improve your manuscript and, perhaps, benefit you as a writer?
Mbuba: The editorial process improved the quality of my work significantly. It evened out awkward sentence turns, put emphasis where it was necessary, introduced active tone where it unnecessarily was passive, changed the focus to the right subjects in sentences, removed ambiguities, introduced clarity as necessary, and provided proper punctuation. Reading through these edits certainly benefited me, as it gave me quite a few insights about how to improve my writing.

LSE: Was LSE fair and accommodating regarding the price and payment arrangements?
Mbuba: The price and payment arrangement were very fair. I couldn’t ask for more.

LSE: What advice would you give to other academic and book-writers who are writing non-fiction books, both about writing their books and about working with a professional copyeditor?
Mbuba: Every writer needs a professional copyeditor. Novices can improve the quality of their work, and experts benefit from a second opinion.

Many of my clients know that my father died unexpectedly this summer. My family misses him terribly, and I'm eternally grateful for the patience that so many of my clients extended to me as I attended to family concerns.

Before my father's death, I'd been working on a few new Oratoria ideas, and I am planning a sort of re-launch of LSE in the coming months. I'm planning two major shifts, one to the Oratoria (which will hopefully provide more free practical advice for writers, in the spirit of St. Philip Neri) and the other to the focus of our services (we're narrowing our client base, so a shift in services will follow so that we can keep our workflow schedule reasonable).

In the meantime, the Oratoria will be back with updates, and we're still offering our full schedule of services. It's been a busy summer, so if you've been thinking about asking for a quote, now's the time!

Thanks, and I hope many blessings for each of you.

Everyone thinks he or she is a terrible writer.  He or she is (usually) wrong.  What's happened is probably some combination of the following:

1. Having been the student of untrained teachers of writing (e.g., people who think they know The Rules and that Good Writing = Rule-Based Writing).  Let's say your English, history, or psychology professor gives you an assignment with a large writing component, but writing wasn't the main point of the assignment (maybe it was instead to explicate a play, to discuss the significance of Ceasar's crossing of the Rubicon, or to write a meta-analysis of common depression treatments).  If you lose a letter grade or more on that assignment any academic work that isn't intended to test and evaluate your use of grammar, usage, punctuation, and other rules and customs pertaining to writing, then your writing teacher is untrained according to contemporary composition-studies best practices.  He or she is likely to make you think that you're a "bad writer" because you didn't follow his or her idea of what counts as "good writing."  It's a common problem.
2. Having worked or lived with what I sometimes think of as "false prophets": people who claim to have The Answers about what counts as "good writing," but unfortunately these folks haven't realized that G-d has yet to hand down the tablets of writing standards.  Beware the false prophets: they live among you.  You can usually tell them by their opinions, which are loud and voluminous.

So, what was my advice to my prospective client?  That's easy!  Just about anyone can do any one of these things in any proportion and see some improvement:

1. Buy a college-level writing handbook (you know, the one you sold back to your bookstore but should have kept around as a handy resource).  Get one with exercises.  I recommend The Everyday Writer by Andrea Lunsford.  You can get older editions used for pocket change.  Read a chapter a week (no, really; read the full text of the chapters, not just the examples and such).  Do the exercises (the answers will be in the back).  Then set it aside for a few months or even a year and do it again.  It's even better if you're doing this with someone else, because your responses to the writing and style (as opposed to the grammar and punctuation) exercises will be different in interesting ways.
2. Read a book about style written by a professional fiction or non-fiction writer.  The one that changed my life was William Zinsser's On Writing Well, but there are many good ones, including one by the same title written by Stephen King.
3. Write privately every day or so.  Start a private blog.  Keep a journal.  You'll want to practice your newfound skills in a risk-free environment.
4. Optional, for the truly serious: hire a writing tutor (I can help you with that) and ask that person to review your writing and give you feedback.  Just be sure that person is doing more than just making corrections for you.  That person should be pointing out problems and progress; the problems should be there for you to fix and improve upon, not opportunities for the tutor to become your copyeditor and fix herself.

Anyone can improve his or her writing.  It's important to remember that there is no ultimate standard for what counts as good writing, and even the best writers can continue to improve and learn about writing and language.  Kudos to you if you're thinking about improving your writing skills!  If there's anything I can do to help, don't hesitate to contact me.

Full disclosure: my dissertation is about a cognitive-rhetorical approach to understanding literature.  Rhetoric isn't always an easy fit with art, so in order to make the case that the two really have something to offer each other, I had to provide a definition of art, specifically literary art.  That was chapter 1 of the dissertation.  Maybe I'll lay out that argument in the Oratoria someday, but that day ain't today!

So I've spent lots of quality time considering academic arguments about what constitutes capital-A Art and capital-L Literature.  I'm still perplexed whenever I come across literary critics who breezily make aesthetic claims as if they're based on premises so foundational as to be universal.  Examples abound, but you need only find one of the book reviews in The New Yorker for a fistful of examples.

But today I came across a new post on the Lingua Franca blog at The Chronicle of Higher Education's website, titled "An Exercise in Bad Writing."  TL;DR: the author explains an exercise used in a creative writing class in which students are asked to take a short story and write it so that, essentially, the story is told, not shown.  Alternatively, students are asked to take a short story and rewrite it so that it's a bad news story. 

The genre-switching there could provide students with some real challenges, in a good way, but it requires two jumps: first, students need to be able to discover and articulate what convention dictates constitutes "good" writing in both short stories and in news articles/broadcasts; second, students need to be able to deviate from those conventions purposefully and explain the writerly choices they made.  If they can do that, then their writing-fu is truly strong.  I used to ask students in a freshman first-year writing course to do something like this exercise, and they did so to varying degrees of success.  Advanced Composition students usually had better luck with the theory and execution of that kind of prompt.  But I digress.

What the author of the post in Lingua Franca doesn't explain is why front-loading a story with details constitutes "bad" writing.  This excerpt begins with what the post's author thinks is an example of bad writing:

And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city. The path that drops down from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and crosses Morningside Park is only fifteen minutes from Central Park …

[Teju] Cole said, “To me, the wrong way to begin it, knowing what the book is about, would be: ‘As a Nigerian-German psychiatrist, living in New York City in my mid-thirties, I found myself quite melancholic to be in the shadow of the Twin Towers five years after they went down. In order to sort through my feelings both about the historic past of the city of New York and my own unsorted neuroses regarding my mother and my grandmother and my dead father I decided to wander around the city.’”

But a first paragraph like that sounds like something some of my favorite writers -- Saul Bellow, John Updike, China Mieville -- might start a book with.  How can I know that what I'm looking at is "bad"?

Perhaps -- and this is my modest proposal -- it's more important to ask students to think about how to define "good" or "art" or "literature" before asking them to start thinking about "bad" writing versus "good" writing.  If we did that, though, I'd probably be out of a job, as would a few psychologists, because we torture students when we lead them to believe that there's an objective standard of excellence in literary art that transcends definition or foundation.  They end up thinking "I'll never be a good writer" because they don't know what "good" means, and yet the implication is that there is a "good" that all "good" writers have an ear for.  That's not the case.

At the same time, we need to be able to evaluate literature.  Let's be clear: I'm not saying that all writing is born equal.  What I am saying, though, is that we have to have nuance -- that long-dead virtue -- when discussing the quality and trajectory of literature or any writing.  Sometimes, my clients want to know whether their manuscripts are "good," and I often tell them that that's not the right question.  The better questions are ones like, "Will it be easy to market this book to its intended audience?", "What is the likelihood that a publisher will be interested in picking this up?", "Does this article achieve my stated purpose?", and "What do you think would improve this manuscript?"  The answer to each of those questions entails some discussion of the quality of the story, information, research, etc., contained in the work, but it requires that I define "goodness" in terms of other objectives rather than on my secret-handshake knowledge of what the literati and I think counts as "good."  When I write for clients, I write for them, not for literary critics, literary agents, editors, or publishers whom I've never met.  I can only do so much to encourage a writer I'm working with to go in a certain direction.  At the end of the day, if a client tells me that she likes what I've written for her, I'm obligated to keep writing in that manner and style until she tells me (in detail) how else I should write for her.  "Good" only matters in that case if I think that what I'm writing will be in no way useful to the writer (e.g., she's contracted with me to write a website for her accounting business, but she wants the copy to be written as a poem; even in that case, I need to give her what she's asked for while carefully suggesting that this approach is highly unusual and may not be effective), but it's not something that's universal or even definable outside of a specific context with very clearly articulated terms.

So, it's not necessarily that writing can't be described as "good" or "bad."  The point here is that anytime you hear writing described that way, stop to ask yourself whether the person making that evaluation has made clear on what basis that evaluation has been made and whether you accept that person's premise.  Make sure you're also asking yourself why the question is "Is this good?" and if another question might be more relevant or useful.

It's never ok to embellish your resume.

Many months ago, a potential client contacted me about a resume update.  This person was between jobs and career fields, so a couple different resumes would be on order, and because I could write a resume in my sleep, it would have been an easy way for me to pay the rent.

Because there were so many potential changes needed to this person's existing resumes, I offered to do a prospectus of sorts before being officially hired.  Which was a mistake.  No one should work for free, but I thought it seemed like pretty straightforward changes were needed, and I didn't mind explaining what I planned to do.  I might have wanted the same thing, were I in this person's position.

I should have suspected from the beginning that things weren't quite right with the resume.  The client (or, actually, potential client) wanted to know if it was ok to list a job title that was slightly different than the job title given to them (NB: I'm using the plural pronoun here to avoid identifying the gender of the client) by the employer.  After all, they told me, they'd actually done more than the job title implied.

In other words, the client wanted to lie on their resume.  No two ways about it: something like that is a straight-up lie, in this genre.

There were a few other trouble spots: the client was terminated from a job because of a falling out with an employer.  Ok, but it's not alright to suggest that the job did or didn't last longer than it actually did to suggest that the falling out happened sooner or later.  It's also not okay to say that you had responsibilities on the job that your former employer wouldn't corroborate should your prospective employer call to inquire about them.  None of these things are okay.

So, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when the prospective client said to me, "I'm going to have someone in my field edit my resume.  I disagreed with what you had to say about it."  At first, I was disappointed and a little hurt.  But then I remembered that I'd done the right thing.  It's not okay to lie on your resumes, friends, and it's doubly not-ok to ask a professional writer to lie on your resume for you. 

In the end, I hope that person heard from other people, too, that it's not okay to fudge the details of a resume.  Not only is it dishonest, it puts you at risk.  In other words, you can take the altruistic angle, or you can take the pragmatic angle; both lead you back to the conclusion that it's just not okay to embellish your resume.

You've been warned!