But it’s also a lot to live up to. For many would-be writers, Strunk and White can be downright intimidating. And that’s not a good thing.

Strunk doesn’t help things by using his signature voice, which even I find forbidding. Have you ever checked out his rant against the word “hopefully,” for example? Nine times out of ten, idiomatic American English speakers use “hopefully” to mean roughly “I hope,” as in “Hopefully, I’ll finish this report today.”

Strunk sneers at this usage. “Hopefully” is an adverb that means “in a hopeful manner,” as in “The dog looked hopefully at the table scraps.”

Of course, Strunk’s own castigation of misusers of hopefully is a little, ah, less charitable, and it exemplifies the voice problem that I describe above:

This once-useful adverb meaning “with hope has been distorted and is now widely used to mean “I hope” or “it is to be hoped.” Such use is not merely wrong, it is silly. To say, “Hopefully, I’ll leave on the noon plane” is to talk nonsense. Do you mean you’ll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind? Or do you mean you hope you’ll leave on the noon plane? Whichever you mean, you haven’t said it clearly. Although the word in its new, free-floating capacity may be pleasurable and even useful to many, it offends the ear of many others, who do not like to see words dulled or eroded, particularly when the erosion leads to ambiguity, softness, or nonsense. (William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style. Fourth ed. New York: Longman, 2000. 48)

Ouch. Just listen to that accusatory “you” in the passage. Let me clarify that it’s not a matter of whether Strunk is right. He is. My objection is to the tone. The message implicit in The Elements of Style is that writing well is a hopelessly complex endeavor, fraught with pitfalls and rife with opportunities to make yourself look like a fool.

We all know that writing is hard work. But you’re looking to a style guide for help, not contempt. This holier-than-thou attitude is why I see so many creative, bright people who say they can’t write because they don’t know what a comma splice is.

If only there were a more friendly style guide that also focuses on making thoughtful choices as a writer. Turns out there is. It’s my pleasure to introduce you to John R Trimble and his book Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing.

Trimble provides sound advice, and his book is a pleasure to read. His opening section, “Fundamentals,” focuses on large-scale issues like structure and readability. He attacks the purveyors of the “religion of Formal English” in a thought-provoking chapter entitled “Superstitions.” And of course, he includes a lot of specific guidance on matters of style, usage, and punctuation.

What do you think are the most important qualities to have in a writing style guide? Let me know in the comments.

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Those of you who haven’t introduced yourselves, please join our intrepid band of writers today! All you have to do is introduce yourself and set some writing-related goals for the next month. So far, I have been amazed at how well public accountability works to shore up weakening motivation or to stave off that little procrastinating voice.

I am fairly happy with my progress: I have drafted my article. (I should note that I did use the weekend of May 2 and 3 to finish up.) It has since been marinating: I have taken a week or so away from it in order to get perspective. Now, I have to go back and see whether it’s any good. Gulp.

I have at least two other versions of this project floating around. One I completed several years ago for a graduate seminar, and the other is my first attempt at a rewrite. I am going to mine these drafts for useful bits, but I don’t think they’ll be very helpful at this stage. Even though they deal with the same topic, neither has the argumentative goal that my current draft has.

I don’t regard these two failed attempts as wasted work at all, by the way. Sometimes you can’t see a project clearly without going down a couple of promising paths that end up in dead ends. They help clarify where you need to go. Who knows, though: maybe I’ll find a usable sub-point. That’d be like finding ten dollars in an old jacket pocket. I don’t expect it, but you never know.

Over the next two weeks, I’ll devote some time to revision of this article. Revision is in many ways the real work of writing. In order to maximize my time, I am not going to look for large blocks of time to devote to it: it’s just not realistic at the end of the semester. Instead, I will employ my old dissertation-writing strategy: write a little bit at a designated time every day.

Actually, I will employ a scaled-down version of my dissertation-writing strategy: I will revise a little bit at a designated time four days a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday). While every day would be best, this will be okay for what I need to do. I need to keep a portion of my mind working on the tasks of revision even while I’m shopping for groceries or going for a walk. This simply doesn’t happen if you only work on weekends (or less often). I need to get this draft’s problems straightened out pronto, so I need my brain working overtime.

Even though revision is so important, it’s possible to spend too much time revising, so that
revision itself becomes some sort of twisted procrastination mechanism. What I have to remind myself is that it’s never going to be ready. There’s always going to be more I could do. But a) I have to draw the article’s boundaries somewhere, and b) I need feedback from other scholars to keep my revisions moving toward a goal.

Thus, after two weeks of revision, I’ll send the article out to the journal I have chosen and move on to another project. After a couple of months (if the journal’s estimate is correct), I’ll have some feedback from peer reviewers. Best case scenario, the journal accepts the article. But even if it doesn’t, I’ll get some feedback.

So, there you have it. My goal for May. I look forward to hearing from each of you: what do you have going on in terms of writing, and how can you move those projects forward? Come set some goals with us.

If you like what you read, I hope you’ll become a regular reader by subscribing to Writing Power’s RSS feed. In addition, please consider sharing your favorite posts through sites like digg, StumbleUpon, or del.icio.us using the “Share This” link below. Thank you for your support!

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I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you should seriously consider taking that thing out behind the shed and putting it down. Yep, I’m talking about deletion.

I will never forget the day that I got this advice. I felt as though I had been slapped. What?! Why would I want to cut it? It’s the best writing in the whole piece! This guy obviously just doesn’t get it. Apparently, he can’t recognize good – no, great – writing when he sees it. It must be over his head. It’s just so clever.

Considering that my reader – the guy who “didn’t get it” – was a distinguished professor of English at a top research university and I was a first year PhD student, I am glad I didn’t say any of those things out loud. But I was stunned.

He then shared a line that has stayed with me ever since. When it comes to writing, he said, “Murder your darlings.”

The thinking behind this rather acerbic advice is that cutesy writing – otherwise known as your piece’s devastating cleverness – rarely comes across with all of the wit and force that the writer is enjoying from it.

It’s a particular form of writer-centered thinking that seduces us all at one time or another. Writing over-the-top prose can be fun, and it’s fine to get caught up in that pleasure while drafting. I’ve certainly been known to do it. After all, the anecdote I started this post with is a true story.

But when you revise, you must shift your focus to serving the reader. Try to remember that the reader is honoring you by reading your work; he or she owes you nothing other than that. As the writer, you must try to anticipate the reader’s needs and questions. More than that, you must make the reader feel comfortable and validated. The success of your purpose, whether informative, persuasive, or entertaining, depends on it.

Cutesy writing tends to drive a wedge between you and the reader. Instead of establishing a bond with the reader, ultra-clever language leaves the reader feeling left out of the joke (even if the reader gets the joke). It’s hard to feel a bond with someone who is smirking at you.

Humility trumps cleverness every time.

If you like what you read, I hope you’ll become a regular reader by subscribing to Writing Power’s RSS feed. In addition, please consider sharing your favorite posts through sites like digg, StumbleUpon, or del.icio.us using the “Share This” link below. Thank you for your support!

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The so what question distinguishes the outstanding papers from the competent ones. The so what question, as its name implies, simply looks at the interpretive claim you’re making and asks, “So what?”

Three other ways to phrase the so what question are as follows: What is significant about your claim? How does this enrich my understanding? What are the implications of your claim? In each case, the reader is asking the writer to look beyond his or her own navel and connect the paper’s idea to a larger conversation in which both the writer and the reader are stakeholders.

When you’re in an academic writing situation, it’s easy to think of your job in terms of completing assigned work (or, to put it more bluntly, earning a grade). And of course you are doing that. But paper assignments ask you to think of your writing as a scholarly endeavor, a chance to share your interpretation of (in this case) a literary text with your peers and to persuade them of your claim’s validity. The most compelling interpretations are the ones in which the reader feels that the writer’s claim is significant, that it matters. The so what question asks you to explore your claim’s larger stakes in the hopes of uncovering significance.

As I was contemplating the importance of the so what question, I realized that the so what question itself had broader implications. Imagining your reader looking at your writing and asking “So what?” can be beneficial in myriad writing situations.

For example, at work, asking the so what question can help you focus on your document’s importance to its stakeholders, whether colleagues, supervisors, or clients. It could also help you streamline emails, focusing on the message’s importance to the recipient.

Even the creative writing world could benefit from a healthy dose of “So what?” Asking the so what question could keep you focused on a complex scene’s driving force and prevent it from getting lost in extraneous details or vague dialogue. Bloggers can also focus on a post’s relevance to readers.

Considering the larger stakes of the way in which we spend and allocate our resources – including our time – could potentially be the best way to use the so what question. Demanding significance from our daily lives (thinking, for example, I’m watching Battlestar Galactica right now, but does this expenditure of time have a solid “so what?”) could revolutionize our sense of living consciously.

The so what question is powerful. I’ll warn you, though, that the so what question is often difficult to answer. Larger, what-does-it-all-mean questions often are. In fact, the modifier I hear most often applied to the so what question is “dreaded,” as in The Dreaded “So What” Question. (Cue the dramatic music.) But, as I encourage my students, we can do hard things. And the hard-won answers, when they come, are sometimes the most significant of all.

If you like what you read, I hope you’ll become a regular reader by subscribing to Writing Power’s RSS feed. In addition, please consider sharing your favorite posts through sites like digg, StumbleUpon, or del.icio.us using the “Share This” link below. Thank you for your support!

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So here goes. I have met my goal, but that’s not saying much. My goal’s phrasing was way too vague to be helpful: it was “refine my argument.” I will update you on my progress, set a new, more focused goal, and announce some other changes I’ll be making in order to make this goal more of a priority.

As you may remember, I’ve been working on a scholarly article on seventeenth-century English poet John Donne. I have an academic journal in mind, and I have reviewed some of their recent issues to get a sense of the kind of work being published by that venue.

One of the challenges of this article is that I’m applying a particular theological concept to one of Donne’s devotional poems. As you know, I am a literary scholar, not a theologian. Literary studies as an academic discipline regularly pulls theories from other disciplines to inform our readings of literary texts. However, it can be daunting to try to understand another discipline well enough to use a certain theory appropriately.

If you don’t do enough research, you risk misusing your material and constructing a flawed argument. On the other hand, it’s easy to sink months into reading, reading, reading background material until your mind is so filled with other people’s ideas that your own project becomes more conceptually remote than when you had the initial idea. In a strange way, too much research can be an academic’s way of procrastinating.

So, I have boned up on some of the theological material that I didn’t feel comfortable with, and I have copies to refer to and citations to find more detailed information. In short, it’s time to draft. As drafting goes, I’m a potter, so I’ll probably write three times as much text as I’ll need for the final article (which will be 20-25 pages). I draft to discover: it’s just the way I work. So what’s my goal for April?

My goal for April is to write a complete draft of the paper (20 pages). I think getting the piece out to the journal before summer comes is a good idea: academic journal editors typically send submissions out to academics to read the piece and give their opinion as to whether the journal should publish it. Academics have a habit of using their summers to complete research, which means many of them are holed up in libraries for weeks at a time and not checking their office mail. This means that if you want a reasonable turnaround time for your submission, get it to people before they scatter in June.

Of course, academic journal policies vary from journal to journal and discipline to discipline. However, I do think this is a reasonable assumption for me to make based on my experience with academic publishing in English. In addition, thinking of it this way provides a sense of urgency that will encourage me to devote time to this project now rather than later.

The challenge I will have to overcome is finding blocks of time in which to write. This is not a project to complete in 30 minute segments. I will be looking for blocks of 6 to 8 hours. If I find and use two such blocks, I should be able to complete this goal.

This leads me to my announcement: I will be slowing down my posting frequency at Writing Power. I will post about three times per week instead of my customary five. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First, I feel an obligation to continue providing the highest quality content possible to my Writing Power readers. I don’t want to sacrifice quality for quantity. In addition, I have noticed that when I post less frequently, readers have more time to read and respond to posts in the comments, which I think is valuable. Your perspectives make Writing Power what it is.

Second, I started 2008 with a lot of big plans, and a lot of energy, optimism, and enthusiasm. Lately, however, I find myself feeling frantic, frustrated, and hopeless – not the kind of energy that I want or need, and not conducive to fulfilling my vision for an ideal life.

I recently had an eye-opening conversation with my husband, my wisest counselor, consigliere, and reality check specialist. We listed all of the dreams, goals, projects, and intentions that I was working on. After we generated the list, he asked me which ones were really important. And I felt stubbornly attached to all but one. “No wonder you’re stressed,” he said. “No matter what you’re doing at any one time, even if you’re working on something you feel is truly important, you simultaneously feel like you’re failing to work on 90% of your dreams.”

As you can see, some things have to change. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your tips for clarifying your vision for your life, establishing a unified strategic direction toward which to apply your energy, and working with multiple competing priorities.

And of course, if you’d like to join Writing Power’s Writers’ Circle, all you have to do is introduce yourself in the comments. We look forward to meeting you. To meet the Circle’s amazing current members, click here.

If you like what you’ve read, I hope you’ll become a regular reader by subscribing to Writing Power’s RSS feed. In addition, please consider sharing your favorite posts through sites like digg, StumbleUpon, or del.icio.us using the “Share This” link below. Thank you for your support!

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The way we talk about our reality is certainly a component of much personal development advice. For example, we seek to eliminate that voice in our head that says, “I can’t…this is too hard…I’m tired…” and replace it with an empowering one.

So what about a personal development classic: “passion”? We’ve all been encouraged to find our passion, that one thing that will give our lives direction and make getting out of bed each day a joy.

This word gives me the creeps, and I’ll tell you why.

First, the word’s etymological root is not pleasant. It comes from a Latin verb, passio, which means “to suffer.” (Think of the movie title The Passion of the Christ.) So a writer might chooseto use the word “passion” instead of “delight” or “love,” in order to emphasize a feeling so powerful, it’s painful.

Considering the term in its fuller sense, therefore, finding your “passion” means finding something you’re willing to suffer for.

That’s why I don’t like the personal development application of the word “passion.” Just yesterday, I heard a person use it in this context: “I have a real passion for teaching people how to scrapbook.” Now, I enjoy scrapbooking as much as the next person, but a passion? It doesn’t strike me as the kind of art you’d cut your ear off for.

Do I think that people who call scrapbooking their passion are wrong? Absolutely not. There’s a lot of cultural pressure out there to define ourselves, to find out what we’re meant to do, to never waste a day of our lives. If you love to scrapbook, and you’d rather do that than just about anything else, then you have found fulfilling work and should run with it.

The problem is that somewhere along the line, someone swapped out “fulfilling work” for “passion.” “Passion” sends the wrong message.

I propose that we stop talking about finding a “passion” and start talking about finding your energy. That’s what I notice about people who are doing what they love to do: they draw abundant energy from their work.

What term would you like to see replace “passion” in our personal development lexicon?

If you like what you’ve read, I hope you’ll become a regular reader by subscribing to Writing Power’s RSS feed. In addition, please consider sharing your favorite posts through sites like digg, StumbleUpon, or del.icio.us using the “Share This” link below. Thank you for your support!

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I’m pleased to announce that I wrote a guest post for The Positivity Blog.  It’s called How You Can Use Proposals to Achieve Your Goals.  The post considers the logic underlying proposals and extracts personal development ideas from it.   I hope you’ll check it out!

If you’re new to Writing Power, welcome!  I’m glad you’re here.  If you’d like to get an overview of the site and some of the most popular articles, check out a little site summary post I did recently: Welcome To Writing Power.

If you like what you read, I hope you’ll subscribe to Writing Power’s RSS feed. 

Cheers!

Loren

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And so it begins.  The series of rationalizations that will lead inexorably to my least favorite time of the week: Sunday evening.  (A downside of being creative is that you can too often sell yourself a bridge in Brooklyn.)   Sunday evenings are as filled with self-recrimination as Friday afternoons are filled with optimism.  Somehow, the weekend slips by and I find I’ve done a fraction of the writing I had dreamed of doing. 

I think my problem is one of expectations, not productivity.  I do get things done each weekend.  But on Fridays, I dream up these grandiose plans.  I need to practice setting realistic goals.

So, Writers’ Circle, it’s time to do two important things: 1) share your progress for March, and 2) set your goals for April.  When May comes around, what would you like to have done? 

If productivity and motivation are challenging for you in terms of your writing, set goals that will inspire you to push yourself.  If you tend to set pie-in-the-sky goals (as I do) that actually work against you, then pare your goals down.

What?  You’re not a member of Writing Power’s Writers’ Circle?  It’s easy to join: just introduce yourself to the group in this post’s comments and share your writing projects and goals.  To meet the Circle’s amazing current members, click here.

 If you like what you’ve read, I hope you’ll become a regular reader by subscribing to Writing Power’s RSS feed.  In addition, please consider sharing your favorite posts through sites like digg, StumbleUpon, or del.icio.us using the “Share This” link below.  Thank you for your support!

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As I was examining grammar handbooks for the next installment of Writing Power’s Proper Usage Guide, I came across a thought-provoking characterization of the difference between “can” and “may.” I was surprised to discover that Diana Hacker’s Writers Reference, usually a bastion of fine distinctions, adopted a fatalistic tone about can/may.

Hacker argues that the line between “can” and “may” has grown faint, and that the usage difference is now largely maintained in formal writing situations. (In case you’re curious, “can” concerns ability, while “may” deals with permission. Can I lift this heavy bag? May I borrow five dollars?)

So why has Diana Hacker given up on can/may? What’s next – shrugging at between versus among? Does it matter?

Since I’m an English professor, you may expect me to say, “yes, it matters! Hold the line lest we descend into chaos!” But that’s not my perspective, and I’ll tell you why.

I don’t think we should insist on maintaining distinctions that complicate the language merely because “that’s the rule.” Grammar and usage rules are not inviolable. Moreover, some of these grammar commandments have archaic, no longer relevant logic underpinning their oh-so-confident “thou shalt nots.”

Many of the grammar rules that we struggle to obey are simply outdated. In English, a desire for standardization engendered a host of prescriptive rules, based not divine inspiration but on observation. That is, nineteenth century prescriptivist grammarians determined rules based on their observations of what great writers in the past had done. They seemed to know what they were doing, so the rules were modeled after them.

Just in case you missed it, the prescriptivist logic went like this: If great writers do X, then X must be correct. Thus, X is correct because great writers do it. There’s no transcendent grammatical Truth. Shakespeare, for example, uses a wide variety of grammatical constructions that some usage books would condemn. He also spelled his own name about ten different ways. But if you could write like Shakespeare, you would, right? There’s more to writing than following rules.

Unfortunately, prescriptivism is often accompanied by zeal and a dogmatic insistence on a rule’s correctness, and that’s what makes it unpalatable to me. Tell me that a particular grammatical construction is more useful, clearer, more concise, or more precise, and I’m on board. Just don’t tell me that it’s right by virtue of the rule alone.

This is not to say that we should have no rules. We wouldn’t be able to understand each other’s sentences if they didn’t conform to some grammatical standards. Just don’t be fooled into thinking that some grammatical constructions are inherently “right.”

If you like what you’ve read, I hope you’ll become a regular reader by subscribing to Writing Power’s RSS feed. In addition, please consider sharing your favorite posts through sites like digg, StumbleUpon, or del.icio.us using the “Share This” link below. Thank you for your support!

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If you’re new to Writing Power, the following posts will give you a sense of this site’s scope:

Use Writing To Make Yourself Irreplaceable

Seek And Destroy Your Writing Style Enemies

Make Your Writing A “Must Read”

Hack Unfulfilled Intentions

Writing Power’s Proper Usage Guide: A

Drafting Process: The Potter vs. The Sculptor

If you like what you read, I hope you’ll subscribe to Writing Power’s RSS feed.

Cheers!

Loren

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