The Christmas Letter

by Brad Beals

It doesn't get any easier.

You'd think after writing 7 or 8 years worth of Christmas letters, I would find that the right words just fall into place by now, but they don't. The format hasn't changed much - intro, a paragraph for each kid (adding a paragraph every couple years isn't hard), one for Heidi, one for me, and a closing that ties it all together with a message about the real meaning of Christmas. But form is easy. It's the moving parts within the form that make this letter, and any writing within a defined structure, so difficult, so much like work.

Yes, that's what it is. It's work.

But why doesn't writing get easier? Mowing the lawn is easier than it was 30 years ago. Teaching high school (stupid, federal-level interloping aside) gets easier. Changing diapers has a real short learning curve; it's only the first thousand or so that are difficult. So why is writing different? I have a thought on this.

Writing has an almost infinite potential complexity, and we're always standing at what seems to us at the time to be the threshold of our own limits. When we write thoughtfully, we're operating at a kind of peak proficiency, putting into the work all we're capable of. But then we live longer, read more and better, see the world differently, learn, and find that as we return to the task of writing, our standards have become just a little stricter, the eyes with which we self-edit a little more unforgiving. So writing never becomes easier for us. But we should be thankful for that, because it's a kind of toil that we will never become inured to. If you're a writer, then your work is never boring.

I'm actually home right now while a sub is doing my work at school. Heidi's got the boys on a field trip to Crossroads Village, and Elizabeth has some nasty intestinal bug. So I'm doing a different kind of work today, but it's good work. I'm writing the Christmas letter. There. Even in the few minutes it took me to post this much, I feel better about this task. It's work, and I'll do it as unto the Lord, and I'll feel good about doing it once it's done.

And as I think about the fact that it won't be any easier to do next year, I'll just be thankful that I'm not bored.

Beware the Floscus

by Brad Beals

versitext


I bet Adam enjoyed naming the animals. I know I would have. But since I don’t often run into unnamed species, I name situations instead. Here are a few:

1. sermat (sir maht) n.: the sudden, sometimes awkward silence that can arise during group discussions. (Note: there is a belief that sermats occur most often at 20 minutes to and after the hour; this is a stupid belief.)

From the Latin sermo meaning to talk and the Greek stamato meaning to stop or pause.

A lively discussion on God’s sovereignty flowed on into the early hours, interrupted only by the pizza-delivery guy and the occasional sermat.



2. floscus (flah skus) n.: the explosive effect that can occur as one takes the very last bites of a closed, sandwich-type food item such as a burrito.

From the latin fluo, meaning flow, and esca meaning food.

You’re getting near the end of that calzone, Lewis, and that’s a clean shirt, so beware the floscus.



3. incurputation (in ker pyu tay shun) n.: an encounter in which two people, approaching from opposite directions, attempt to pass by one another; but in making room, both choose the same side thereby running into each other. This is sometimes followed by a series of similar side-to-sdie moves, as each participant tries to get past the other. Incurputations are often terminated by one or both parties smiling or laughing awkwardly and saying something like, “shall we dance?” Variations include two or more cars starting and stopping simultaneously at a stop sign, a European kiss to the check where the parties bump noses, and introductions between people from the West and Far East in which the opposites can’t figure out whether to bow or shake hands and so attempt to do both, alternately, clumsily, ineffectively.

From the latin incurse meaning to collide and the Greek perpate meaning to step or walk.

She had determined to make an elegant entrance into the restaurant, but a blushing incurpatation with a waiter spoiled the effect.

Go ahead and try these out. Make people look at you funny and say, “whu?” It’s great fun, as words should be.


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When Lilacs Last...

By Brad Beals

Versitext.com

One afternoon a few years back, I learned to see lilac bushes. My father-in-law, a world-class talker, pointed to a bush and said, “That’s a lilac.” It was the first time I’d ever really looked at one, so I listened as he said that it was a favorite, that it was the most spring-ish of spring-time flowers, that it bloomed in white, red, purple, and—naturally—lilac. And that was all. It was a discourse of about one minute, and I planned on forgetting it.

But then a miracle happened. Overnight, across the state of Michigan, along highways, driveways, back roads, and backyards lilac bushes sprang as from the forehead of Zeus, full grown and in bloom. For days after, I could hardly turn my eyes to any familiar stretch of countryside without seeing a lilac bush where there had certainly not been one before.

The miracle, of course, was in my own brain. That the new information about a flowering tree should so quickly change the way I saw the landscape was to me, and still is, miraculous. And it’s an every-day miracle. Scientists believe—and good ones, I presume—that a baby can’t see things until her brain learns that such things really are. So a newborn may see the shape of a face, but not the nose. She can’t (or doesn’t) see nose because there’s no corresponding knowledge, no nose file to refer to. As she has more and more experience of nose, her ability to see it fills in, slowly, like a lens bringing an image into focus.

Maybe you’ve heard the eye described as being an extension of the brain; it's a helpful notion for seeing how closely the two work together to bring our world into focus, to make of it something solid and navigable. Until there’s enough input, we simply don’t see whatever it is our brain is making sense of. You can test this yourself. Look at a page of text written in an unfamiliar language—say, German. You see nothing but letters broken up into what seem to be word-sized chunks. But there’s no recognition beyond that. You see no patterns, nothing familiar. Now glance at a page of English text, and it’s all familiarity, like the faces of friends. The content is the same: German and English use the same alphabet. But it’s the patterns of letters and their correspondence to known words that make up the seeing as we read. Knowledge here literally gives sight.

So what was there before? there in the lilac-bush place of my mind’s eye? I don’t remember it being a blank or a gray smudge in the picture, but maybe it was. There’s no way to know now because the lilac bush is one place in the scene to which I, apparently, paid no attention. It was probably filled with some stock photo from my head called “bush” or “nondescript shrub”. And here’s fascination for you: that our vision is always filled with something. Our page of German, indecipherable as language, is still filled with clear black and stark white, with letters and punctuation. It’s filled but waiting for more.

My brother-in-law can see deer in the woods. That may not seem like a feat unless you’re with him, unless he’s pointing at a curved piece of gray-brown lump pressing out from a thick tree trunk. And no amount of squinting and straining, no trick of the imagination will allow you to see what he sees, not until the lump moves and either disappears behind the tree or materializes into a deer. His brain has been long trained to see forest patterns and therefore breaks in the patterns. And those breaks, at certain heights off the ground, in certain un-tree-like curves and colors are often deer. But, like learning a new language, it takes years to see that way. And yet always, at all points in the education of our eyes, the forest is full.

I’m only now learning to see the trees that hide the deer. Two years ago, I bought a house that has a woodstove, so I’ve spent some time in woods, felling, splitting, and hauling a variety of hardwood and not-so-hardwood trees. I’ve learned to see maple and cherry and oak and beach and poplar and elm. They look different, these trees. Their bark, leaves, limbs, and shapes are different. And I’ve learned this so gradually that I can’t remember what woods looked like when they were filled only with tree. So how do I know that I’m seeing more now that I once did? Because I narrate. I walk the woods and practice the vernacular. “That’s dogwood…old beech…maple there…nice cherry tree…beautiful sycamore.” I didn’t do that just a few years ago because I wasn’t really seeing different trees. I had not the vocabulary for it. And now, as my tree vocabulary grows, so does the complexity of what I see.

And I’m just a neophyte. If I leaned in close to a biologist in the woods, would I hear the synapses pop and crackle as his eyes sweep across a field of vision packed with pattern and familiarity? No, I don’t think so. The brain seems to have an inexhaustible capacity for more and finer detail—I doubt that a biologists head makes any more noise than mine does. But in the woods he does see more than I do, I’m sure of it.

This idea that seeing is powered by knowledge brings me to more questions: what am I missing right now? What parts of my nascent vision are comprised of stock footage? And am I even able to detect such blindness? It gets very tricky here. To be able to see a blur, a lack of pattern, requires first a recognition of pattern. So no, I can’t detect the blindness. I can’t look around at the landscape and say now there’s a lack of clarity and detail just waiting to be filled in with knowledge. I can’t because there’s too much detail already filled in around it, the detail exactly matching the knowledge beneath. I can’t see potential patterns anymore than a child can see the inches he has yet to grow or read the language he has yet to learn.

That’s the nature of this world and our experience in it. The visual detail keeps up perfectly with its growing, corresponding knowledge. I learn that the difference between the black maple and the silver maple right next to it are its smoother bark and fewer leaf lobes. And then vision! From that point on, I see them differently. I watch a rugby match, and it’s all chaos and confusion. But a friendly hand points out the patterns in strategy, and the game becomes something new. Knowledge comes and makes vision possible. It differentiates and brings order.

So where there was once at the side of the road a passing blur of white or red or purple, there is now a lilac bush, syringia in all of its deciduous detail. And it is still—to this child still learning to see—miraculous.

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The Politics of Language, Sort of

By Brad Beals

Versitext.com

I run a search for the term Web site and find these: website, web site, web-site, Website, Web site, Web-site, and even Web Site, and WebSite. What gives? What’s a well-meaning copywriter to do?

What gives is that the term Web site hasn’t grown up yet. It’s a still-awkward post-adolescent, not quite come into his own. And what I’m to do is the same as I would with any search: sift, cut, discern, and in the end go with whatever variation’s got the most clout. In a way, I’m casting a vote.

And in this way, English usage works–sort of–like a republic. Its form and pattern of convention are shaped by popular will but (like your vote for President) along a circuitous route. And like other democratic processes, at the murky center of things are the opinion leaders, the informal authorities that push and pull at the machine. Chicago Manual of Style, AP Stylebook, Wired Style—these are the players in the smoke-filled room.

Here’s a common scenario: Wired, let’s say, decides that Internet, heretofore capitalized because it’s a one-of-a-kind, will lose its proper-noun status and join the rank-and-file common nouns as humble internet. There may be good reason to do this, as there was probably good reason to capitalize it in the first place, but none of that matters. This is what matters: Wired (out of a growing pressure within its own ranks maybe) has changed policy and will henceforth cast the term as internet, small i.

So what happens next? and how do we plebians know that this change has been made? Does a committee stamp something? Is there a press release, or even a memo to writers? No. And in this we find the proof of real clout. Wired is rendering internet in the common, and like magic, like opinion polls and approval ratings, the rest of us eventually come along and wonder how we could ever have been so silly as to capitalize internet. And this sort of thing—slowly and out of sight, like committee work—is happening all the time, all around us.

Of course, a change in language usage doesn’t move at the speed of a presidential election cycle, but neither is it like stone eroding. Internet and World Wide Web were new to us less than two decades ago, less time than it takes for a human to reach adulthood, and in that time we’ve made both terms common, and effectively dropped the world wide.

But the internet, you will say, is an anomaly, statistically insignificant in a population as large as that of English words. Nothing in our lives has come about so quickly and completely as the internet. And you’d be right. But the example still illustrates the process. We could mark out similar patterns for words like baseball, railroad, airplane, email, and most other closed-compound words that, over time and use, have collapsed from two words into one, a kind of etymological entropy. But in each case the change is hurried along by one of these informal authorities. If Miriam Webster says that copyeditor is a closed compound, then the publishing world and soon the rest of us follow. Or maybe Webster follows Chicago. It’s not exactly a chicken-egg thing, but close.

That such wild, ungovernable processes determine usage can be frustrating both to the rule junkie and the rule weary. The junkie because it all seems so un-rule-like, and the weary because there’s still authority, however nebulous, determining something. It might be helpful to both if we define terms:

· in written language, rules are subject to the consensus of the governed

· a rule without an exception is no rule—it’s a law, and as language users, we don’t like laws

· the rules of usage, grammar, syntax, and mechanics are the servants of expression, not its masters

· while grammar and syntax tend to change more slowly as they are more closely tied to logic, usage and—to a lesser extent—mechanics follow the logic of fashion

So formal rules of language lie somewhere between guidance and prescription. Submit to them according to your own lights. But if you want to avoid the risk of obscuring meaning, if clarity is paramount, then follow a good set of rules consistently.

But whose rules? To whom do I look as an authority?

To answer that, let’s extend further the democracy metaphor. Like an election-coverage map, usage has its red states and its blue. We’ll call those in the book-publishing industry red for no other reason than the authority they look to—The Chicago Manual of Style—is actually red. Those in the newspaper and magazine publishing industries tend to follow the AP Stylebook. It’s not blue, but for the sake of our metaphor, it’s blue.

If I see myself as red, I’ll defer to Chicago on matters of usage and mechanics. If I prefer blue, I’ll line up with AP. If I feel no affinity to either party, I can join a third; there are other style guides out there. I can even call myself an independent and build my own rule book, picking the best from the big hitters and making up the rest. This is fine as long as I’m consistent throughout. Readability is key, so consistency is one of the more considerate things you can do for your reader.

Put another way, when it comes to language, there is no legislative body, no executive branch looking to make war on words, no high court handing down punctuation pronouncements. Authority is in the collective will, and the collective will, ultimately, is weighed and assigned value in the smoky backrooms.

So what do I do with Web site?

Professionally, I may live in a red state, but for this issue, I’m jumping to the party with the most clout in on-line usage. And since Wired makes a good case for casting Web site as a common, closed-compound noun, that’s how I’ll write it: website.

Democracy is a fine thing.

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Clarity is a Cruel Knife

By Brad Beals

Versitext.com

I love words. Give me a string of fat, convoluted, compound-complex sentences over stubby, simple ones any day. But 90% of my work heads to web pages, and since long sentences are harder to scan than short ones, clarity is often a cruel knife. And off they come—lovely words, hard-fought phrases and clauses, whole sentences even.

And then there’s the big-picture part of me who speaks up, and I’m reminded—clarity is good, clarity is key. And that means cutting fluff and sprinkling those long sentences with end-mark punctuation. Here, clarity is a scalpel, and, despite the pain, my text is generally healthier for it.

So clarity is good, and brevity is the soul of web-page copy. Why not stop now and call it a post?

Because not all content submits itself easily to treatment. Difficult-to-convey concepts or complex argumentation can be troublesome. When dealing with such copy, it’s easy for me to slip back into the old ways, placing no checks on sentence complexity, and paying little attention to the scanning tendency of my audience (That’s a long sentence, I know, but I’ll assume that you, as a blog reader, aren’t scanning this). And more than once I’ve heard myself asking this question: don’t we need complex phrasing to communicate complex ideas?

My answer to me: Nope. Complicated ideas should be communicated through the entirety of the text, not in the particulars of sentence complexity. This requires careful organization in the development of copy. Clear, short, active-voice sentences can do the job better than long, fat ones if they’re sequenced effectively. Because it’s within the broad sweep of the text that this kind of clarity is achieved and not in pieces, we’re less likely to be lulled into the old habit of wordiness.

In writing for the web, I’ve had to sharpen my ability to do the job quickly, at-a-glance in some ways. I’ve learned to make eye-contact, present my case, and bring things to a close in a hundred words instead of the thousand I was used to. And as my perception of good writing has changed, so have my means for achieving clarity.

My working definition for clarity is now this: a clear message is conveyed when the reader is brought safely to my conclusion. Yes, you need simple, clear sentences to do this, but you also need reasoning, logic, and the careful sequencing of all of it to help bring your reader home.

So is there no indulgence for the word junkie? None at all? No, there’s not. Not on an ecomm site, anyway. For a word-fix, go write a novel. Or better yet, a blog—it’s faster acting.

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Another Word on Words

By Brad Beals

Versitext.com

The words you use, better than any other indicator, reflect the quality of the thoughts behind them. That’s not to say good thinking can’t happen without corresponding good expression—intellectual genius often goes hand in hand with an inability to express it. But good expression rarely happens without good thinking to drive it. That is, a complicated idea, clearly expressed, indicates that complicated thinking really did happen.

A woman playing chopsticks on the piano might be a virtuoso, but she’s probably not since most people can play chopsticks and few are virtuosos. The expression of chopsticks can convey only that level of proficiency and nothing higher. And if she plays a Rogers and Hammerstein tune, we know she’s at least that good. But is that the extent of her skill? We don’t know, and we wouldn’t assume a level higher than that until we’ve heard an expression that would indicate it.

But if she does move on to playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #3, our estimation of her abilities will rise, and—now this is the important part—we will never again put her skill level at chopsticks or show tunes, even if we never hear Rachmaninoff again!

Your use of language conveys quality of thought in a similar way. Expression will convey that level of thinking, but nothing beyond. If it’s simple, you convey simplicity, which is not necessarily bad—you might just be fooling around with chopsticks. If your words are muddled, you will convey muddled thinking. And if all your expression is mundane, prosaic, plain…well, then that’s the only tune we’re hearing.

But doesn’t this contradict simplicity as doctrine for writing web copy? you ask. Doesn’t what we know about usability suggest we pound out nothing but chopsticks?

Not exactly. Even if our virtuoso prefers to play chopsticks, and even if we never hear a concerto again, her credibility at the piano is established. We know she’s good. Business writing for the web is not about entertainment—it’s about utility and credibility.

So it’s not imperative that every sentence should knock it out of the park (in fact, if you try to accomplish that, you’ll convolute your text) but that your sum-total expression does. If you give your readers a taste of Rachmaninoff early on to establish credibility, they’ll listen closely to the rest.

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Writer, Proof Thyself

By Brad Beals

Versitext.com

Proofing your own copy is like tickling yourself—it’s not real effective. Just ask Lynne Truss, the author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Here’s the complete title of her book:

Eats, Shoots and Leaves:

A Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

And in the subtitle we find, of all things, an error in punctuation. The compound modifier zero tolerance, because it modifies a noun immediately following, needs to be hypenated, as in zero-tolerance approach.

(It’s a great object lesson for copy folk, but don’t let the slip-up prejudice you against Truss’s book—it’s a great read, and no, I’m not forgetting that it’s about punctuation.)

The more time a writer spends with a piece of copy, the more familiar it becomes. If errors aren’t caught early, the writer’s eye and brain (they’re the same organ, really) will begin superimposing correct form onto the copy. You’ll read it correctly because the sentence’s content and syntax encourage you to anticipate and assume the correct form. It’s nothing new; we see what we want to see.

Some remedies:

• spell check is a start, but it will miss distinctions between words like wear and where
• reading aloud is helpful for broader form concerns like sentence fragments, misplaced or dangling modifiers, and style, but it won’t catch spelling and typo problems
• reading copy word for word in reverse—this eliminates the brain’s assumptions about form since there’s no syntax to hypnotize you. This is a good complement to reading aloud as it will only catch spelling and typo errors.
• farming the copy out to a proofreader for one last pass

But your best bet is to be doing all four. That’s the true zero-tolerance approach to proofing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need my wife to read this before I post.

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