Writing Riffs

You might like words if . . .

. . . you own four English dictionaries, two style guides (okay, one’s technically on loan), a thesaurus, a French-English dictionary and a rhyming dictionary . . .
. . . and you actually use them all.

How can I possibly use them when every computer comes with a built-in dictionary and thesaurus and often a grammar checker? Easy. There are things that the computer just doesn’t catch. I do use those computer functions, but I don’t rely on them exclusively.

I work sometimes as a freelance copy editor. A publication will have a house style and that includes following a particular dictionary. It goes without saying that I’d better have that same dictionary. I have never yet been told that that dictionary is Microsoft Word. I repeat, Not yet.

Words can have more than one correct spelling. The one that gets published comes down to the dictionary the publisher decides to follow. Canadian spellings freak out my computer software. Red lines everywhere! And computer dictionaries don’t catch when a word’s spelling depends on the meaning intended or how the word is used in the particular sentence. Think: they’re, their, or there. They are all spelled correctly so a spell check wouldn’t flag this as wrong: There party is they’re on the street where their doing construction.

Sorting out spellings and meanings and grammar rules can be a headache. You definitely have to like obsessing about this stuff. But there’s this awesome moment of triumph when you zero in on a typo and then blast it from the face of the paper or screen forever. Gotcha! Hah! You just have to hope the 95 percent rule kicks in when you miss one (you know, the one that says 95 percent of people reading it won’t have noticed).

Some things I’ve had to wrestle with recently:

Is it raccoon or racoon?

phosphorus or phosphourus?

give away or giveaway?

awhile or a while?

through, threw, or thru?

compliment or complement?

affect or effect? (I hate that one!)

and finding the use of “jester” where “gesture” was what was needed put me in a good mood for hours.

But don’t assume then that this blog is free from typos or grammar mistakes, okay? ‘Cause while I try to be correct if I had to obsess over that stuff here too I’d never ever get around to posting.

© Lizann Flatt, www.lizannflatt.com
No part of this blog may be used without written permission from the author.

The Importance of Line Breaks

Here’s a tale about a note that came home from school awhile back. It caused me complete confusion. Why? Because of a bad line break.

It was a slip of paper with all the various possible comments that could be applied to the particular project presented in a series of boxes. In word processing terms, think of a table with text in each box. The circled box, and hence comment on my kid’s project, read:

Understandable

rule but needs

more to be

clear

Excuse me? Needs more to be? As in it needs to be clearer? As in: I need more to be speaking English better?

Surely I wasn’t seeing things correctly. So I looked again at that little slip of paper. I must have read it 10 times. But then it hit me: the line breaks were making me read each line as a phrase. I was reading those words together, such as in a poem, so that meant I was reading the ungrammatical “more to be” together as some sort of dialect or expression that should have no place in a formal marking scheme.

But if I read it as a whole sentence it’s fine, sorta: Undertandable rule but needs more to be clear.
Okay, I got it that way. Needs to add more content to be a clearer rule. Or, broken properly with line breaks:

Understandable rule

but needs more

to be clear.

There. Much clearer. Line breaks do matter. In poems…and apparently in marking schemes.
© Lizann Flatt, www.lizannflatt.com
No part of this blog may be used without written permission from the author.

Three Times is Charmed

Saturday found me driving here and there. I was doing whatever you do when you’re driving, concentrating on a tricky hairpin corner, when whoa! I hit the brakes. There was a deer standing right in the middle of the road. It gave me a good look and then sauntered off the road and into the bush. The kids and I thought that was pretty neat.

So then I’m actually driving down my driveway when suddenly a deer springs right in front of my car and bounds into the bush. It all happened so fast I pretty much didn’t have time to blink. You can bet that caused a lot of marvelling.

And then that same day I was returning home from yet another trip (kids!) when, just off to the side of the road, I see a streak of brown rushing towards the road. I slam on my brakes. Out in front of my car races a—wait for it—a coyote! (Or some other such canine type creature.) Wow!

So when I got home safely and without further incident I pondered those encounters. Deer, deer, coyote. Hunh. Taken as a whole they seemed sort of completed, and not only because after three close calls I was still un-dinted. I think the feeling came from the element of three. Three feels like a significant number. It feels complete; like closure.

This three thing resonates in stories (in religion too but I’m not going there). Here’s how it goes:

The First incident is the setup. What is the situation? It’s shown to readers.

The Second incident is a repeat of the first and so it sets the pattern. Readers will now expect that the situation will be repeated, or that it’s part of a regular pattern.

The Third incident similar but it’s changed somehow. While the reader expects to see what’s come before, this time it’s different. This is the twist or the unexpected conclusion.

And that’s what I experienced with my deer, deer, coyote encounters.

Look for the pattern of three in stories. Would it work for yours? Try it and it might just be the charm you need.

© Lizann Flatt, www.lizannflatt.com
No part of this blog may be used without written permission from the author.

The Snowman Cure


A simple snowman.

Cure for the seasonal blues, writing rejections, writer’s block, whatever ails your soul.

Never underestimate the power of playing like a kid.

(Even if you’ve had to have one coerce you into making this discovery!)

© Lizann Flatt, www.lizannflatt.com
No part of this blog may be used without written permission from the author.