Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer | 
One last gift from my sister. Back to work tomorrow to start my long stretch but I‘m already looking forward to my extra long weekend at the end of it. Happiest of Holidays Littens. I hope you‘ve all had a good day filled with love, peace, and books.
“If a period is a stop sign, then what kind of traffic flow is created by other marks? The comma is a speed bump; the semicolon is what a driver education teacher calls a “rolling stop”; the parenthetical expression is a detour; the colon is a flashing yellow light that announces something important up ahead; the dash is a tree branch in the road.”
#QuotsyJan20 | 04: #Bump
📷: Made with Typorama
pickA great book to refer to, I am currently writing more than I am reading, not in actual word count but in time spent, hence this book is in my spotlight again. Great little tips.
Assigned reading for a class I'm taking.
Image: library flowers.
Poorly written reports, memos, announcements, and messages cost us time and money. They are blood clots in the body politic. The flow of information is blocked. Crucial problems go unsolved. Opportunities for reform and efficiency are buried.
When I moved to Alabama in 1974, I was struck by the generalized American speech patterns of local broadcast journalists. They did not sound like southerners. They had been trained to level their regional accents in the interest of comprehensibility. This struck me as more than odd; it seemed like a prejudice against southern speech, an illness, a form of self-loathing...I reached a point where I needed to name this language syndrome...Cronkitis!
From productive conversations with professional writers and editors. I once learned that only three behaviors set literate people apart. The first two are obvious: reading and writing; but the third surprised me: talking about how reading and writing work. Many of the tools came from great talk about the construction of stories and the distillation of meaning.
In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell describes the relationship between language abuse and political abuse, how corrupt leaders use the passive voice to obscure unspeakable truths and shroud responsibility for their actions. They say “It must be admitted, now that the report has been reviewed, that mistakes were made,” rather than "I read the report, and I admit I made a mistake." Here‘s a life tool: always apologize in the active voice.
If a period is a stop sign, then what kind of traffic flow is created by other marks? The comma is a speed bump; the semicolon is what a driver education teacher calls a “rolling stop”; the parenthetical expression is a detour; the colon is a flashing yellow light that announces something important up ahead; the dash is a tree branch in the road.
