Emily Lockhart comes to CHS

Northwest author Emily Lockhart came to Capital Friday afternoon, sharing her experiences with six English classes. In a presentation that was relatable, self-deprecating, and honest, Lockhart spoke about her life as a student and as a writer--and explained how the two were intertwined. She grew up in Seattle, and first attended a "granola" and "bohemian" prep school; as she put it, "We all had to promise to never buy a car."

A loner, the sort of person others avoid in the cafeteria, Lockhart decided to transfer to Lakeside School, where she was able to reinvent herself in a surprising fashion:

I didn't change anything about myself--how I looked, how I acted. I just showed up to see what happened. What happened was, I made friends.... I had a totally different life. I saw high school life from somewhere near the top, and somewhere near the bottom.... that's why I keep writing about it.

As Lockhart explained, unlike many places in the adult world, high school throws together people of every conceivable disposition and circumstance, with no real option for escape. The conflict that results is what interests her, and her young adult books are full of italicized, capital-D Drama.

Like a lot of fiction writers, Lockhart took time to get noticed. Her first attempt at publish non-fiction was rejected 70 times; her first success, a children's book, was rejected 30 times--and then, when published, "it was a lovely experience, but nobody read it." She wrote five unnoticed novels before The Boyfriend List finally caught readers' attention. Now, she's published a book a year for the last eight years. In her words, "It's not an easy way to get rich, but you can make a living."

You could sense Lockhart's palpable enthusiasm for her craft when she talked about the way she develops narrative.

You become a little bit fond of the character. I gave Ruby traits that I like--some of them are mine. I liked Ruby. Once you create a character that you like, as a fiction writer, what you have to do is torture them. If you have a story about a happy person with a good life, and they continue to be a happy person with a good life, you don't have a story, you have a description. Your job as a writer is to ask, "What's the worst thing that could happen?"

Some of Lockhart's best advice concerns her writerly motivation.

I don't feel like writing a lot of the time. I make myself do it. I write junk... I set a goal. I'm going to write 500 words, and then I can have a chocolate chip cookie.... Some day it's really fun and the best job ever. My writing teacher [in her university program] thought I sucked. But I'm the only one from the class who became a published writer. Why? Because my books are finished.

Lockhart's down-to-earth persona and frank advice seemed to resonate with the students in her audience. Even though YA Teen Drama isn't really my thing, I'm going to check out a couple of her books, and recommend her work to my students.

And one last thing: Lockhart pointed out, "I'm on Twitter, you can come follow me." (She's @elockhart.)

why you should learn big words

Why is your teacher encouraging, exhorting, or even nagging you to learn roots, to study vocab, and to read with an eye and ear for language?

The reasons are manifold.  Augment your vocabulary...

To become a better, more engaging writer.
To better comprehend your reading.
To confuse people.
To connect subjects (math --> English --> science).
To define unknown words more easily.
To express yourself more effectively or accurately.
To feel more confident with little words.
To feel sophisticated.
To gain access to power.
To gain knowledge--to not be clueless.
To get good grades.
To get out of a bad situation.
To have deeper, more intelligent conversations.
To have fun.
To have options when choosing a word.
To impress a date.
To know what you're being accused of or charged with.
To know your rights.
To land a better job.
To learn how to say exactly--precisely--what you mean.
To learn the history of language and culture.
To make money.
To master the English language.
To not be afraid of things you don't understand.
To place more emphasis on other words.
To protect yourself from scams or risks.
To read between the lines.
To read more expressively.
To sound intelligent.
To sound professional.
To sound smart.
To succeed in a future career.
To understand difficult subjects.
To understand more knowledgeable people.
To understand ourselves and others.
To understand politics.

And, most important:

To win at Stump Mr. Anderson.

how to become a better writer

1. Care about your writing.
Everything that follows depends on this. Care so hard it hurts. In fact, if you are not in physical pain every time you pick up a pen, you don't care enough. Journalist and all-around savant Gene Fowler describes writing thusly: "All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead." If you think he was exaggerating, you are obviously a no-talent hack.


2. Endlessly revise.
Perfect your work. Keep at it until they have to drag you away from your last draft, clawing at the last adverb  that mars your masterpiece. This ensures that you will never publish anything, cementing your reputation as an unsung genius.


3. Find and keep good readers.
Treasure them, by which I mean, stuff them in a box in the back of a closet somewhere. You want them reading only your work, not anyone else's.


4. Read voraciously.
Sir Francis Bacon once said that truly great books were meant to be chewed and digested. Invest in a stomach upgrade and a set of titanium teeth and make this happen.


5. Write in different modes.
You can't just publish a novel first thing. Start small: carve a letter into a tree trunk. ("Z" isn't a bad choice, if your name is Zorro.) Move on to bathroom walls, which not only builds an audience, but develops your rhyming skills. From there, in ascending order of importance, it's Twitter, blogs, advice columns, ad copy, Atlantic short stories, New Yorker cartoons, novellas, Wikipedia updates, manifestos, horoscopes, celebrity obituaries, limericks, novels, trilogies, and ransom notes.


6. On second thought, get a disciple to do it for you.
Do what Jesus, Socrates, and the Buddha did: write nothing down yourself. The downside, of course, is that your ideas may be misunderstood, misappropriated, or pureed beyond recognition. The upside is huge, though: you'll attract groupies while maintaining plausible deniability.

correct me no corrections

Every time I tell a stranger my primary occupation, they say a version of the following: "Oh, I guess I'll have to watch what I say!"

"I'm not on the clock," I usually reply. The mock-fear of being corrected by the Grammar Police both saddens and amuses me.

Where does that mock-fear come from? People like this:

Rosenthal, who is in her early 60s, asked for a toasted multigrain bagel -- and became enraged when the barista at the franchise, on Columbus Avenue at 86th Street, followed up by inquiring, "Do you want butter or cheese?"

"I just wanted a multigrain bagel," Rosenthal told The Post. "I refused to say 'without butter or cheese.' When you go to Burger King, you don't have to list the six things you don't want.

"Linguistically, it's stupid, and I'm a stickler for correct English."

No, you are not. You are what you called the barista: an asshole.

Why? Because there's nothing grammatically incorrect about the barista's question. It's a logical problem--a false dichotomy--but only if it's pronounced a certain way. The accent matters. See below:

"Do you want butter or cheese?"
Without any emphasis, the possibility of neither is perfectly sound. Just answer "no thanks."

"Do you want butter, or cheese?"
Now we have the false dichotomy.

And once again, there is a perfectly reasonable and polite way to answer: "Neither, thanks."

One more thing: when you go to Burger King, you certainly do have to decline the things you don't want: the meal deal, the meal deal King-sized (or whatever they call it at Burger King), and whatever else the order-takers have been ordered to upsell that week.

So, in conclusion: step down from your grammatical high horse, Ms. Rosenthal.  The world needs less false dudgeon.



[via Slate's Twitter feed]

sometimes a noun is just a noun

There's a neurological explanation for why people love to verb nouns.

When people were confronted with verbed nouns (in sentences such as ”I was not supposed to go there alone: You said you would companion me.”) EEGs measured their brains recognizing a syntactic anomaly, but not a semantic one. In other words, the subjects understood--in a time measured in milliseconds--that something cool and new was happening. And they immediately got what it meant.

Coming soon: a neurological explanation for why a bitter few really, really hate it when you verb a noun.

[via pourmecoffee]

take a tour of your school

A creativity / storytelling / extemporaneous speaking exercise.

Take your class on a tour of your school. The catch: they're the tour guides. Make a circuit around the campus, and let individuals stop the tour when they approach a location where they can tell a story, real or imagined, about its significance or history.

If you want to emphasize spontaneity, give about five minutes to prepare, with a notecard for those who need it. If you want a more polished presentation (as a practice, say, for upcoming speeches), give students a day's notice.

The ground rules:

1. Careful in the hallways.
2. Be nice. Don't rag on a teacher you despise. Don't embarrass friends or strangers.
3. Don't monopolize the time. Keep your story under two minutes.
4. Ham it up.

You'll be surprised what you'll learn about your school--and your students.

"chicken one day, feathers the next"

The concretion, found in Oregon, offers a potential glimpse into a world millions of years in the past, but the story offers an equally fascinating glimpse into the colorful world of paleontology.

"It's kind of like your first blind date," said state paleontologist Bill Orr. "The closer they get, the worse they look...."

We're waiting for Mother Nature to knock it off the wall," Hanshumaker said.

There's an expression in paleontology, Orr said, that describes the frustration involved in finding something that might be spectacular but really isn't that big of a deal.

"Chicken one day, feathers the next," he said. "This is definitely a feather day."

Here's hoping for a really cool chicken ancestor trapped in the middle of an ancient rock.

if you're trying to offend Australians...

...don't just use "crikey"--spell it wrong.

(The clouds, incidentally, are nifty.)

;) or :) at the end of a sentence

;) or :) at the end of a sentence: which should I use, and how often?

First, you should use emoticons, as they are called, as liberally as possible, unless you are politically conservative, in which case you should use them frequently.

Each has a specific effect as supplemental (or as a replacement for) punctuation.

Let's compare and contrast, shall we?

I robbed a bank yesterday.

I robbed a bank yesterday :)

I robbed a bank yesterday ;)

The first is a frank admission of guilt, or a matter-of-fact description of one's accomplishments. Devoid of context, it is bland and unassuming. The second positively beams with pride.

The last, however, adds a pinch of flirtatiousness: If you're lucky, you just might end up a little richer. So, while :) is ambiguous, albeit friendly, ;) adds a hint of sauce. If you're going to employ it, be aware of this critical fact.

Also, I should note that for good reason, in academic writing, the use of emoticons is generally frowned upon. >:(





[165th in a series]

you, y'all, all y'all

Apropos of being in Alabama for one more day...

It starts with a discussion of the vagaries of standard English usage. It evolves into a thoroughgoing and sometimes contentious analysis of the greatest of all pronouns: "y'all."

MST3K evolves

Clark Stooksbury on the natural history of the greatest television show of all time:

Speaking at the 2008 San Diego Comic Con, the actor Patton Oswalt aptly compared the early fan efforts on behalf of Mystery Science Theater—sending videotapes to friends in areas where the show was not available—to the ways people use YouTube and MySpace today. Now many of the show’s writers and performers are using the Web to directly reach fans old and new without the middleman of cable TV. Neither Cinematic Titanic nor Rifftrax is a rehash of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but both are recognizable descendants. And both continue to transmute cinematic dross into comedy gold.

Any excuse to use the word "transmute."

today's spring cleaning links

The mess in the apartment is contained and certified non-toxic. The mess on my hard drive, in my Google Docs, and in my Firefox bookmarks, though, is overwhelming. I have piles of lessons, handouts, images, links, and random observations, stashed in a "Dump" folder on the desktop (backed up, promise) or clogging up the bookmarks toolbar.

While it was still morning, while the laundry took a bath in the washing machine, while the sun faded into cloud, I sorted through the clutter, taking some links from the junk drawer and tossing them here on the blog.

Enjoy.

1. Clear out the cobwebs in your lecturing style.

2. Reorganize your way to a better timed essay.

3. You never know what you'll dig out of the bottom of the history trunk--or how it might get you in trouble.

4. Toy cars, dolls, stuffed animals, and superhero action figures that symbolize America's most salient political debates of the early 21st century.

5. You could always just hide junk by painting it into invisibility.

6. Why did you buy all this stuff anyway?

7.Need the will to get started? Find it nestled in the recesses of your brain.

e-neo-ough

You are allowed only one neo- per noun.




[via Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing]

good + good = bad

Here's a game: take two words that represent good things individually, and combine them into a common phrase that is bad--or, at best, disappointing. I'll start.

1. steak + sandwich

2. TV + timeout

3. poetry + reading

4. rice + pudding

5. [this is where you come in]

because grammar matters

Put that modifier in the proper place. Or else:

After the flub heard around the world, President Barack Obama has taken the oath of office. Again. Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the oath to Obama on Wednesday night at the White House - a rare do-over. The surprise moment came in response to Tuesday's much-noticed stumble, when Roberts got the words of the oath a little off, which prompted Obama to do so, too....

It happened when Obama interrupted Roberts midway through the opening line, in which the president repeats his name and solemnly swears.

Next in the oath is the phrase " ... that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States." But Roberts rearranged the order of the words, not saying "faithfully" until after "president of the United States."

[via Glenn Reynolds]

more election rhetoric

Slate's Juliet Lapidos points out that antimetabole, right now, is hot:

John McCain, in his Thursday convention address, deployed the technique in this admirably honest line: "We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us." The audience roared. McCain's antimetabole echoed one used by his running mate, Sarah Palin, the night before: "In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change." The inversion of change and career, forming a crisscross structure, gives the line a powerful one-two-punch feel. During his speech last week, Bill Clinton recycled an antimetabole he'd first used in the 1990s: "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power." The turn of phrase pleased the delegates—they clapped and hooted—but a far less famous speaker can lay claim to the most successful rhetorical switcheroo of the Democratic Convention. Barney Smith, a regular guy from Indiana who lost his job to outsourcing in 2004, took the stage at Invesco field and produced this zinger: "We need a president who puts the Barney Smiths before the Smith Barneys."

It's nice to see rhetoric getting the attention it deserves during this election year. It probably stems from the fact that, for once, we have some halfway decent public speakers in the mix--Bush vs. Kerry was, rhetorically, a parched desert.

Added:Peter Wall makes his own observation.

expletive McCain

Slate's Paul Collins dissects one of John McCain's preferred rhetorical devices: "my friends."

McCain falls neatly into line: Roughly every generation since FDR, a candidate resurrects "my friends." But while used in its first few decades by good or great orators, it's notable that in the last half-century it's been exclusively resorted to by the worst orators in our presidential races.

Three observations.

1. Collins notes that "my friends" carries a vague notion of a threat, but "friend" is more threatening than "my friends" when coming from a stranger. Greg Behrendt's comments here are spot-on.

2. The phrase "my friends" is perfect for a candidate who is a confessed computer illiterate, and therefore has no idea how the phrase has gained currency and lost power via "social networking." These days, "my friends" means everything and nothing.

3. Collins misses the perfect chance to load up his "MF'er" pun. The use of a brief intervening phrase is called "expletive."

grammar mockery taken to new depths

Laughing at others' syntactic and orthographic ineptness is one thing. Making it your mission to correct others' mistakes: not so wise.

Deck's diary account of the Grand Canyon incident was submitted as evidence in court. It says the two men climbed Desert View Watchtower while on holiday from their typo-enforcement duties "and discovered a hand-rendered sign inside that, I regret to report, had a few errors. I know today was supposed to be my day off from typo-hunting, but if I may be permitted to quote that most revered of android law enforcers, Inspector Gadget, 'Always on duty!' I can't shut it off. . . . Will we never be free from the shackles of apostrophic misunderstanding, even in a place surrounded by natural beauty?"

After correcting a misplaced apostrophe and comma, Deck reported, he was aghast to discover what he described as a made-up word: "emense."

"I was reluctant to disfigure the sign any further, so we had to let the other typo stand. Still, I think I shall be haunted by that perversity."

In their quest to rid the world of typos, Jeff Deck and Ben Herson "used a white-out product and a permanent marker to deface a sign painted more than 60 years ago by artist Mary Colter." A historic landmark. It'll cost 'em over $3,000 to compensate the park service for the fix, and they're banned from entering national parks for a year.

I shudder to think how those morons would react if they stumbled across the only surviving copy of A Table Alphabeticall.

[via Obscure Store]

today's orthography links

1. Sucks to misspell your own name. Suck doubly if you're a newspaper, and infinitely if you blow it on the front page. It's one step below "The Tmise regrets the error." At least they didn't spell it "Noose." [Via Matt Welch]

2. If you misspell Obama's name, what kind of websites come up? Why didn't somebody think of this sooner?

3. The Scrabulous / Scrabble battle brings out the spelling puns.

4. Portuguese spelling is now standardized.

5. Korean prof says, we can't let the Japanese take our island. Step one: let's all spell its name the same way.

6. Miss Spelling--Tori--is writing another book. This one, titled Mommywood, at least doesn't misspell the word "Story."

7. It's "Myers." Why do almost all of his critics spell his name wrong?

catchphrases to drop as if hot

One more linguistic entry for today: Ron Rosenbaum wants to know which catchphrases have been completely cliched out.

There's Stage 1, when you first hear a phrase and take pleasure in its imaginative use of language on the literal and metaphorical level. This may not be the most beguiling example, but consider "throw up a little in my mouth." I'm still kind of attached to it.

Then there's Stage 2, when you use it to establish "street cred" (time to throw "street cred" under the catchphrase bus?) or convey a sense of being au courant.

Then there's Stage 3, when the user acknowledges a phrase's over-ness and tries to extract some final mileage out of it by gently mocking it, usually by using ironic quotes, or adding "as they say" to the end.

Finally, there's Stage 4: terminal obsolence, dead phrase walking. Take "at the end of the day." It kind of stuns me whenever I find someone still saying "at the end of the day" with a straight face. What are they, stuck on stupid, as they say?

Rosenbaum ends with questions rather than ordinances. What, he asks, are we to do with "stay classy," "up in your grill," "overshare," "tell us something we don't know," "man up," "go-to," "drinking the Kool-Aid," or "mad props," among so many others?

So, for his and your edification, some edicts:

1. Permitted
Stay classy, overshare, go-to.

2. Forbidden
Up in your grill, tell us something we don't know, man up, drinking the Kool-Aid, mad props.

Complete list of bans and moratoria here.