It Was A Dark And Stormy Night ....

I've used The Milk Tray Man's "And all because the lady loves Milk Tray" as a metaphor to finagle goodies.

I once received an email inquiring "what is this technical trinitrotoluene that the offshore team is talking about?"
I burst into laughter. I don't think any small word would have rendered that jocularity.

Aye, as our Get Shorty implored, "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip"

We had the purists up in the arms for this year's Academy Award botch-up, no, the other botch-up here

But I love the girth of tour d'horizon.

Barbarous or barbaric for this barbed rule?

 

Inert compounds and nobles gases are boring. They only make up flashy signposts.
We need ionic bonds in which atoms lose their electrons for something interesting to happen.

If writing were quantum chemistry, then the the dangling participles are valence electrons that upon quantum entanglement produce the spookiness of fused participles (aka possessive with gerunds)

 

BTW, that is a spoof. I thought someone might peel the varnish of technical-falutin in that metaphor to expose erred writing and I was eager to have my ears pinned back.

The usage of intensifiers is deliberately flubbed.

Wrong: More lighter
Correct: Lighter

Wrong: Lowest orbitals
Correct: Lower orbitals

Correct: Smaller words

 

OK, enough horseplay.

Here’s something I am interested to learn and any pointers and nudges from you will not be regretted. As I don’t see any running theme in this sprawling and yuge thread, and at the risk of derailing it for a page or two, I wish to know how to cultivate a smooth referential flow in a sentence. You can (1) nest the references, (2) scatter as footnotes , (3) inject parenthetical or in-place references, or as in the below sentence, (4) overlay the references. A lot of communication these days (corporate mail) is playfully done by the way of (4).

What are the general thoughts on such writing style?

I contemplate between (3) and (4) and usually choose (3) over (4) making my writing appear clunkier.

On references and citations: Good writing is soaked not only in worthwhile references but closer to (now-)home cultural mimicry. Born and raised in India, I grew up in a household watching Chitrahaar and the only international English I picked up is from those syndicated cartoons. Would I be at a disadvantage in my writing (forever) devoid of these alien cultural tropes that I always have to look up (what? what is that television programme from 90s) that my colleagues irresponsibly toss.

On Slang: There’s this mindful linguistic acculturation an immigrant goes through in the early years of their settlement during which they pick up slang and but I would never be able flex those slang terms the way my colleagues do. Does that again put this Beatrice Prior below the mark or will this Divergent ever rise to retaliate in the same tone?

Mind, I have no intention to scale to literary heights but how do I cultivate that playfulness and idiomatic writing which is natural to a native. Few years ago I was heartened to know that Joseph Conrad had learnt English way past his critical period of learning at the age of twenty-one. I don’t intend to write a Heart of Darkness but how do I surmount such relativistic shortcomings.

Few decades ago, someone asked me where I work and he gasped , “You work in plated-glass, high-ceilinged, stuffy rooms with stiff upper lip pricks?"

I don’t know what that meant but I soon realized that my field has a bad rap outside the shiny exterior. So when I say “colleagues”, I mean past and present groups of 5-6 clowns who flout the rock-ribbed writerly starch of my profession. We are anything but calm and collected junkies. Our conversations and emails are some of the funniest moments I have experienced in life with references to The Peter Schickele/P.D.Q. Bach Web Site. My personal writing style is yugely influenced and wrought by correspondence at work.

 

Dude, you are in a sluggish forum, in a lost company, with a misleading title.
Yet, you had hopes to upset stray fly-bys with your ungracious usage of "abecedarian".

You will put Pangloss to shame over his frugal optimism!

 

Talking of metaphors, I love Steven Pinker’s advise on the usage of “like” and “as” for metaphors. Don’t get too fussy on grammar and bash up a confounded soul for his irreverent use of “like” in place of “as”. He cites how the brand Winston was profited in the prescriptive wrangle to liberate the preposition from the corrupted conjunction in the brand’s slogan bender: "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should", or should that be "Winston tastes good, as a cigarette should". Pinker's The Sense of Style is one of the few books I've read cover-to-cover and absolutely loved the updated take on Grammar since the edicts of "Strunk and White". The like-as war has been flaming for years with no abatement despite Ogden Nash’s witty mediation.

Very Like A Whale - Poem by Ogden Nash

Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can't seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to
go out of their way to say that it is like something else.
What does it mean when we are told
That that Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot of
Assyrians.
However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and
thus hinder longevity.
We'll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were
gleaming in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a
wold on the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy
there are great many things.
But I don't imagine that among them there is a wolf with purple
and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was
actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red
mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof Woof?
Frankly I think it is very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say,
at the very most,
Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian
cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host.
But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he
had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,
With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers
to people they say Oh yes, they're the ones that a lot of
wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them.
That's the kind of thing that's being done all the time by poets,
from Homer to Tennyson;
They're always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,
And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket
after a winter storm.
Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of
snow and I'll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical
blanket material and we'll see which one keeps warm,
And after that maybe you'll begin to comprehend dimly
What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.

 

I read somewhere that advise (n) is mildly non-standard, owing to its wide-spread misuse, slowly creeping its way into acceptance. I am very sloppy with my writing. Heck! Ain't this thread about "learning to write".

Your work-in-progress,
Abecedarian

 

I mostly tap away casual and rarely send a dry and instructional email to anyone. My tenets of good casual writing:

(1) Get rid of the apologetic and conciliatory tone in casual writing. Took me a while to drop that stiff "Dear" and "Regards" and other meddlesome noise.

(2) Write crisp. I terribly fail and this is something I have been working on.

(3) I read somewhere that "you are the five people you are with", similarly, your writing is the product of the five people you write to. In few years, you tend to write in each other's compulsive verses. This calls for a read on verbal tics and how our writing is littered with contagious and dominant phrases we contract from our friends.

(4) Don't get too finicky on closed, open or hyphenated compounds. I used to be a nervous wreck with misplacement of dashes. Now I let go such anxiety.

(5) Good writing demands good reading. One has to choose writers and blogs and op-eds famed for their style and structure more than semantics. And this is so important that it is pressed and honoured repeatedly as (6), (7) and (8) points

(9) I regret not having maintained a diary or journal in my youth. In one of your posts in this thread, you mentioned that you kept a diary for eight years. That is a testimony to your splendid writing. All such recorded soliloquies not only aid in enhancing one's articulation but help to track progress.

(10) Good writing is the hardest to achieve. Despite regrets that I should have done better, I am glad that I am atleast marching in the right direction by realising the significance of such an enterprise.