The ‘Paramedic Method’ involves bringing writing that lacks vitality back to life. Offers an 8-step process for achieving all this.
“Chicago” is 15!
Now featuring coverage of electronic publishing as well as a grammar and usage chapter all its own, the Chicago Manual of Style is in its 15th edition. Buy it. Read it. Mind the gaps. Perhaps most importantly, remember to (as Linda Halvorson, chief editor, puts it) “break or bend” rules as your needs dictate.
On Rhetoric and Conversation
I read recently about the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy and about other dos and don’ts of debating at Truth Tree, a site offering its share of left-leaning positions in a series of essays,and message boards for each for readers to submit their responses. Not cutting edge site design by any means (nor especially current), but stimulating nonetheless. I was reminded of Dean and Marshall VanDruff’s Conversational Cheap Shots (please pardon my implication of causality), but here we have an effort at community.
Lit and Woe
John Kilgore of Eastern Illinois University writes in The Vocabula Review (subscription required) of the aversion many students have of sitting in a classroom reviewing works of poetry, and the equally potent aversion teachers have to presiding over same. One salient point:
English poetry reports in from every point of the compass and from eight different centuries, and it is simply to be expected that any given reader will have trouble making basic sense of much of it. Johnny performs dismally as a reader of sonnets, but how would Shakespeare fare with a rap CD or a Nintendo game?
Now for those of you who wish to place the Bard on a higher plane than Busta Rhymes and Sonic the Hedgehog, that is your right (and admittedly my first inclination as well). But on reflection, which truly helps us make sense of this world? Indeed I’m a product of this day. Perhaps my literature background gives me an expanded view of the world. Were it in math, perhaps I’d see equations everywhere…
