In  “The Art of Good Writing,” Adam Haslett of the Financial Times considers the way in which sentence form dictates content.  In reviewing Stanley Fish’s new book, Haslett compares the rules endorsed by Strunk and White — those emphasizing brevity — with some more complex sentences from Henry James, David Foster Wallace, and others,  to show that meaning cannot be separated from sound.  It’s an excellent article, and worth reading to see how it applies not just to literary fiction, but essay style in general.

This weekend’s episode of  On the Media talked about bookselling, eBooks, and the changing landscape for the publishing industry.  The full audio and transcript can be found here.

In The American Scholar, Sven Birkerts writes about the effect of the Internet on the novel and our ability to maintain focus on a complex narrative:

“The problem we face in a culture saturated with vivid competing stimuli is that the first part of the transaction will be foreclosed by an inability to focus—the first step requires at least that the language be able to reach the reader, that the word sounds and rhythms come alive in the auditory imagination. But where the attention span is keyed to a different level and other kinds of stimulus, it may be that the original connection can’t be made. Or if made, made weakly. Or will prove incapable of being sustained. Imagination must be quickened and then it must be sustained—it must survive interruption and deflection. Formerly, I think, the natural progression of the work, the ongoing development and complication of the situation, if achieved skillfully, would be enough. But more and more comes the complaint, even from practiced readers, that it is hard to maintain attentive focus. The works have presumably not changed. What has changed is either the conditions of reading or something in the cognitive reflexes of the reader. Or both.

All of us now occupy an information space blazing with signals. We have had to evolve coping strategies. Not merely the ability to heed simultaneous cues from different directions, cues of different kinds, but also—this is important—to engage those cues more obliquely. When there is too much information, we graze it lightly, applying focus only where it is most needed. We stare at a computer screen with its layered windows and orient ourselves with a necessarily fractured attention. It is not at all surprising that when we step away and try to apply ourselves to the unfragmented text of a book we have trouble. It is not so easy to suspend the adaptation.”

Kevin Hartnett of The Millions reflects on the rise of Kindle and the loss of bookshelves.

A chief virtue of digital books is said to be their economical size—they take up no space at all!—but even a megabyte seems bulky compared to what can be conveyed in the few cubic feet of a bookshelf.  What other vessel is able to hold with such precision, intricacy, and economy, all the facets of your life: that you bake bread, vacationed in China, fetishize Melville, aspire to read Shakespeare, have coped with loss, and still tote around a copy of The Missing Piece as a totem of your childhood.

The Guardian features dos and don’ts from authors such as Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaimon, and Joyce Carol Oates.  The project was inspired by Elmore Leonard’s new book, 10 Rules of Writing.

In memory of

J.D. Salinger

Avrom Sutzkever

and

Howard Zinn

On his blog The Millions, C. Max Magee has posted a conversation with a confessed book pirate — someone who uploads and downloads books illegally via the internet.  While some of the questions and answers seem to just skim the surface, the interview does offer some interesting insight into the mind of a person who obtains books illegally (as opposed to, say, borrowing them from the library for free).

In August of 2009, William Zinsser gave a talk to incoming international students of the Columbia journalism program, reproduced here in the American Scholar. At the end of the speech, Zinsser summarizes his advice:

Repeat after me:
Short is better than long.
Simple is good. (Louder)
Long Latin nouns are the enemy.
Anglo-Saxon active verbs are your best friend.
One thought per sentence.

The speech is worth reviewing for both international students and native English speakers, particularly those who will soon begin to write their personal statements.

In a recent Times Online article, Ben Macintyre writes about the death of the narrative at the hands of the internet.  According to Macintyre, the fast-paced nature of the internet has made us unable to focus our attention in a sustained manner.

The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé.

Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message, we are in state of Continual Partial Attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that someone distracted by an e-mail message alert takes an average of 24 minutes to return to the same level of concentration.

We crave plot, he continues, but the internet is not the forum for the long-form narrative–especially not when that next webpage is only a click away.  The cell phone stories that have become extremely popular in Japan may herald the next narrative form–compressed, yes, but still containing characters and a narrative arc, “proof,” he says, “that the ancient need for narrative, hardwired into human nature, can sit comfortably with the wiring of the newest technology.”

In a recent post to 3 Quarks Daily, Daniel Rourke discusses Socrates, the internet, and the instability of text.

Since the invention of writing, and its evolutionary successor the printing-press, text has commanded an authority that far exceeds any other medium. By reducing the flowing staccato rhythms of speech to typographically identical indelible marks we managed, over the course of little more than 2000 years, to standardise the reading consciousness. But in our rush to commodify the textual experience we lost touch with the very material that allowed illiteracy to become the exception, rather than the rule. We forgot that it is the very fallibility of text and book that make them such powerful thinking technologies.