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.

Paste a sample of your writing into the box on this website to find out which famous writer you write like.   Disclaimer: it may lack accuracy: pasting a sample of Alice Munro yielded a result of Stephen King.  And this blog post?  Arthur Conan Doyle!

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.

Visit this blog for unexpected juxtapositions between modern television screen shots and the literary quotations they’ve been captioned with, or, as the author Maris Kreizman puts it: “Kurt Vonnegut, meet Brenda Walsh.”

In memory of

J.D. Salinger

Avrom Sutzkever

and

Howard Zinn

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.

This article from the Washington Post discusses the potential effects of new technology on the narrative form.

There’s endless talk in the news media about the next killer app. Maybe Twitter really will change the world. Maybe the next big thing will be just an algorithm, like Google’s citation-ranking equation. But Smith is betting that there will still be a market, somehow, for what he does. Narrative isn’t merely a technique for communicating; it’s how we make sense of the world. The storytellers know this.

They know that the story is the original killer app.

In a recent article for the Guardian, Umberto Eco muses on the decline of handwriting skills.

Recently, two Italian journalists wrote a three-page newspaper article (in print, alas) about the decline of handwriting. By now it’s well-known: most kids – what with computers (when they use them) and text messages – can no longer write by hand, except in laboured capital letters.

He goes on to note some reasons for this decline, which he believes began even before the advent of computers.  He also muses on the importance of the art of writing by hand in general–the hand-eye coordination it teaches and the opportunity it provides to simply slow down and think.