22 August 2012

Short Fiction: Hot Dogs


Scrumpy hated the circus. He nearly pulled my arm out of the socket with the fuss he kicked up when we passed by. I was no big fan either. Their presence in our clean wholesome little town created a small rank cesspool  on the village green. I thought the mayor must have lost his mind to allow them to set up there but he had made a big public statement about the old fashioned quaintness of this kind of family entertainment and anyone who said anything to the contrary just looked like some kind of child hating jerk.


18 August 2012

Lose the Flab: The Writer's Diet

It's too hot to move, almost too hot to think. But it's never too hot to procrastinate.

In order to avoid completing my first developmental editing assignment, I'm playing around with The Writer's Diet, a fun online tool that analyzes a sample of your writing for flabby prose. The tool identifies the overuse of "to be" verbs and passive constructions, abstract nouns and nominalizations, longs strings of prepositional phrases, adverbs and adjectives, and "waste words" (there is/are).

Just for fun I created a speech given by rotund little man to an admiring audience of townsfolk, who I imagine as all quite pleased with themselves. In addition to circuitous phrasing, nominalizations, and general pomposity, I gave him a pronounced fondness for speaking in capitals. His speech was scored "flabby" by the Writer's Diet, and I agree.

If you'd like to see the tool in action, you can cut and paste the text below into this link. Click on "See the full diagnosis" to get complete results.

The tool is not designed to tell you if your writing is good. Good writing, as the Helen Sword notes on The Writer's Diet, can use all of the elements tagged in the tool and can use them well. But more often, especially in academic or corporate writing, too many abstractions and passive constructions lead to some mighty snooze-worthy prose.

Curious about your own writing? Give it a try. To see my sample text, click on "read more."

08 August 2012

Summer Reading


Summer is flying by, but we still have a few weeks left for a leisurely read. A good thing too, since I've been remiss in posting Wendy's review, which was sent in just as I left for the US a few weeks ago.
—Kathy

***

Anticipating the long lazy days of summer, I optimistically downloaded eight books onto my Kindle before heading west to the Island of Noirmoutier in the French Atlantic. Of the eight, there are three which I would recommend as great summer reading: good writing, interesting plot, not too heavy.

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