Welcome to the February 25, 2008 edition of writers from across the blogosphere. It’s a bit late and there are some repeats from the last carnival, but it’s also full of new good reads as well. Enjoy!

writing

Jessse Hines presents The…

http://xenodochy.org/ex/quotes/beliefs.html

Perhaps because I’m a Gemini, it’s my nature to qualify. The use of “more,” “some,” and “many” comes naturally to me.

As a writer, though, those words blunt one’s effectiveness. I admit that, when I think I can get away with it without lying, I omit them and deal in generaliztions.

Sometimes 100 percent accuracy has to take a back seat to getting your point across.

In other words, I don’t want to come across as namby-pamby when, as a Gemini, that’s exactly what I am.

Thanks, JSO. I’ve never seen this issue addressed before!

Guess that if you’re without (much) access to the Internet, you’re on an outdoors adventure of some sort. Have a great time.

Fascinating language. I wish I remembered more than a smattering of it.

I do think that language impacts the way in which we think, though i am not ready to come down on one side of that debate or the other. I think of the difference between Russian and English in terms of word order. Our SVO structure makes us rely on “to be”; spoken English, in particular, uses “to be” heavily, and so it translates easily into written English. Russian has no rule about word order. For example, “I love you” can be said four different ways, and the speaker can remove the subject completely because the conjugation of the verb implies the subject. All four ways of saying “I love you” mean what they say, but there is also an interesting shading of implication that stems from how the speaker chooses to phrase the sentence. Or maybe this phenomenon is something that i imagined because i was predisposed to compare these subtle shifts of grammar against my native grammar.

In any case, thank you for making me think.

I’ve been teaching news writing since 1990. And arguing with Slammy about the difference between subjective and “objective” journalism. Much of what you write applies.

I also teach opinion writing. Oddly, it’s hard to break students of the habit of purely descriptive or half-and-half descriptive and inferential writing. They say they have opinion, but the vocabulary base is often lacking (that binary thinking!) to make fine distinctions of meanings and judgments.

Thanks for the time you took for write this post. I’ll be spreading it among my students.

A new driver has trouble because there are there are a thousand things to pay attention to at any second and not enough time to do so, while the more experienced driver will limit attention to know problematic issues, and let the rest take care of itself unless they spot something unusual.

That such expectations cause extensive chain reaction crashes, shows how that thinking can go wrong, but unless we want to limit all travel to 20mph, everyone who drives faster runs that risk. You head over the rise of a hill you expect the road to continue on the other side, you don’t drive up and look over. Though if your experience indicated that not all roads continue, you might do just that, the more dramatic the discovery the greater the influence.

There is a problem here because the more dramatic the event, the rarer it is likely to be, as the drama is often because it is rare and unexpected, yet it will have much more influence in decisions about the common situation. Where there has been a great deal of trauma, either early in life, or very recent, the influence can cause the reactions to become quite odd from an outside viewpoint.

The evolving expert abuse of this tendency needs to be seriously studied by those who would restrict such abuse, hold it accountable, and find a way to deflect or repair the results of the trauma.

It’s not always easy. I tend to catch this stuff in edits, rather than in the process of writing my thoughts the first time around.