Fritinancy

Book Review: “How to Not Write Bad”

Ben Yagoda’s new book has a cheeky title: How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them. It’s a compact little volume, just 172 pages, that’s intended for students and teachers but will be welcomed by anyone who wants his or her* writing to be appreciated. And it’s such a good example of good writing—vivid, charming, funny—that even experienced writers will read it with pleasure.

 

 

In his introduction, Yagoda says the inspiration for his title came from a psychoanalytic concept first proposed in the 1950s: “the good-enough mother” (or parent) who doesn’t solve every problem but still manages to get the job done pretty well. “What I’m talking about here,” Yagoda writes, “is good-enough writing. As with parenting, it isn’t necessarily easy to achieve, but it’s definitely achievable. And it’s a decidedly worthwhile goal.”

How to get there? By reading a lot, of course—preferably writing that has been “selected and processed by an editor, and then ‘published.’” And once you sit down to write, Yagoda says, write mindfully. (Here I pause to consider that Ben Yagoda’s surname can be anagrammed into god, yoga, and Yoda.) A big part of mindful writing is maintaining “an awareness of and attention to the (hypothetical or real) person who will eventually be reading your words.”

Yagoda teaches advanced journalism and writing at the University of Delaware—he also writes the Not One-Off Britishisms blog and is a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog—and most of the examples in the book come from his students. The majority of those students, he writes, “put me in mind of what Jack Nicholson famously shouted to Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men. The Cruise character couldn’t handle the truth, Nicholson said. Well, most students, I’ve found, can’t handle writing ‘well.’ At this point in their writing lives, that goal is simply too ambitious.”

One bad student example should suffice:

The criteria that made this site able to be nominated are because of the uniqueness of the content it possesses.

Yagoda’s suggested not-bad rewrite:

The site has excellent content.

Some specific bits of wisdom from How to Not Write Bad:

On preparing to write: “First, turn off the radio, the iPod, the television; put your phone on silence and in your pocket, X out of or minimize all screens other than the one you’re writing on. Multitasking = bad writing.”

On spelling: “Spell-check, in many ways a wonderful innovation, has caused spelling muscles—never especially robust to being with—to atrophy to the point that they now have the firmness of mint jelly.”

On punctuation: “You can dismiss apostrophes—and punctuation in general—as just a series of technical details. I prefer to look at them as measures of mindfulness.”

On the inadvisability of punctuating by ear: “”[S]tudents tend to insert commas at places where they would pause in speaking the sentence. This has about the same reliability as the rhythm method in birth control.”

On the passive voice: “The passive is a problem if and only if it leaves in its wake an insistent question that begins with the word Who?”

How to Not Write Bad is available in all the usual places, in print and e-formats, including, naturally, on Amazon, where Yagoda admits to obsessively tracking the book’s ranking. On publication day, February 5, he combined this “narcissistic endeavor” with some fitting philanthropy: For every ranking drop of 100, he donated a copy of How to Not Write Bad to Mighty Writers, a Philadelphia after-school program that teaches kids ages 7 to 17 “to think and write clearly.” I think the game is off now—at last check he’d donated 17 copies—but you may still want to support Mighty Writers, which looks like a mighty fine endeavor. And buy the book, of course.

By the way, once you’ve mastered the advice in How Not to Write Bad I suggest you read Yagoda’s 2005 book The Sound on the Page, which I wrote about in 2007.

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Disclaimers: 1) I received a review copy of How to Not Write Bad from the publisher, Riverhead Books. 2) The David Friedman to whom Yagoda dedicates the book is not the David Friedman to whom I am related.

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* Yagoda acknowledges that within 10 to 15 years many uses of singular they will be acceptable in formal writing. “However,” he writes, “they’re not acceptable now, so you have to make adjustments.”

Somethin’s Missin’

Picking up on yesterday’s theme of apostrophe’d brand names, here are more examples of squiggles in places you wouldn’t expect to find them.

Exhibit A: Amaz’n Asian Sesame Chik’n.

 

I learned about this frozen product at The Impulsive Buy, which tested it and found it “not amaz’n, but appetiz’n.” The “chik’n” spelling here communicates “just kiddin’ – it’s veggie chicken!” That isn’t a hard-and-fast spelling rule, though. As I wrote in a 2011 post about the names of “further processed foods”: “Chik’n (or chick’n) can be chicken-derived or just chicken-ish. It can come from any of a dozen or so unrelated companies. The only thing the odd spellings guarantee is a certain degree of unnatural-ness.”

As for “amaz’n,” I surmise that it’s there 1) to chime with “Asian” and 2) to mirror the look of “chik’n.”

For what it’s worth, “amazing” topped the list of Lake Superior State University’s 2012 List of Banished Words, and there’s a thread on Yelp’s Portland (Oregon) site titled “I Hate the Word ‘AMAZING’.”

 

Exhibit B: Chop’t.

I’d never heard of Chop’t—the fast-salad chain, not to be confused with “Chopped,” the Food Network program—until I read Matthew Yglesias’s withering comments about it on Slate. (My excuse: there are no Chop’t restaurants outside New York and Washington, DC.) Yglesias is annoyed by Chop’t’s wanton use of “Cobb” to describe any old seasonal salad (see also “Stop the Cobb-sanity”), and I can’t say I disagree. Salad historians tell us that the Cobb salad was invented at the Brown Derby in Hollywood and named for the restaurant’s owner, Robert Cobb; the requisite components are chopped greens, tomato, bacon, boiled or roasted breast of chicken (not chik’n!), hard-boiled egg, chives, Roquefort cheese, and red-wine vinaigrette. Yes, hominy, pepper jack cheese, and pita chips are tasty, but they do not belong in a Cobb salad. (See “Flagstaff Food Truck Cobb” on the current seasonal menu.)

But I digress: my own interest is in “Chop’t,” in which the apostrophe replaces a couple of letters and the T substitutes for D, possibly to approximate the word’s actual pronunciation but more likely because CHOPTSALAD.COM was available for purchase.

The spelling conveys a vague if inaccurate sense of old-timey Britishness. But mostly the apostrophe-t just calls attention to itself, the way gratuitous umlauts in brand names do. (The British do prefer -t suffixes for some past-tense verbs such as leapt, spilt, and learnt. I even came across an argument that dreamt and dreamed have different meanings; this may be true in Commonwealth countries, but not in the US.) 

For an even odder example of -ed changing to apostrophe-t, see my 2008 post about “home bake’t delicious muffin.” And for more about “the most misunderstood and misused piece of punctuation in the language,” see The Dreaded Apostrophe.

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UPDATE: Commenter Clachnit reminded me of the Kia cee'd, which I wrote about in (can it be?) 2006.

The Airing of Grievances

Yes, I’m observing Festivus a few days early this year. The aluminum pole is looking handsomely unadorned (I find tinsel distracting), and I’m feeling confident about my chances in the Feats of Strength. But first, my favorite part of the Seinfeld-inspired holiday: The Airing of Grievances.

I’ll start with the most grievous of my 2012 grievances. Stick around – they get funnier and less lethal, I promise. (Past grievances: 2011, 2010, 2009.)

X Just Got ... Better?

Here’s yet another twist on a very familiar snowclone. This variation, on a billboard from the streaming service Roku, brings up some distressing associations.

 

“Insomnia Just Got Better!” Bryant and 6th streets, San Francisco.

I get it, sort of. If you’re lying awake at 3 a.m., why not make the best of a bad thing? With Roku, you can watch a movie or play a game instead of uselessly counting sheep.

Still, in the conventional “X Just Got Better” formula, “X” = “something good”: “Summer just got better,” “Beef just got better.” The advertised product or service promises to improve on an already good thing. Here “X” is bad, and all Roku can do is make it not quite as bad.

I know, I know. It’s a joke! I should lighten up! Well, sorry: for some of us, insomnia is no laughing matter. I will thank you, Roku, to delete the annoying exclamation mark and change the subject.

Oh, while I’m at it: Yes, there should be punctuation after “Keep Streaming.” It’s that old Donner Party Comma problem again.

By the way, I used to think Roku was pronounced “rock you,” but it isn’t. It’s pronounced “roh-koo,” to rhyme with “beaucoup.” According to a Wikipedia entry, the company was founded in 2002 by Anthony Wood; he named it Roku, the Japanese word for “six,” because it was the sixth company he’d launched.

Other posts in the “X Just Got Y” series here (with examples from Gorilla Glass and many other companies) and here.

Fix These Ads, Please

Here’s a slightly belated quiz in honor of National Punctuation Day. What’s missing from each of these national ads?

 

Email promotion for the Pizza Hut P’Zolo.

 

Magazine ad for Crest Pro-Health “clinical” rinse and toothpaste.

 

 

If you said “the comma of direct address” – also known as “the Donner Party comma” – give yourself a standing ovation, sir or madam.

The P’Zolo headline needs a comma after “YA” to make it clear that the word is slang for “you” and not the librarian’s abbreviation for “young adult.” The Crest headline needs a comma after “hike” to avoid suggesting that the reader deserves a wall-mountable award for going the distance on the Appalachian Trail. (Better layout would help, too: the idiomatic “take a hike” shouldn’t be broken up over two lines.)

Who’s at fault? Maybe the copywriter; maybe the proofreader, if there was one. Most likely, a comma-averse art director decreed that an extra punctuation mark would disturb the Platonic perfection of his design. I speak from experience: I’ve had many frustrating conversations with designers and art directors who arbitrarily removed correct and necessary punctuation “because it looked funny.” To which I say: Stick to pictures, bub.

Ampersandstorm

In retail branding this season, ampersands are the new black. I’ve written previously about ampersand-linked retail brand names like Judith & Charles, Fifth & Pacific, and Georgi & Willow, and I’m working on a new post that compiles more than 30 additional “X & Y” names. In the meantime, here are two examples of how the ampersand is extending its reach.

Crate & Barrel, the mid-market home-furnishings chain, this week launched a $10 million ad campaign based on the ampersand. The ads—which will appear in magazines, on TV, online, and in stores—use “X & Y” headlines to celebrate connections: “Hostess & Mostess,” “Love & Light,” “Happy & Hanukkah.”

Here’s one of the print ads:

 

And here’s the “Now & Forever” spot:

 

See more Crate & Barrel ads at Creativity Online. 

To make sure you get the point, the stores are selling a pillow with “our iconic Helvetica ampersand.”

 

In another corner of retaildom, women’s-wear designer Eileen Fisher has created an “Ampersand” category to tell stories that go “behind the label” and beyond color and fabric content.

The home page:

A print ad:

Vanity Fair, September 2012

 

In case you didn’t know: The word “ampersand” first appeared in print in 1837; it’s a contraction of “and per se and.” Read my 2007 post about ampersands, in which I quote liberally from Ben Yagoda’s excellent book When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It.

Title Nine Scores, Fouls

I had some errands nearby, so I stopped into the Title Nine store in Berkeley over the weekend to see what was new with this local brand. 

A bit of background: Title Nine was founded in 1989, taking its name from Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex to any person seeking the benefits of any federally funded education program. Title IX opened doors to girls and women who wanted to play sports in school; Title Nine sells non-technical sports gear and clothing. The company has 19 retail stores—none in malls, the website boasts—243 employees, and a manifesto.

Appropriately, there’s a lot of playful, you-go-girl energy in a Title Nine store. This poster typifies the spirit:

“You are so busted!” is very cute. The medallion touts the company’s “bravangelists”: also nice.

I actually laughed out loud at this sign displayed above the entrance to the bra department—excuse me, the “Home for Unruly Girls Support Center.”

If you don’t get the joke in “unruly girls,” see the Online Slang Dictionary.

So far, so good. By the evidence, Title Nine is a company that makes a big investment in copywriting, and that’s a good thing. The attention to words carries over into the dressing rooms—or so I thought until I encountered this sign:

 

“Have a Fit!” is fun. So are the other headings: Containment, Mind the Strap, Be Smooth, Know the Terrain, and Think Straight. Then I read the very last sentence: “The bra should lay straight.”

Aha! So Title Nine’s editorial department has an Achilles heel after all: the lay/lie fault. The bra should lie straight, if you please.

(Listen, I get that a lot of people mix up lay and lie, and in fact I tolerate “lay” for “lie” in casual speech. But I can’t condone its appearance in published prose. And that includes marketing copy: See my critiques of the Hanes Lay Flat Collar, the SpeedSleep ad, the Back2Life back-pain “solution.” This is why professional copyeditors were invented. They know this stuff. They can help.)

I picked up a fall catalog to see whether the dressing-room sign was anomalous. Nope: The error is even worse in the catalog (insert, page 7), where in addition to the lay/lie error we have a comma splice:

“The bra should lay straight, if it rides up, it’s still too loose.”

There needs to be a period—a colon would be OK, too—after “straight.”

The “lay” error persists on the website:

I leafed through the catalog to distract myself from all this lay-ola. Unfortunately, my eye fell on an even bigger boo-boo—in a name with a trademark symbol, no less:

 

Page 19, fall catalog.

I was drawn to that “Wooliscious” headline because in all the time I’ve been tracking -licious compounds—see here, here, here, and here—I’d never come across a -liscious. It looked odd, and I wondered whether it was a clumsy attempt at a portmanteau with “luscious.” Nope again: In the product copy—and on the Web—the word is spelled “Woolicious.”

I’m guessing Title Nine’s lawyers have already pitched a fit over this mistake, so I’ll leave it at that.

In my crappy photo you can just barely make out the name of this garment: “The Swacket.” It’s “more than a sweater—not quite a jacket,” the copy says. Honestly, is that the best they could come up with? Because all I can think of is the poor sacrificial fracket.

I’ll have another post about Title Nine later this week.

Because They Say So

The San Francisco magazine 7x7* brought to my attention a pop-up juice bar that opened in the city over Memorial Day weekend. It’s called Sow.

This is what I pictured:

Sow and juice-imbibing piglets. Image from JustMommies.

No, no, not /sau/, insists the Sow website.

 

See? It’s Sōw, with a macron over the O to tell you to pronounce it as a “long” vowel. Or to confuse you further.

And because most city folks won’t know a sow from a sōw from a hole in the ground, there’s a dictionary definition:

verb /sō/ plant (seed) by scattering it on or in the earth

That’s mildly interesting, but so what? A dictionary definition doesn’t make me want to patronize the shop. Besides, while the “planting” concept might make “Sow” an apt name for a nursery or a community garden, the connection between “scattering seed” and “drinking fresh juice” is fairly remote. (From what I’ve read—on the Kickstarter page, for example—Sow doesn’t grow its own fruits and vegetables.)

Another quibble: Nowadays, if a non-farming person is at all familiar with the verb form of “sow,” it’s probably as part of an idiom. And that idiom is a shady one: sow discord, sow rancor, sow rumors, sow one’s wild oats. 

As for the macron, here’s something I wrote in 2008 about Grāpple, a brand of grape-flavored apples:

Basic naming rule: If you have to rely on diacritical marks like the macron over the a to clarify pronunciation, your brand name isn't working. Additional hints (“Say Grape-L”) only make you seem more desperate.

That observation applies to Sōw, too.

We recently saw some fancy macronizing with Mondelēz, the new name of Kraft Food Inc.’s global snacks business. The macron over the second E is there to tell you—force you—to pronounce the name “moan-de-LEEZ.” But even the company’s original press release dropped the macron after the headline, and a more recent press release dispensed with it altogether. So go right ahead and say “MAHN-de-lezz” if you please. Or mahn-de-LAY. I won’t turn you in to the brand police.

(As Tate Linden of Stokefire, a branding agency, said in a tweet about Mondelez: “Any name that requires the Latin Extended character set gets a FAIL in my book. How many people can type an ē?”)

Let’s extract the juice from this critique:

Outlining the Victim

“Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.” – E.B. White, in a 1969 interview with The Paris Review. 

White’s observation leaped to mind when I read this passage from “Inquiring Minds: The Spanish Inquisition Revisited,” an essay by Adam Gopnik in the January 16, 2012, New Yorker (paywall). Gopnik’s subject is contemporary historians with a revisionist perspective on the Inquisition:

The first is a memorable figure by any standard: the elder Netanyahu, Bibi’s now hundred-and-one-year-old father, Benzion, who, over years of research, has established, at least to his own satisfaction, that the idea of a flourishing clandestine community of Iberian Marranos, who paid lip service to Christian rites and rituals while secretly remaining Jews, is a myth, invented by the Inquisition for its own evil ends and taken up, much later, by the Jews, in the hope that it would make their ancestors seem less fearful and more resistant.

That’s 13 commas in a single 89-word sentence.

If I’d been on the copy desk, I’d probably have deleted at least some of those commas (the ones around “much later,” for example) or replaced them with em dashes. Still, one can’t help being impressed. I recommend that you read the sentence aloud, pausing wherever a comma tells you to do so, to understand what Gopnik’s up to.

Take This, Ray-Ban

From a full-page ad on page 127 in the December issue of Esquire:

 

 

Let’s take that phrase literally, as it’s punctuated: “Take that physics” (Newtonian, say) as opposed to “this physics” (quantum).

I don’t think so. The sentence needs a comma of direct address, also known as the Donner Party comma: “Take that, physics.”

It gets no better on the website, where we find another “Take that physics” as well as this:

 

“Tecnology”? And down there in the reverse type, “whilst”? This is the USA version of the website, Ray-Ban: we’re while folk on this side of the pond.