Writing, Clear and Simple

“The worst thing you write is better than the best thing you didn’t write.” — Unknown

I found this quote (via a post on the Signal v. Noise blog comparing writing words to writing software) in an essay about “writing your first novel,” but it applies to everything you can try writing. For interesting blends of the obvious with the profound, it’s right up there with “You’re guaranteed to miss 100% of the pitches you don’t swing at.”

Don’t let the fear of failure paralyze you. Edison tried thousands of different filaments in his light bulbs until he found something that worked. He never considered those thousands of attempts to be failures; they were opportunities to learn. Look at everything you write, every opportunity you have to put words on paper, the same way.

Inspired by a post by Bill Walsh, I offer you a little quiz.

Bill said that a reader complained about the following “error” in his newspaper:

One of the few commanders who were successful in Iraq in that first year of the occupation, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, made studying counterinsurgency a requirement at the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, where mid-career officers are trained.

The reader said that it should be “who was successful” rather than “who were successful.” On the contrary, said Bill,  were is the correct tense.

The quiz: Which is it, and why? Drop your answer in the comments.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, Bill Walsh is a copy editor for The Washington Post. I’d rather you tried answering the question before you do, but if you really can’t resist and want to read Bill’s post, it’s here.

I’ve been working on a lens to accompany this blog.

What’s a lens, you ask? Here’s how Seth Godin defines it in his e-book Everyone’s an Expert (about Something):

A LENS FILTERS LIGHT AND SHOWS US WHAT WE NEED TO SEE. It focuses on some elements and hides others. Lenses are often different and frequently personal. (“Don’t wear your friend’s glasses,” mom shouts; “you might go blind!”)

An online lens is a page, a single page, that highlights one person’s view of the Web—not the whole Web, just one tiny part of it.

A lens gives context. When it succeeds, it delivers meaning.

The Writing, Clear and Simple lens is my attempt to pull together resources that will help you be a better writer. It’s under construction right now, but I invite you to take a look and let me know what you think.

When did women’s underwear become “innerwear?”

Etymology is the study of the origins of words, and knowing the history of a word—whether it has roots in other languages, how it has changed over time and geography—can help your writing in many ways. It can expand your vocabulary, as you learn about related words. It can help you choose exactly the right word for specific occasions, as you know more about the nuances and shades of meanings of seemingly synonymous terms.

And sometimes it’s just fun to learn what a word really means. Take, for example, ciao. Everybody knows it’s just a casual word of greeting or farewell, right? Kind of like aloha. It means both hello and goodbye.

Well, that’s how it’s used, but that’s not exactly what it means, as I learned today. According to The Free Dictionary, here’s the etymology of that innocuous little word:

Ciao first appears in English in 1929 in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which is set in northeast Italy during World War I. It is likely that this is where Hemingway learned the word, for ciau in Venetian dialect means “servant, slave,” and, as a casual greeting, “I am your servant.” Ciau corresponds to standard Italian schiavo; both words come from Medieval Latin sclavus, “slave.” A similar development took place with servus, the Classical Latin word for “slave,” in southern Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Poland, where servus is used as a casual greeting like ciao. At the opposite end of the world, in Southeast Asia, one even sees words meaning “slave” or “your slave” that have developed into pronouns of the first person, again to indicate respect and humility.

In other words, it was a way of saying “at your service.” Gives a new shade of meaning to a casual greeting, doesn’t it?

Ciao, baby!