In “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business,” Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, writes that “we are entering an era when free will be seen as the norm, not an anomaly.”
Source: Chris Anderson, “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business,” Wired, Feb. 25, 2008. Thanks to the Librarian in Black blog for the pointer.
You want to write something, but you don’t know where to begin. The page, the screen is empty, waiting. Your cursor blinks.
The problem is that the page is not really empty. The writer sees it filled with critics: the person you are writing to, the teacher who discouraged you from writing years before by pointing out all your errors, your colleagues who are waiting to catch you in a mistake.
Banish them. Push them over to the margins and let them fall off the edge. You will deal with them later. This is your time.
Picture the reader that you most want to see what you are writing. Are you writing a love note? Then picture your beloved’s eyes. Is your task to write a technical document? Then picture a colleague at work with whom you share an interest in this topic. Do you need information from someone you don’t know? Picture the kindest salesclerk or government official you have ever had to ask a question of, and keep in mind that person as you write.
Focus on that person in your mind and begin. You know what you know, and you know what you think. Now try to write as closely as you can to the way you would speak. How would you talk to this person if you were standing across from him or her? Think of your writing as a part of a conversation. You are speaking now through the words you type.
Type what you would say aloud. You can even read the words aloud after you’ve typed each sentence or paragraph. Listen to yourself. You sound pretty good, don’t you? Now keep going until you have said it all.
Don’t stop to correct yourself. Just keep going.
Now you’ve begun.
Related post: English as a Foreign Language
Tamara Straus of the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed novelist Carol Edgarian and editor Tom Jenks, who have been publishing a free online literary magazine, Narrative, the last five years. “The magazine’s primary goal: to connect more readers to more literary writers.” Read Straus’s interview.
Here’s a direct link to a Narrative interview (note to those with a slow Internet connection: it’s a PDF file) with one of my favorite writers, Richard Rodriguez. Narrative requires you to sign in to read, but access is free.
Source: Tamara Straus, Two Editors’ Online Journal Gives New Life to Literature, San Francisco Chronicle, March 6, 2008.
People often have difficulty knowing whether to write its or it’s. What’s the difference between the two, apart from one apostrophe?
The possessive its shows ownership, and it has no apostrophe. Use this form in any case where you are writing it and want to show ownership. A simple trick is to ask yourself whether you could replace its with either the word his or her. Let’s take this sentence:
The dog has lost its collar.
The collar belongs to the dog, so this is a case of ownership. If you knew that the dog was female, could you write this and still make sense?
The dog has lost her collar.
Yes, the word her fits the context of ownership, so you know that its will also fit here:
The dog has lost its collar.
Things get a little trickier when the it in question is an inanimate object:
The tree has lost its leaves.
Let’s use that trick again: Could you replace its with her in this sentence and still make sense — at least grammatical sense?
The tree has lost her leaves.
Maybe this won’t make much sense in the real world, because the English language doesn’t assign gender to most nouns, but yes, it works as a sentence. And now you know that this is a case for the possessive its:
The tree has lost its leaves.
Some of the its/it’s confusion comes from the fact that English often uses an apostrophe to show possession with nouns:
Anil’s daughter
Mexico’s economy
the tree’s branches
the car’s windshield
You might think it would be OK to write either “Mexico’s economy” or “it’s economy” to show possession, but things are not so simple. Whenever you use an apostrophe after it, you are writing a contraction for “it is”:
It’s five o’clock in the morning.
It’s a long way to Tipperary.
This car may not look great, but it’s all I’ve got.
“No matter what he said about me,” she cried, “it’s not true!”
So when you’re faced with writing its or it’s, ask yourself whether you could replace that word in the sentence with her. If that works, at least grammatically, you know to write its without the apostrophe. If that does not work and you mean “it is,” then add the apostrophe to write it’s.
And now, take a little break with a real San Francisco treat, the It’s-It.
Jordan Robertson of the Associated Press wrote this article on “Google hacking… a slick data-mining technique used by the Internet’s cops and crooks alike to unearth sensitive material mistakenly posted to public Web sites.”
Source: Goolag Program Mines Google for Hidden, Sensitive Information, San Francisco Chronicle, March 3, 2008
The act of writing is a journey, and these are some of the journeys I’ve taken.
An Inadvertent Revolution: Women on the World War II Home Front. I interviewed Emily Yellin, author of Our Mothers’ War, for the Berkeley Daily Planet in 2007. Yellin was to speak at a nearby event to commemorate the work of women known collectively as Rosie the Riveter, or sometimes Wanda the Welder, during that war. It’s a very fine book, informative and easy to read.
Chevron Access Needed for Richmond Bay Trail Link. This news article for the Berkeley Daily Planet began as a failed travel piece on the unexpected beauty of the part of the Bay Trail that moves through the beleaguered and much maligned city of Richmond, California. A few days after this story’s publication in Berkeley, the San Francisco Chronicle published a related story.
A Flashing Heaven of Luck. This interview with publisher John Martin of Black Sparrow Press was published in the North Bay Bohemian. I had wanted to walk into Martin’s publishing company to apply for a job for years while living in Santa Rosa, California. I finally got the courage to talk to him after landing the interview assignment, as the press was closing its doors for the last time. Martin was very gracious.
A Patriotic Act: The U.S. Patriot Act’s effect on booksellers. This article, written for OP magazine (later renamed Fine Books & Collections Magazine), was my first political piece. It required hours of research and interviews. What amazed me was that professionals — lawyers, booksellers — were very willing to talk to an amateur with almost no press credentials, simply to get the word out about an issue that they were passionate about.
Word Surprise: Gertrude Stein. I wrote this thesis over two long years, writing five pages by hand at my desk every day, in hopes of putting an end to my career as a perpetual student at San Francisco State University. One Saturday afternoon, a friend called to ask if I’d like to go see a movie with her. I declined, saying I had to work on my thesis. “When is it due?” she asked. “Two years from now,” I answered. She told me that was the worst rejection she had ever heard from anyone. We went to the movies.
Related post: Introduction: Background and Context
