The uninhabited clause (17)

The Uninhabited Clause* is a clause with a physical or conceptual subject, as opposed to a human subject. For example, “New York” is a physical subject, “assertiveness” is a conceptual subject, and “New Yorkers” is a human subject. There is nothing inherently wrong with using Uninhabited Clauses. But when we use a lot of them, we bore and exhaust our readers. They want to read about people.

Example

Here’s the opening paragraph of a Boston Globe article titled “The broken dialogue on men’s rights,” by Cathy Young:

Never mind the “war on women:” According to growing numbers of bloggers, activists, and authors – some of them women – it’s males in modern Western society who are under siege and whose rights need defending. Is this the next frontier for gender justice, or a woman-hating backlash? Men’s advocacy raises important and worthy issues that often draw unfair ridicule. Unfortunately, it is also prone to toxic rhetoric that subverts its valid points and alienates potential supporters.

Analysis

The author uses two human subjects:

you (implied) mind
who are

And eight non-human subjects:

it is
rights need
this is
advocacy raises
that draw
it is
that subverts
that alienates

By so frequently hiding the people, she takes a lively topic – “the war of the sexes” – and makes it sound a little dull. (To be fair, I hasten to add that in later paragraphs she uses human subjects more frequently.)

A livelier version

By putting in more people, she could have made the opening paragraph livelier. For example:

Never mind the “war on women:” More and more bloggers, activists, and authors – including women – are saying that in modern Western society males are the people who are under siege and who need their rights defended. Is this the next frontier for gender justice, or a woman-hating backlash? Men’s rights activists raise important and worthy issues and often draw unfair ridicule. Unfortunately, they sometimes use toxic rhetoric that subverts their valid points and alienates potential supporters.

This version contains ten human subjects:

you (implied) mind
Bloggers are saying
activists are saying
authors are saying
males are
who are
who need
activists raise
activists draw
they use

And three non-human subjects:

this is
that subverts
that alienates

The rewrite took me 1 minute and 25 seconds.

The Takeaway: Unless you are writing about abstract topics such as metaphysics or mathematics, you should strive to include persons in most of your clauses. Otherwise, you may sound academic and boring.

See disclaimer.

*My coinage, so far as I know.

My top 10 tips for productive writing

Here are my 10 favorite productivity tips, all of them copied from highly productive writers. I wrote this post for the freelancer, so if you’re a staff writer, please adapt the tips to your particular office environment – for example, in Tip #9, you may prefer to keep the Post-It-Note out of sight.

Managing

1. Choose a reliable, easy-to-use system for planning, scheduling, keeping track of to-do’s, taking notes, and capturing ideas so you won’t forget them. Keep adjusting your system until, over time, it becomes effortless. Currently, I use Google Calendar and I carry a Moleskine pocket notebook everywhere except in the shower.

2. For most writers, the best work schedule is to write in the morning and leave the afternoon for administration, correspondence, social media, and research. Experiment to see if it suits you.

3. Ruthlessly schedule and jealously guard large blocks of time for writing. You can also get a lot done during waiting time if you always have work-in-progress with you in a pocket, backpack or briefcase. For example, I’m always writing or editing in the waiting rooms of auto-repair shops, doctors and dentists.

Writing

4. Use Mindmapping. It’s more efficient and effective than outlining, and it helps prevent procrastination.

5. Keep on hand a picture of a friend or acquaintance who is a member of the audience you’re writing for – a techie if you’re writing for techies, a business person if you’re writing for business people, and so on. Occasionally look at the picture and ask yourself if that person would understand and like what you are writing.

6. Never stop to edit while writing a draft; finish the whole draft and then edit it. While you’re writing, steadfastly refuse to look at social media or answer idle phone calls. Remember, you’re a professional writer and thinker, not a clerk.

7. Break once every 60 or 90 minutes. Stretch. Drink water. Walk around the office or outside the building. Rest your eye muscles by focusing on distant objects.

Quitting

8. When we’re tired, we work unproductively and don’t realize it. Make it a habit to quit writing before you get tired – a tip from Dale Carnegie’s 1948 bestseller How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. And always quit in the middle of a sentence, so that next morning you’ll start writing easily and without hesitation.

9. If you’re feeling discouraged by an assignment, do this before leaving the office: On a Post-It-Note, write “You can do it. You’ve done it before.” Stick the note to your monitor. That reminder has kept me from despair on many a wintry morning.

Relaxing

10. Watch fewer TV programs and read more books and magazines. It will sharpen your intelligence, expand your knowledge, and refine your diction.

The Takeaway: By using these techniques, and adding your own, you can constantly improve your productivity.

Thanks to Janice L. Brown, Dale Carnegie, Stephen R. Covey, Daphne Gray-Grant, Charles R. Hobbs, Michael Hyatt, Stephen King, Alan Lakein, and Robert Ringer for dozens of productivity techniques.

Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in the sales of any product or service mentioned in this post. See general disclaimer.

Quotations on thinking, speaking and writing (21)

“I look for ambiguity when I’m writing because life is ambiguous.”
~Keith Richards (pictured)

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”
~Flannery O’Connor

“The most important thing in communication is to hear what is not being said.”~Peter Drucker

“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.”
~Helen Keller

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
~Rainer Maria Rilke

“One afternoon when I was seven I complained to [my grandfather] of boredom, and he... told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else’s.”
~John Taylor Gatto

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
~Richard Feynman (It was on his blackboard when he died.)

The Takeaway: Keep an open mind.

See disclaimer.

A manly tone – Anton Chekhov

In a long letter, the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov (pictured) admonished his older brother Nikolai, a talented artist but a drunkard, that he was living a lie. Anton’s tone is manly: direct and substantive. It is strikingly different from the pussyfooting tone that many American men use today (samples here and here).

For example, Anton is direct and substantive when he expresses sympathy and respect for his brother:

As your brother and intimate, I assure you that I understand you and sympathize with you from the bottom of my heart. I know all your good qualities like the back of my hand. I value them highly and have only the greatest respect for them. If you like, I can even prove how I understand you by enumerating them. In my opinion you are kind to the point of fault, magnanimous, unselfish, you’d share your last penny, and you’re sincere. Hate and envy are foreign to you, you are open-hearted, you are compassionate with man and beast, you are not greedy, you do not bear grudges, and you are trusting. You are gifted from above with something others lack: you have talent. This talent places you above millions of people, for there is only one artist for every two million people on earth.

He is also direct and substantive when he comes to the main point:

You have only one failing, the cause of the lie you’ve been living, your troubles, and your intestinal catarrh. It’s your extreme lack of culture.... Please forgive me... The thing is, life lays down certain conditions. If you want to feel at home among intellectuals, to fit in and not find their presence burdensome, you have to have a certain amount of breeding. Your talent has brought you into their midst. You belong there, but... you seem to yearn [to] escape and feel compelled to waver between the cultured set and your next-door neighbors. It’s the bourgeois side of you coming out, the side raised on birch thrashings beside the wine cellar and handouts, and it’s hard to overcome, terribly hard.

He states and describes the conditions that he believes “civilized people ought to satisfy.” I summarize and paraphrase them here:

They respect other people.
They have deep compassion.
They pay their debts.
They are candid and truthful, even in small matters.
They do not fish for compliments.
They are not starfu**ers.
They respect and exercise their talent.
They “cultivate their aesthetic sensibilities.”

In the letter, Anton Chekhov (more precisely, the translator) uses none of the creepy effeminate euphemisms that so many men use today. For example, he does not use issues as code for failings, or self-esteem as code for unearned self-respect.

Refreshing, isn’t it?

The Takeaway: If you are a man, talk and write like a man. Be direct and substantive, not evasive and flimsy.

See disclaimer.

Order

When readers encounter a series, they expect it to be in order, usually in a specific order. For example, if you’ve just taken your seat in a concert hall, and you’re looking at the evening’s program, you expect it be in chronological order, the order in which the pieces will be performed. And you would expect a list of the concert hall’s benefactors to be in alphabetical order by last name (sometimes within groups that broadly indicate level of generosity, highest to lowest).

Careful writers try to put every series in proper order. In contrast, a careless writer will often present a series in a jumble. For example, here is the last paragraph in an article about false allegations of sexual abuse:

But if no-one [sic] approximates to what they are taken to be, then authenticity and trust disappear. The value of anonymity and the precious -privacy in public- it brings, comes from a reliable assumption of shared values between people not known to each other from which the trust necessary for society to function properly derives. (Source)

The writer apparently is trying to describe a causal chain. But he does not put the links of the chain in proper order.

After some guesswork and two rewrites, I came up with this:

But if strangers do not share our values, strangers will not approximate to what they appear to be, and we will not be able to trust strangers. Then society will not be able to function properly and no one will be able to enjoy anonymity or “privacy in public.”

I think that my version is clearer and that I have captured what the author meant. However, I am not certain. I welcome your comments.

The Takeaway: When you are presenting a series, put it in order, usually in the order that readers expect. And when the order is not what readers expect, state the order.

See disclaimer.