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Floccinaucinihilipilification and why you shouldn't use it.

8/12/2022

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There's a general rule that states that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. The long word in the title and other such attempts at showing how clever you are fall into that category. I saw the word 'onerous' in a piece of communication recently which triggered this post.

When you are learning a language for the first time, it's natural to want to impress others with your newly-acquired 'mastery'. Reminds me of this little kid who came home from school saying, 'Mom, I learnt a new word today'. Mom says, 'What's that?' Kid says, 'I'll give you three surmises'. It's ok. For a kid. Not for people who get paid to write professionally.

Because communication is about clarity. It's more about how much the other person you are talking to doesn't know or care about than about your own cleverness. That doesn't mean you have to dumb it down, far from it. You just have to keep it simple and effective. 

Consider this powerful sentence from Hemingway. In The Sun Also Rises, there's a passage where a few people are talking. One of them says, "And I went bankrupt". Another guy asks, "How did you go bankrupt?" to which the first person says, "Well, gradually, then suddenly." Brilliant, don't you think? And it applies to most situations in life. How did your marriage end? How did you lose your job? How did you become an expert? (Like that saying about overnight success taking at least ten years). 

The power of that reply is in its simplicity. It comes from experience and resonates with the reader at a different level. There's a reason proverbs, which are distilled wisdom passed down through generations, are expressed in simple language. Truth or what passes for it, expressed in simple yet powerful words, tends to last longer and have more impact. 

Floccinaucinihilipilification, by the way, means 'to regard something as worthless'. As in floccinaucinihilipilification of unnecessarily big words. 

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Bullets over body copy

4/2/2016

 
'A clear sentence is no accident', says the author of 'On writing well'. Well, looks like you don't have to look far to find examples of these little 'accidents'. Just pick up any magazine or browse any website and you'll see most of the article headlines will have a number in them. 10 ways to improve your sex life. 37 websites for free graphics. 8 ways to get over your ex. Even football sites are learning precisely 5 lessons from every weekend match. Nothing more, nothing less. Just 5 lesson, derby or not.
I thought headlines like these died along with their 'how-to' cousins. Apparently not. Left to these guys, they would probably rewrite the classic Lemon ad with "3389 reasons why a VW is better" (3389 being the number of QC inspectors in those days). You can understand why, though. It's sheer laziness.I mean why go through hours of writing and rewriting when you can easily crank out a bunch of 'X ways to do Y' headlines? You can spend that time more productively, by hitting the like button on cat videos and posting close-up shots of food. 
I don't know when it will stop, but it's spreading like a cliche. Close on its heels are the bullet points (bullets don't kill good copy, people do, to coin a phrase). While bullets have their place, they shouldn't be the only way to express one's point of view. But 'the-death-by-bullets' approach is dictated by the 'X ways to do Y' headline. And with the proliferation of online material on every topic by anyone with access to a computer and the internet, coupled with the short-attention span of the audience, it seems decent copy will have to roll over and die.
But you do see decent pieces sprinkled across the web, dodging the bullets so to speak, leading you to believe that there is still hope for well-written articles. Speaking of which, here's a link that you might find useful: http://goo.gl/KczFQJ

Writer's Block

4/12/2014

 
Writer's Block
It happens sometimes. The challenge of the blank page. The dread the white paper or the blank screen fills you with as you stare just as blankly, trying to fill it with your next bestseller. The blank monster apparently had someone in its grip on Quora, and she wanted to know what to write. 'Don't just say write', she requested. Fair enough I thought as that piece of advice is as  helpful as telling someone who wants to swim to just jump in the water. While it is not entirely useless, it is rather limited in scope. So I decided to help her out of her misery by quoting a passage (which I luckily remembered) from Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance where the author's past life character, Phaedrus, helps one of his students stuck on an essay about the US. 'Start with a city', he advises. When she comes up with nothing, he tells her to narrow it to a street in a city. When she still draws a blank, he tells her to write about a building. 'The brick on the top right', to be specific. Turns out that's just what she wanted to open the floodgates. The student comes back with a 5000 word essay the next day. She says she sat at a cafe opposite the building and started to write. 
Sometimes that's where you need to start. With something minuscule and specific and work your way out of the monster's grip. You can always edit, trash it, start over but at least you are out of the block, so to speak. So start with a brick. Or a strand of hair. Or a drop of rain. Good luck. 

Coding and tpyos

6/5/2014

 
There, that was intentional, the typo. I've been learning a host of programming lessons on Udemy, a fantastic site for learning almost anything you want. I finished an excellent course on HTML & CSS, am halfway through a couple of Ruby courses ( I like the 'gems' bit, irrational, I know), a couple of Python courses, and a bunch of others I haven't gotten around to yet. Picked up a Python for kids book and trying to code like an eight year old.
Coding teaches you some important lessons though: 'close what you open' is one of them. The other being how something as lowly as a comma or a semicolon can mess up your result beyond recognition.  In programming, everything is not just essential but critical. So never treat a comma with contempt for it can have you going through reams of code just to laugh at you villainously from its non-existent space. It is not for nothing that people have spoken in hushed tones about the wrath of a curly brace scorned. Treat every bit of code with respect. Just like in life. Never look down your nose on the tea lady for she knows what goes into your cup.
There are life lessons everywhere as a matter of fact. For instance, swimming teaches you a crucial lesson: shut your mouth and keep your eyes open. And relax for heaven's sake. And float (or float left; to be more in tune with this post).

Zen and Lord Krishna

27/4/2014

 
I purchased a kindle book the other day titled 'Dancing beyond thought'. It's a collection of verses from the Gita and the author's sincere belief is that one can take any of these verses and make chanting that a daily ritual. It's transliterated with English pronunciations along with the verses. Speaking of a verse that resonates, I always felt drawn to the instruction to 'do your duty without expecting results' (karmanye vadikharaste ...').

It allows you to focus your mind on what's at hand, not a distant victory whether it's the money that's going to be in your account or an award that you may or may not get someday. Since it un-clutters your mind, you can concentrate on the task at hand. It absolves you of the result, good or bad bestowing upon you a sense of peace and calm settle in you as you go about doing your duty, whatever that maybe.

There's a similar story in a Zen koan. An impatient student keen on learning kendo, a Japanese martial art(way of the Sword), approaches the sensei and asks him to teach the art of kendo. The master says it will take ten years. The student, appalled, says, 'But master, I have to learn it in five years'. 'Oh?' says the master, 'in that case, it will take twenty years'.

The lesson is: focus on what you have to do and the rest will take care of itself. In the case of the student, effort and single-minded attention would have ensured that he became adept at the art in ten years or less, but with his mind on the result, it was obviously going  be delayed. The more impatient you are, the longer it will take.

Which somehow ties back to Stephen King's 'writers write' piece of advice. It doesn't matter if your book is published or not; whether you have a million readers or five. All that matters is that you sit at the computer and write. Because, like he says: “Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.” 

It doesn't have to be stories all the time. You can take a break between your novels and story writing schedule by writing blogs. Even if you write a bestseller, what next? Are you going to stop? Is that the best you got, to quote Ali (apparently that was how he taunted his opponents in the ring)? Not all bestsellers are great. Again, going back to King, he hates Snowfall in the cedar type stories; Tom Robbins loathes 'Fifty shades of grey'. So to write a decent book, you have to keep writing, and if you make it to the bestseller list, great, but that's just the beginning. As they said when I was learning Aikido very briefly, 'a black belt is not the end, it's the beginning'.

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