My Favorite Writing Excuses yet: Paaaaacing…
Posted April 13th, 2008 by Howard Tayler
This week’s Writing Excuses is my favorite episode yet. Why? Well… I brought my iPod along, and fired up the stopwatch, so we could all see exactly how much time we’d spent.
This really kept us moving. And it’s fitting, because we were talking about pacing. This is fifteen very lively, content-filled minutes of podcast, and my iPod’s stopwatch should get credit in the liner notes.
In related news, The Salt Lake Tribune interviewed Jordan Sanderson (the Writing Excuses webmonkey and audio guy) and me for an article about podcasting in Utah. Yeah, it’s a “slow news day” piece, but that’s really the only kind of day I want to make the paper.
Explore posts in the same categories: Podcasts
April 14th, 2008 at 1:30 am
So are we going to see your article framed on the Keep’s wall?
April 14th, 2008 at 2:14 am
What’s with the audio? You’re clearly somewhere a bit echoey, but the echoes stop at the same time as the speaker. Quite disconcerting to hear through headphones. Is it a compression artefact or what?
And I was stunned to hear that Battlefield Earth’s a good book. I mean, it’s easy to believe that it’s better than the movie (what isn’t?), but that much?
April 14th, 2008 at 2:28 am
And I realised after I posted that that parenthetical remark could be interpreted in two ways. They both work…
April 14th, 2008 at 2:33 am
Sorry, I should have said “… after I posted that that that parenthetical remark could…”
Wow. Legitimate triple word.
If I get any points for that then a cleric standing on them would get an attack of opportunity, even in the event of a critical hit.
April 14th, 2008 at 6:16 am
Battlefield Earth and the movie are related only through the title. It is a good book, in fact, a brilliant book.
April 14th, 2008 at 7:50 am
@Sam - the audio was recorded through a single laptop mic, and yes, it was compressed in order to bring the overall volume up while lowering the noise floor.
In short, Jordo goofed during the recording, and fixed it as best he could in post.
Re: legitimate triple word… I would demand a comma between the first and second “that.”
April 14th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
I was thinking the same thing, the comma is a must.
The book Battlefield Earth made it to my re-read list 3 times. The last time was after I watched the movie, and needed to wash the taste out of my mouth.
Anyone believe the patricide rumor??
April 14th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
In less than 10 minutes, Rules 4 and 11 were added to the Schlock Wikipedia page.
April 14th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
I love Wikipedia.
No, wait. I hate Wikipedia?
Hang on…
*sigh*
It’s true. Just because you swear by something doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to swear AT it.
April 15th, 2008 at 2:40 am
Re: comma
Hey, if you can use “lay” to mean “lie”, I can leave out the occasional comma. In the version with all three “that”s anyway.
I originally wrote it without the first that, then when I reread it I realised that that “that that” that that sentence had [Contrived. No points.] could be read as the first two “that”s, and then the lack of a specifier causes the reader to backtrack when “remark” turns out to be singular. So I added the first “that” into it, because Munchkin-Clix of Cataan is funnier than adding a comma.
Actually, I think I should have used two commas – “after I posted” (or “after I posted that”, in the three-”that” version) is a parenthesis*, so it should have commas on both sides. But hey, in my head I was saying it fast.
And why does my spell-checker complain about “Munchkin”, but not “Clix”?
*Anyone who thinks “parenthesis” means “round bracket” will need to consult a dictionary to understand that.
Re: Wikipedia
Hey, it’s a discordant mob. Any intelligent opinion about it has to be heavily nuanced.
April 15th, 2008 at 2:45 am
Grr. Obviously I meant to put the second header in bold too. Stupid lack of a preview.
April 15th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Battlefield Earth is an entertaining and decently written book with some rollicking adventure and a bit of satire.
http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/r_bearth.htm Red Mike’s review was excellent. Though his review of the movie Starship Troopers is the best review ever done of any movie, ever.
April 16th, 2008 at 12:10 am
I think I’d read that review of Starship Troopers before, but I didn’t remember it until I got to “I have to comment that I really liked the Special Effects in this film. Especially Dizzy’s left special effect and her right special effect.”
April 16th, 2008 at 12:41 am
Sam: I was taught by English teachers who would mark off points
for using the same word twice in a row, even if it *was* legitimate
(Reason: “Shows lack of creativity.”)
Of course, these were the same teachers who would ream one out
publicly over a Grocer’s Apostrophe — and what happened to the
poor soul who confused his homophones… oh dear gods, is there
no mercy…. [shudder] [sob] :)
I think your triple-”That” would have resulted in your immediate
crucifixion…. :) (No, it wasn’t a Catholic School.)
April 17th, 2008 at 7:57 am
The misuse of homophones and apostrophes annoys me, too, but what synonyms are there for “that”? I can’t find it in my thesaurus.
Okay, let’s see… “I realised, after submitting that post, that the parenthetical remark therein…” Er, no, sorry, “I realised, after I posted that, that that parenthetical remark…” is clearer (unless the commas are omitted, of course). I HATE, DETEST, DESPISE, LOATHE and ABOMINATE the sort of “creativity” (yes, I put the scare quotes in bold) that comes at the expense of clarity. Unless it’s really clever. But it’s the sort of thing where the creator is likely to vastly overestimate how clever it is, …and I’m ranting. Sorry about that.
I hope you never had to write an essay about The The.
April 17th, 2008 at 8:09 am
Or Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
And what did your teachers have against the past perfect of the verb “to have”?
Of course, it can be overdone:
But it’s still better than that stupid buffalo sentence.
April 17th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
@Sam: “the” and “this” will both work. In fact, rather than saying “that that thing” you can say “that this thing,” or “that the thing in question.”
There are ways around it.
April 18th, 2008 at 12:28 am
Sam: What The Boss said. :)
As for what my English teachers approved of, or disapproved of:
I grew in the Los Angeles area, for Azathoth’s sake — it’s a miracle
I can communicate above “grunt and point”. (Being Male, it’s a
double-miracle. :) )
Finally: “And I realised after I posted: The parenthetical remark
could be interpreted in two ways.”
[cue Double-Entendre Sign; Double-Entendre Sign in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…]
You have a Colon for a reason — use it.
[Double-Entendre Sign now] :)
April 18th, 2008 at 12:50 am
Maybe I have a different threshold for the distinction between “here” and “there”, but, to me, “this” doesn’t feel right in that situation. Okay, “I realised, after I posted, that the parenthetical remark…” works, but that’s not the point. This is a blog comments area, not capital-L Literature. The repeated words don’t damage clarity, as long as they’re properly punctuated. Yes, I should have punctuated it properly the first time.
csadn’s teachers’ hatred of repeated words makes me suspect that they also disapproved of split infinitives, or sentences ending in a preposition. Except that those alleged rules come from the fact that you can’t do it that way in Latin, and even Latin allows repeated words:
And that’s also better than the buffalo sentence.
April 18th, 2008 at 12:58 am
I don’t know why the “malo” example is bold, and the “had had” isn’t, but I suspect it’s something to do with the fact that WordPress generated improperly-nested HTML for the “malo” one.
And it’s supposed to be XHTML, too. Aren’t little details like that supposed to be more important in XML than in SGML?
April 19th, 2008 at 12:44 am
Sam: Yes, they did, tho’ not nearly as much as they disapproved of
Repetition. One of them once said: “There’s so many words in the
dictionary to choose from — stop using the same ones all the time.”
I recall one short-answer quiz a teacher gave where students were
required to recapitulate the question being asked (the questions
being formatted such that there was no space for the answer, thus
forcing a Separate Sheet of Paper to be used) *without* using the
word “because”, after she became frustrated with reading 1,000
separate renditions of “[recap of question] because [answer]”.
Of some 1,000 students who took the quiz, exactly four passed it,
and only one — Yr. Obd. Srvt. & Hmb. Narr. — scored an A (100%,
thanks so much). How, one asks? Simple: The sentence structure I
used for answers was “[answer] was [recap of question]” — the
same structure I *always* used.
And another nail in the coffin of my popularity was hammered home.
:)
(There’s an infamous joke from the baseball world involving ending
a sentence with a preposition, but it fails local standards of Lingustic
Sanitation. :) )