Tag: writing
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On good and gobbledygook writing
Rivaling Winston Churchill’s missive on brevity, this 1944 memo by Maury Maverick is the first known use of the word gobbledygook and dishes out some hard truths about good writing: Be short and use Plain English. Memoranda should be as short as clearness will allow. The Naval officer who wired “Sighted Sub — Sank Same” told the…
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Barbenheimer: screenwriting edition
Well, not exactly, but Christopher Nolan’s recent appearance on the Scriptnotes podcast was excellent and inspired me to check out Greta Gerwig’s 2020 appearance for Little Women too. Both have really thoughtful things to say about the craft of writing and how it relates to moviemaking. Here’s Gerwig on the ache of absence in Little…
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A new home for ‘The Wedding Singer at NCC’
Back in early 2011 I produced a photo documentary of the student-directed stage musical production of The Wedding Singer at North Central College, where I’d graduated the year before. I set up shop on Tumblr and documented the behind-the-scenes process over the 10-week period. It was fun to watch the show come together from the…
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Cut the intro
Robin Rendle preaching the truth: Here’s one way to improve the thing you’re writing: cut the intro. Writing about the symbiosis between trees and mushrooms? Don’t start talking about how humanity has depended on trees since the blah blah blah. Just jump right in! Talking about new features in your app? Don’t start with the…
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Write thank-you notes to your favorite authors
Literally: find a favorite (not dead) author’s website and use their contact form to send them a message with specifics about why you like them. I’ve done this several times. The nice thing is they’re usually very accessible and responsive, maybe because they tend not to get the same kind of public praise as actors,…
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17 years
Today marks the 17th anniversary of my very first blog post. Thanks to everyone who has read and shared my scribbles in that time. I’m very proud of the body of work I’ve made and hope you’ll continue following along. Wanna browse the archives? Check out my film and books pages, along with the various…
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How to make time for art
I noticed three writers posted about similar things around the same time, so I thought I ought to pay attention… Oliver Burkeman: In the end, the reason actually doing things matters so much isn’t because it’s the right way to raise a successful adult, complete a novel, or achieve some other beneficial future goal. It’s…
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Journalism is just the art of capturing behavior
The opening monologue of the 2003 film Shattered Glass: Some reporters think it’s political content that makes a story memorable. I think it’s the people you find… their quirks, their flaws, what makes them funny, what makes them human. Journalism is just the art of capturing behavior. You have to know who you’re writing for.…
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A spoonful of Cinema Sugar
I’m very excited to share a new thing I’m part of that’s now live on the internet: Cinema Sugar, a website/newsletter/social media destination for people who love to see, think about, and talk about movies. Our mission statement: We are not interested in celebrity culture. We are not interested in hate-watching, takedowns, or tasteless criticism.…
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Winston Churchill’s memo on brevity
I’m reading Erik Larson’s latest book The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz and appreciated his spotlighting a memo Churchill sent out to his cabinet with the title “Brevity.” Highlights: To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them…
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Lowercase truths
Bret Stephens, in a column on the New York Times’s 1619 Project: Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not…
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Get thee a blog and an RSS reader
Two belated New Year’s resolutions: 1. Get more of my intelligent, articulate friends to start blogs. Maybe some of these intelligent, articulate friends aren’t the writing type or won’t have the time or inclination or find Instagram sufficient for digital socializing, thank you very much. Still I will try. (I halfway succeeded already with my…
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Tale from an unknown typist
Once in a while I stop by a nearby antique rental shop that is stocked full with all kinds of vintage junk. And in its musty, cavernous basement, among the rotary phones, LPs, radios, and TVs, is a wall of typewriters. I already sifted through most of them awhile back: varying conditions and styles, some…
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5 tips from 10 years of filmlogging
In July 2008, while on a 24-hour break from the summer camp I was working at, I saw The Dark Knight with some fellow camp counselors. The next day I cracked open the new 3-subject composition notebook I’d brought to camp, flipped to the back third, and wrote a few lines on what I thought of the…
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Media of the moment
I want to do more to account for what I read and watch. I do use Goodreads for tracking books, Letterboxd for movies, and my Logbook for all of them in one place. But between occasional reviews on the blog here and there, a lot of other noteworthy pieces of art pass through my consciousness almost without comment.…
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The People’s Machine: On ‘California Typewriter’
As was the case with Tom Hanks’s new typewriter-inspired short story collection, I was the easiest mark in the world for the new Doug Nichol documentary California Typewriter, which profiles the titular typewriter repair shop in Berkeley and the wider place of the typewriter in modern culture. Though I’ve been anticipating the film for a while, I…
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No More ‘More’: Against Irregular Superlatives
Who’s ready for a grammatical crusade of pedantic proportions?! Get in on this: It’s time to standardize English comparative and superlative adjectives. Those are used when you are comparing one or more things. For example, a banana can be big, bigger, or biggest. The -er and -est progression is common and used for most adjectives.…