Minor Wisdom

For writers (legal and otherwise), a suggested New Year's resolution

If you resolve to improve your writing in 2006, I have a few books to recommend to help you keep your resolution. All of these books focus on the structure of writing. Read them, and you'll see that good expository writing is a science more than an art: anyone can learn how to do it.

First, read A Grammar Book for You and I ... Oops, Me! by C. Edward Good. Or to save a few bucks, read Who's (Oops) Whose Grammar Book Is This Anyway?, also by Ed Good—same book sold under a different title for a slightly lower price. Either book will teach you to analyze writing grammatically, and to come up with better grammatical structures to express the idea. For example, when you see a dependent clause functioning as the subject of a sentence, you'll remember that nouns work excellently as the subject of a sentence. You'll study the clause and perhaps come up with a noun phrase or a noun that serves the purpose. Good's mantra is to convert clauses into phrases, and phrases into single words. You accomplish the conversion by grammatical analysis.

After you've a Good grammar book, read The Sense of Structure and Expectations, both by George Gopen. Like Good, Gopen analyzes writing structurally. The idea is that readers expect to find certain information in certain specific places. If you deliver the information that readers expect, where they expect it, you bridge the gap between writer and reader, and greatly increase the chances that the reader will get the message you're trying to deliver. Sense of Structure is written for all expository writers, while Expectations is written for writing teachers. But don't skip Expectations just because you don't hold classes in writing. If you care about writing, you've probably been teaching yourself how to improve—in which case the self-teacher in you will benefit from Expectations.

These books have in common a valuable quality: by focusing on the structure, they show you how written English works. If you know how language or any other tool works, you can use it more effectively.

Roy Blount Jr., Feet on the Street

To understand New Orleans, there used to be one book to read: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Now there's another: Roy Blount Jr.'s Feet on the Street.

What can I say about Feet on the Street? This: I've lived in New Orleans from 1960 to 1971, off and on from 1971 to 1982, and continuously since 1982. But I've never figured out what makes this city different from all others. Roy figured it out, though, and in this book, he reveals his insight—it's more profound than you can imagine. If you love New Orleans, or good writing, or both, then you should read this book.

Here's my favorite quotation:

[E]verything in New Orleans, in my experience, is a double date. When you're with a woman in New Orleans, it's like being with two women, the other being the city herself. Over the years I seem to have wound up usually with the city. And the city's man ain't me, I know that, her man is the River.

Wise Blood

I'm almost finished reading Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. I continue to be astounded that someone who looked like this could write such cathartic violence. The error of judging a book by its cover.

The picture at left comes from a Sojourners page with a collection of articles about her writing and spirituality. If you're interested in either, take a visit.

p.s. After writing this post, I finished the book. Here's a taste from the last chapter: "If she was going to be blind when she was dead, who better to guide her than a blind man? Who better to lead the blind than the blind, who knew what it was like?"

Burning the house

I'm shocked, SHOCKED, to read in the latest issue of Gambit that some waiters and bartenders on Bourbon Street (and elsewhere) may be scamming their customers and employers. In How to Burn Down the House, a.k.a. The Scam Bible, a pair of New Orleans waiters pull the cover off this, er, industry. Michael P. Welch, who reviewed the book for Offbeat Magazine, summed it up nicely as "basically just a manual on how to rip-off the restaurant you work for, with minimal sarcastic editorial."  In short, the greatest threat to the First Amendment since Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book.

The Scam Bible's authors, Peter Francis and R. Chip DeGlinkta, also have their own blog, Ask the Scam Oracle, where they catalog their efforts to market their book, and where, not surprisingly, they find themselves railing against "the braying ass of censorship."

What's a restaurant customer to do? First, when the waiter tries to steer you to certain menu items, be aware that the purpose may be to work a scam rather than give you a superlative dining experience. Second, check the tab carefully, and watch the little things hard to keep an inventory of, like iced tea. Third, pay by credit card; the paper trail impedes some forms of scamming.

Free online books

This may be the best reading bargain anywhere:  Bruderhof has 45 e-books online for free downloading.  Just go to their home page and click on "free e-books" in the navigation bar.  You can browse by author, title, or topic (reflections, commentary, stories, or advice).  The authors are listed below the fold; they include Johann Christoph Arnold, Daniel Berrigan, Soren Kierkegaard, Malcolm Muggeridge, Oscar Romero, and Leo Tolstoy.