A thoughtful list from Thought Catalog—one of my favorites:
“The first draft of anything is shit.” Ernest Hemingway
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament From GQ, Michael Wolff beats up on the dead Christopher Hitchens:
Writer, orator and highbrow barfly Christopher Hitchens transformed, in his final years, from searing socialist showman into untouchable, saintly sage. But, asks his former media cohort, was this beatification deserved… at all?
For all his faults, I’ve always enjoyed the brilliant snarky writing of Christopher Hitchens.
From Opinionator—The New York Times:
“Do you have a solve for this problem?” “Let’s all focus on the build.” “That’s the take-away from today’s seminar.” Or, to quote a song that was recently a No. 1 hit in Britain, “Would you let me see beneath your beautiful?”
If you find these sentences annoying, you are not alone. Each contains an example of nominalization: a word we are used to encountering as a verb or adjective that has been transmuted into a noun. Many of us dislike reading or hearing clusters of such nouns, and associate them with legalese, bureaucracy, corporate jive, advertising or the more hollow kinds of academic prose. Writing packed with nominalizations is commonly regarded as slovenly, obfuscatory, pretentious or merely ugly.
The author of this piece, Henry Hitchings, apparently doesn’t like this writing style!
From The American Scholar:
When a novice writer received a letter from Jacques Barzun, asking her to write a book, how could she have know what she was in for?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament From brain pickings:
Today’s abundance of advice on the art and craft of writing makes the phenomenon appear a modern meta-trope of the written word. And yet it is anything but new. In his 1852 treatise The Philosophy of Style (public library; public domain), Victorian-era philosopher, scientist, and liberal political theorist Herbert Spencer sets out to create a structural framework for good composition, guided by the emergent groundswell of formalist writing. Only 32 years old at the time, he defines language as “an apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought” and proceeds to map out its essential machinery.
And note these added links:
Complement The Philosophy of Style with Stephen King’s militant case against adverbs, H. P. Lovecraft’s advice to aspiring writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald’sletter to his daughter, Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing, Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 keys to the power of the written word, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips,Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques,John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, Neil Gaiman’s 8 rules, Margaret Atwood’s 10 practical tips, and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament From kennymyers.com:
Rhyming words are fun, but some words will leave you tongue-tied trying to find a suitable partner. Anyone who has ever dabbled in poetry will tell you that meter is a refined art that requires the poet to have a comprehensive understanding of how the rhythmic structure of words, sentences and verses ebb and flow. A rookie mistake when dealing with rhyming words is assuming that every word has to be an exact match. A close match is often sufficient to convince the ear that it rhymes without breaking the rhythm of the verse of rhyme. These 15 websites are designed specifically to help you find rhyming words, synonyms and other forms of creative word play.
See the list at the link.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament From The Paris Review, Fall 1999:
“Nothing good was ever written in a large room,” David McCullough says, and so his own office has been reduced to a windowed shed in the backyard of his Martha’s Vineyard home. Known as “the bookshop,” the shed does not have a telephone or running water. Its primary contents are a Royal typewriter, a green banker’s lamp, and a desk, which McCullough keeps control over by “flushing out” the loose papers after each chapter is finished. The view from inside the bookshop is of a sagging barn surrounded by pasture. To keep from being startled, McCullough asks his family members to whistle as they approach the shed where he is writing.
Read more at the link.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament From mental_floss—
The Oxford comma, so-called because the Oxford University Press style guidelines require it, is the comma before the conjunction at the end of a list. If your preferred style is to omit the second comma in “red, white, and blue,” you are aligned with the anti-Oxford comma faction. The pro-Oxford comma faction is more vocal and numerous in the US, while in the UK, anti-Oxford comma reigns. (Oxford University is an outsider, style-wise, in its own land.) In the US, book and magazine publishers are generally pro, while newspapers are anti, but both styles can be found in both media.
The two main rationales for choosing one style over the other are clarity and economy. Each side has invoked both rationales in its favor….
One would think that there are more important things to worry about. Apparently not among the grammar police.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament From Ink at Fontayne.com:
“I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.” Henry David Thoreau
“Writing is an adventure.” Winston Churchill
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 James Ament From The Chronicle of Higher Education:
[The] one thing that the nitpicking grammar Nazis hate most: diversity. Variation within Standard English. There seems to be no agreed unitary rule governing the inflection of who where it functions as subject of a clause to which it is not adjacent.
And why should there be? Nobody ordained or guaranteed that English would be uniquely fixed at all points. I’m sorry if you wanted it to be otherwise, but no Dark Lord has dominion over English grammar, with one rule to ring them all, and in the darkness bind them.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 James Ament 
follow: RSS