#writing and literature and prose are complex and there's no hard rules that should be applied. however

[daumat]

need me a job doing copy editing or something. 90% of text i see in the wild pisses me off

[hypnoticwinter]

110 Epigrams, in no particular order

1. there is no such thing as bad writing so long as you are saying what you mean to say the way you mean to say it to the people you mean to hear it.

2. prose is only inexcusably purple when it is pretentious or unnecessarily complex.

3. the most important part of any relationship is knowing what you want and knowing what they want.

4. you handicap yourself if you have power but refuse to exercise it.

5. characters don't have to be likeable and don't have to grow, but they do have to have logical motives for their actions.

6. everything is art, but that doesn't automatically make it worthy of discussion.

7. literature is multidimensional and the original author should not be placed on a pedestal; however, the original author should also not be completely disregarded.

8. intelligence is the ability to take in knowledge and dissect it; wisdom is the ability to use it in your life.

9. the good don't need the law and the bad don't obey it.

10. in great attempts, even to fail is glorious.

11. it's not what you do with your life, it's how you feel about it. If you're content, nothing else matters.

12. the quickest and laziest way to solve a problem (provided the entire problem is completely solved) is always the best way.

13. money can't buy happiness, but it can buy fun.

14. irony has come to define people and their vain struggle to escape the cage only accentuates its existence.

15. either have something new to say or a new way to say something old.

16. you shouldn't marry someone unless you'd still do it if there was no cake, no celebration, no witnesses, no rings, and the only thing you got from it was a little piece of paper that said 'ur marid now grats.'

17. never buy people things they are better at selecting themselves.

18. being truthful is preferable to lying, but if you have to lie, do it to anyone but yourself.

19. the point of marketing is to make people think they want your product.

20. you can have an infinite set without having all possibilities.

21. morals are for people who want to feel better than anyone else, but can't get money or sex.

22. people only do things because it benefits them in some manner.

23. a law is only as powerful as the apparatus that enforces it.

24. being fat is prole, but having a lot of muscles is prole too.

25. you're not a dog, so don't reward yourself with food.

26. the only person who will always be there for you is yourself.

27. you're not as good as people say you are, and you're not as bad as people say you are.

28. if you need to do it with friends to have fun, then it isn't fun.

29. to feel sorrow is to deserve forgiveness.

30. we never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.

31. slang is the weapon of elitism.

32. art should never be censored.

33. someone fucking someone over because of the bottom line makes sense, but getting fucked over because people are friends irks people the worst way.

34. trust the written word the least, the spoken word a little more, and actions the most. The way people act is the way they feel.

35. carefully cultivated vagueness is any artist's best friend. Let your audience fill in most of the blanks themselves and they'll invent things much more fantastic and memorable than you ever could.

36. no matter how little you care about what other people think of you, their opinions of you still affect you.

37. saying 'then you do it better' is never a valid response to criticism.

38. if you don't respect yourself, nobody else will.

39. make no more enemies than necessary.

40. when people say 'just be yourself' what they really mean is 'don't try to trick me' or 'don't get uppity.'

41. true communication is distinguishing between when the other person doesn't understand you and when they do understand you but don't care.

42. it is always the speaker's responsibility to ensure their message is heard.

43. how hard you work does not and should not affect the value of something you create.

44. the government is a tool to serve a purpose; it should never be the focus of love or unconditional loyalty.

45. finding an aspect or the entirety of a work of art offensive is not a good reason to not absorb and attempt to appreciate it.

46. either have substance or have form.

47. the surest way to identify constitutional weakness in someone is if they phrase their insults and other opinions in the form of a question for no reason; people only do this when they don't believe in themselves because they're afraid of their own voice.

48. the best scams of all are the ones that punish people for not partaking: marriage, taxes, degrees.

49. if you can't bear your power/status gracefully, you don't deserve it.

50. the secret to empathy is to suggest something believable enough that the other person thinks that's what they were thinking.

51. whenever you feel you must do something, make sure you are doing it because you want to do it, not because someone else thinks you ought to. Note that the two are not always mutually exclusive.

52. you cannot feel shame unless you already harbor guilt.

53. it is the responsibility of the commissioner of a task to ensure that it is done to their liking; it is the responsibility of the doer of a task to ensure that it is done to the best of their ability.

54. ignorance is never shameful unless it is willful.

55. once an individual accepts the inherent injustice in the world, all things become just.

56. for praise to be worth something, it has to come from a higher source; thus the object of praise lifts the praise-giver to a superior level.

57. success in life does not come from actual virtue or competence, it comes instead from appropriately and frequently signaling one's holiness through ideological gang signs.

58. people do things publicly so others will notice them. What people do when they're alone is what they truly enjoy.

59. it is difficult to be kind to a person who wants nothing.

60. trying to be calm is not calmness.

61. it is safer to beg than to take, but finer to take than to beg.

62. you are only as good as your latest work.

63. being a victim has become a currency and like all currencies, it is counterfeited.

64. faith is a tool that becomes more necessary when an individual is living close to death.

65. poetry is the only art not consumed by its 'fans' ... it is an art divided between snobs, who refuse to accept any but classical poetry, and other snobs, who ape contemporary poets with none of the requisite skill or understanding.

66. companies are sociopathic entities. They don't have any empathy or desire to help people, nor should they. Their only purpose is to function efficiently and produce money, and it's the government's function to impose human values on them through regulations.

67. if you're actually proud of something, you won't be offended when someone uses it as an insult against you.

68. silencing an opponent through brute force rather than logic makes them a martyr.

69. people want sympathy, not solutions.

70. rules have no inherent power, and people no inherent obligation to follow them. Rather, the enforcers of rules are the ones with power, and rules are only obeyed out of fear of punishment. Corollary: the degree to which a particular rule is obeyed is directly related to the power or aggression of the enforcer of that particular rule. Hence why everybody obeys the law of gravity and nobody obeys laws against jaywalking.

71. people do not normally react aggressively to honest, non-aggressive criticism unless there is an underlying insecurity about the thing being criticized.

72. never put a person in a position where they have to defend themselves, even if they're wrong.

73. never apologize to people who do not believe in forgiveness.

74. never pick up something you aren't willing to put down.

75. if you can't change the situation, change your view of it.

76. the best way of learning is to accept your ignorance and regress to a childlike state where you are not ashamed of not knowing what you are doing and you are free to experiment even with the most basic elements of what you are trying to learn.

77. if you are proud of your country you are either a thug or you haven't read enough history.

78. justice without dispassion is rarely justice.

79. do not do anything for someone that they can do for themselves.

80. the truly marginalized people are the ones you never hear about.

81. change is not the same as progress.

82. the more irrational and bizarre a person's beliefs are, the more their subjective viewpoint is proven to exist.

83. believe in the ideal, not the idol.

84. know when to stop.

85. it is impossible to argue with someone who knows they are right.

86. when you reduce your character to one aspect of yourself, you will begin to assume that every criticism levelled against you stems from prejudice against that aspect instead of any legitimate wrongdoing on your part.

87. trust no information that was transmitted or created in exchange for money or favors.

88. praise the person, not the act.

89. giving an excuse means that you are not sorry.

90. looks depreciate.

91. you will only change if you see a need to.

92. if you want to be noticed, be irreducible. The larger the box you can be shoved in, the more you will stand out.

93. make no quotes in languages you don't speak unless you are certain of what you are saying.

94. a bad defense looks worse than silence.

95. do unto others as they do unto you.

96. if you can't explain something to someone, it's not because they're stupider than you are.

97. if the worst someone can do to you is yell at you, they are no threat.

98. groups are not defined by the outliers.

99. make decisions with irreversible outcomes rarely and with grave consideration.

100. those who refuse to follow are doomed to lead.

101. tribalism allows for blatant hypocrisy without even a trace of self-awareness.

102. a sequel should not undo what was done in the original, it should instead expand on it without damaging the original's legacy.

103. the only people against gatekeeping are those it's meant to keep out.

104. the only human right is the right not to have to do things that you don't want to do, and it is violated wholesale.

105. fudge everything you can get away with.

106. the only law is might makes right, all else is vanity.

107. believing features of a different culture are by default sacred is just a sophisticated way of insulting them for being savages.

108.  never attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by malice.

108a. sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

109. anything good that flows downstream is an accident.

110. you can't gatekeep if you don't own the keys.

[restlessmuseum]

nomen amen (or “paraphernalia”: back by popular demand)

                                    (where books compete for space with pottery)

We were already halfway through interminability. Away all redundancy of deficiency from the page, the tear from the past to mend us about to rampage. This far we had not said anything good but perfection required, in tone and content, inexplicable. (1) I found the crux in the posture to device, like an impostor happens in his tender, (2) a damage done like the wrapping paper of a ducked present. (3) Under the stance of unison, the shallower I read between the lines the further I'm improved from the time of my oversight, (4) the unison becomes the sound she phews down to my very being, like but the rest I forgot about... Sorry, got it wrong. Actually, I wanted to continue this something started spreads ago, but the prose screeches and cackles around its ineliminable inexactitude. I really don't feel like resuming anymore, or should I say, I'm done boggedly running after the end of my premises. Yes something happened, something to investigate in a whole other direction. So, gonna take all, this will be the first part. I wish I could express revolutionary philosophisms, I thought I could be a poet because I'm unable to be an essayist and a novelist. I'm not good at public speaking. I entered Tumblr to be found by publishers and make money: I had a system of truths and truly nothing else to say. Besides, what did this idea of klein Lebensdarbietung mean? Is the text doing its characters or are these ones setting out their own words? Text's abolition of today, which is nothing but "the sentences already written, the sentences that people say, the sentences yet to write; verses, words, spacings, texts' dissemination, whatever you want, about the purely sign-linguistic-textual" (cit.) verbatim et literatim, and here is another example of my strugglings to go on properly. In any event it is clear that we are moved when required, except the exempts. (5) It is always the most unexpected time to undergo the aha entanglement. In constant foresight I guiltily prepare to hindsee the neglect and with confambulatory prowess I succumb to the development in this underpass of construes. How much do we match with our sounds? — asking myself. In this respect I'm afraid to surprise me onstage like the surrenedered one (and here onpage, ah foolishness, as playwright). But if I leaf compulsively through hundreds of pages, that's to find my words not belonging to me, and the others to fight (me) with. As I am nearing the open conversation, I make up my mind never to read me. Tons of notes, reproaches and scratchpads. Tons of work to do. And I have to get rid of the old adjustments once and for all. (6) Electra the yet-signed. You like the simple words, the ones you recognize already written, the crystalline syllabification that enoculates the wholeness of an order babbling sibyllinity downstream. You carry on with the work of literature: how the body absconds at the risk of space and time with them. Imperfect doubling, mirror images, and repetition in her practice. Topical scratches. Interceptors sought in everyday life — like unspeakables — that she then distorts to create the straight path in reverse. Poetry will not touch her, because poetry is just the unwritten complexity going wrong side along the process of self-becoming, a recent installation, midway between marble and corporal desires in an ascending scale of hardness. (7) Listening to the closest friends, the process of self-becoming could only linger primarily in the sight of aesthetic, then morality, then religious status quo. But friends come always as a closer, blind alley, at the end of tears: a misunderstanding at first, then never read enough. (8) It is often the case that the practice of consensually agreeing to one's own mental performance and self-image by means of meddled languages and lineages may become a genuine bondage of freedom. The restrained partner can derive any drift in the set of possibilities so that we use to say the doing is more important than the outcome. (9) The doing is in uncomfortable or painful positions, for example as a punishment: then, easily it tends to be forgotten, because unforgivable. That's why the effect is the same as a verbal collage, but 1) rips are often behind schedule or on borrowed time, "out of sync with the fade" (cit.) hearth of what seems to be the Pentecostal tongues of fire; and 2) metaphors like "the rope of telephone charades" or "the coils of something wound in the form of a revolution to come is the licking of sugar injury, met since the starting point" are not allowed. "Real me is way more concerned with" (cit.) the Transcaspian line that follows the pattern of a crosswording of the desert. (10) Rather than holding on to me tight I choose to distance myself from what I'm being forced to watch daily. Dies irae dies illa desirable. Without prejudice to this last inescapable point, the first issue represents the Derridean crux of the matter, about which I will be saying something bad in the wrongest moments, since my voice is as effective as my unsuccessful rewrites. I just want, by using the instruction books, the border of this drama, accelerated and hence trespassed in time into ridiculousness, to be experienced as the comedy it is. There is a hour of the wolf and there is a hour the wolf is afraid of. When the time is right I'd like you all to be safe to be spared in my turn from this construction beyond good and better. (11) Here you shine white with noise. "Sonorous cobweb" (cit.) made of only one thread, the unbent line of homeostasis at long last kept in crisis. (12) This narration should have had a different common thread. "And yet", imprint, "it moves" (cit.) as sensible prose. Prose of proses. The dispelled thing, spilled on Tumblr, disseminated. The seedbed: descendants, everspring off, family. The planting postdisposed. All going as planned. (13)   When I know that I don't know where to start a carving, I start a list of synonyms or unyoke a fable from a series of rereadings. What excommunication if you can't subvert the strainer? (14) Once upon a time Electra, beloved only sign of her father, has a brother. Agamemnon possesses the actuality and practicality of the dead: he wants to see water circulate water in laminar rheumatology and freshness sculptures out of tempered air. [director's note: the Argolis' scene isn't even entitled to melt!]. She eats anise candies and unwarmed foods without a problem. She is so lovely when she urinates first thing in the morning, holding the head in her hands, graeaean ownership. Yes, I'm worthy of attending to the offertory on the altar of love. So many congratulations against my behalf that the opposite seems true. (15) "A woman with long hair is not a simple point of view" (cit.). She's got a prompt night's sleep and reasonable. We cling to angelic accidents. We are clung to our soundtrack. (16) Indeed love is not "the panic subsidence onto the body" (cit.) [director's note: can we let the body become finally soaked in real pornography and never mind, here?] but sheer faith for a symbolic subject who's shattered fully loyal. Intermediate sprint of a life midpoint crossroads that lead at the same destination to flee from. (17) Because, as it goes, her staple is such a volitive confidence meaning to me the wait of the powers that created us, the coincidence of both of us makes our skewness on my side of the derangement. Averted word, when addressed. I am a bad Greek at the time of Christianity and a bad Christian on such dysfunctional divertissements. Who knows how ethically important it is today? I retain it, ending up forgetting everything else, and am lookin' very bad. (18) Of course the movement is diminished in certain directions; the style more flattened upon my chosen sickness that we now have no use for, after the setting of the starting stances; I suffer from more severe erections. An acquired kurtosis distributes my monodimensional remarks as the fourth cumulants in order of precedence. Still a lot of exercise to get. Busy like the evermentioned forgettables I'm at that stage where it's difficult for me to even do difficult things. Wrongstaged, I can't compete. I only challenge. (19) Therefore coincident like the two norths of which one is sinking liminal in the perfectly unsaid of your perfect cues. In one fell swoop you pone the part and mastery. And in the next. And the apnea for the answer back. Teeth gouged by the opposite of words in formation for a smile. The winky face par excellence. Here's the real spectator of my vocalized character. I wedge the self with a puny malapropistic idioticon to spread now that I'm a simplex person. As long as I continue to improve in (furtive, it has to be) apprenticeship I'm losing abilities. Old mistakes reappear, no inspiration from mumpsimuses. (20) Where adults flutter, she, disemvowelled and free from frills, spoken by the plural to be inscribed in the Sophoclean, in the Euripidean, in the Hofmannsthalean, in the Yourcenarian script, lost in tv shows and blatant phone calls, is, for me, abused of notations but who am I to denounce such an effusive happiness? There's nothing she can't Netflix. (21) No banana peel on the slope of her singularity — reversible up to a point, interchangeable up to a point, genderbending up to a point from the same side of view. Slotting minims in the same tone as the main characters. That the same out-of-turness is imbricated. (22)

Virtuosity was painlessly flaying the secret from the kids. This is tragedy. We all know what everyone should have said, sorrows come only after. We see each other for sure and too well. Find your trace in the deep of your prompter's heart. Dimmable glow of ancient times. Under guillotine percentages, under curtain at half-mast, under the veils in the dance of the seven veils. What am I trying to say? (23)

In the floodlights' gloom, without changing the rules of the game, exit khorós. With whom would you listen to you speaking? (24) Woods of brightness wherever, it makes me want to expect your coming deaf-handed right therever, the braindomed untrodden order of phrases where roommouths around it are opening. (25) A substratum, but rather as two shadows they finally vest themselves without amendment, and just drag on this semi-detached ward where it just doesn't feel like our theater anymore. So that there may well be the laetum and lethean occurrence of a new polarization. (26) It is no coincidence that here you're always cold and pale. What a cutie! (27) But maybe that's just too much information. Now would be the time to shut up even more. Already being in the manner for that: being at one with the template versus falling back into the patient subjectivity to agency, to make war and to make love with the weapons of the unconditional surrender. The book is that inferring the timbre of each Klagesprache. (28) Like the current situation could return to equilibrium because of an indefinite vocabulary which is still fighting us pressurers. We come across the unilaterality of it every day. Its constitution. (29) But infinity alive doesn't exist. We can approximate it in the endless rummaging and musing. (30) Approximation is worth nothing. We get sick for the words that once beguiled us. The limits of infancy don't set. And now I just -ess the world in voluntary silence nonexperienced. (31) With plex I brux my certainty and centuries. Party time abounds. (32) Clause: applause. (33)

[hananku]

Seven upgrade stategies for a problematic article or chapter

Do one thing well. Flatten the structure. Say it once, say it right. Try paragraph re-planning. Make the motivation clearer. Strengthen the argument tokens. Improve the data and exhibits. I guess every researcher and academic writer has often faced the task of trying to upgrade a piece of work that just will not come out right. Sometimes it’s clear what the problem is, and colleagues, friends or supervisors who read the article or chapter can make concrete suggestions for change. But often it’s not so clear-cut. Readers are cordial but obviously unenthused. There’s nothing massively wrong, but the piece feels thin or unconvincing in some diffuse way. Sometimes too the problem occurs well before you want anyone else to read your text. If it is a one-off piece of research then maybe it can just be filed for later reconsideration. But often the research plan in a grant bid, or the book contents page crafted a year ago, or the PhD structure devised two or more years ago, mean that an article or chapter just has to get done. Here an unsatisfactory first draft is not just much less than you’d hoped for at the distant planning stage, but instead a depressing roadblock to completing a whole, long-term project. At times like these it is handy to have a set of standard things to try to improve matters — familiar strategies that you can frequently use, deploying them quickly because you’re deliberately not treating each article or chapter as sui generis or unique. Everyone has their own moves for coping with the upgrade task. Here are my top seven, in hopes that some of them work for you. Do one thing well. Many writing problems stem from trying to do too much within the same few pages, causing texts to inflate beyond journal length limits (often fatal for passing review), or just introducing ‘confuser’ themes that referees love to jump on. ‘I’m not clear if the author is advocating X, or trying to do Y’. Keeping it simple (within well defended boundaries) makes things clearer, so long as your paper is also substantive i.e don’t go from this point to try and ‘salami slice’ a given piece of research across multiple journal articles. A nice blog by pat Thompson puts this point alongside other common mistakes. 2. Flatten the structure. All articles in social science should be 8,000 words or less and most chapters are similar or verge up to 10,000 words. Given the attention span of serious, research readers, you need a sub-heading about every 2,000 words or so — that’s just four or five main sub-headings in total. They should all be first-order sub-heads, at the same level, and preferably dividing the text up into similar-sized chunks, that come in a predictable way and have a common rhythm. If you have two or three tiers of sub-headings in a hierarchy, make it simpler. In other fields, length limits are much less — e.g. just 3,000 words for medical journal articles. So the numbers of subheadings needed here will be correspondingly reduced. Each of your section headings should be substantive (not just formal, conventional, vacuous or interogative). Ideally they should give readers a logically sequenced set of narrative cues, about what you did, and what you have found out. You can add a short Conclusions section with its own smaller kind of heading. Also, never label the beginning bit of text ‘Introduction’ — this is already blindingly obvious. Many structural problems and inaccessible text are caused by people using outliner software to create overly hierarchized sets of headings at multiple levels, made worse still by adding complex numbering systems (e.g section 2.1.4.3) to ‘help’ readers. At an extreme, an analytic over-fragmentation of the text results, with sections, sub-sections and sub-sub sections proliferating in bizarre complexity. The text can become like the traditional British tinned desert called ‘fruit cocktail’, which contains many different kinds of fruit, but all in small cubes and smothered in a syrup so thick that you cannot taste at all what any component is. The writing coach, Thomas Basboll, shrewdly remarked that : “ A well-written journal article will present a single, easily identifiable claim; it will show that something is the case… The [typical academic] article will consist of roughly 40 paragraphs. Five of them will provide the introductory and concluding remarks. Five of them will establish a general, human background. Five of them will state the theory that informs the analysis. Five of them will state the method by which the data was gathered. The analysis (or “results” section) will make roughly three overarching claims (that support the main thesis) in three five-paragraph sections. The implicationsof the research will be outlined in five paragraphs. These are ball-park figures, not hard and fast rules, but “knowing” something for academic purposes means being able to articulate yourself in roughly these proportions”. 3. Say it once, say it right. Nothing is so corrosive of readers’ confidence in a writer than repeating things. Academic readers are not like soap opera fans — they do not need a thing previewed, then actually said, then resaid, and then summarized. So it a bad idea to take one decent point and fragment it across your text in little bits. If your current structure is forcing you to do this, recast it to make this problem go away. Simple, big block structures are generally best. Complex structures, with points developed recursively on in frequent discrete iterations, are easier to mess up. Close to every nuance of your own argument, you may well feel that you are thematically advancing, embroidering and extending your arguments each time you come back to a linked point. But readers will just see repetition. So, say each point once— and say it right first time. This motto also has resonance at the micro-level. Fellow scientists or academics normally do not need points to be so hammered home that every tiny scintilla of meaning has been triple-locked in case some doubt remains. This way lies turgid prose. (As Voltaire shrewdly remarked: ‘The secret of being a bore is to say everything’). 4. Try paragraph re-planning, as discussed in my separate blogpost. This is a great technique for really helping you understand what you have done/got in the existing draft of your article or chapter. Rachael Cayley has a similar approach, which she calls ‘reverse outlining’. The core idea is to start with your finished text and then to resurface a detailed, paragraph-by-paragraph structure from that. Looking at this synoptic view of your whole text, you should find it easier to come up with an alternative Plan B sequence for your text. Unless you are a genius writer already, re-modelling text is an inescapable burden at multiple stages of securing acceptance by a journal. 5. Make the motivation clearer. Give readers a stronger sense of why the research has been done, why the topic is salient and how the findings illuminate important problems. Researchers who live with their topic over months and years often lose track of why they started, why they shaped the study as they did, and what the significance of their findings is for a larger audience. If a text is not working, or not quite working, the author is often too close-up to the detail of the findings, too convinced that the study could only have been done this way and that its importance is ‘obvious’. Being unable to write an effective conclusion is a good ‘tell’ for this problem — an apparently separate symptom that is actually closely linked. Trying to achieve a high impact start for an article (or a clean, forward-looking beginning to each chapter in a book or PhD) can help readers to better appreciate a motive for reading on. A quick start usually helps readers commit to learning more. 6. Strengthen the argument tokens. At research level every paragraph draws on ‘tokens’ to sustain the case being made — which might be literature citations, supportive quotations, empirical evidence, or systematic data presented in charts or tables (see point 7). On citations, quotes or evidence it is usually worthwhile to ask if your search and presentation could be made more convincing — for instance, by multiplying references, showing evidence of systematic and inclusive search, more methodical evidence-gathering, or simply updating and refreshing a literature search that is now a little dated. People often do a literature search at an early stage of their research, when they only understand their topic rather poorly — but then neglect to do a ‘top up’ search just before submission, when they are likely to be much better at recognizing material that is relevant. 7. Improve the data and exhibits. This works at two levels. First, at an overall level it is important to design effective exhibits that display in a consistent way and follow good design principles. Second, at the level of each chart, table or diagram, make sure you provide full and accurate labelling of what is being shown, and that the data being reported are in a form that will matter to readers — not ‘dead on arrival’. To follow up these ideas in more detail see my book: Patrick Dunleavy, ‘Authoring a PhD’ (Palgrave, 2003) or the Kindle edition, where Chapter 5 covers ‘Writing clearly’ and Chapter 6 ‘Developing as a Writer’.