Archive for the ‘ Aphorisms ’ Category

Friday’s Revolution

Huh, the thesis of my latent manifesto just coalesced a little more (#holidays), leaving me with fifty-odd years to complete it before it coagulates (#life). [ READ MORE ]

Commas

Without: The popular tendency toward minimal punctuation would have Sir Ernest Gowers turning in his grave, because misguided adherence to this trend renders too many sentences ambiguous, their clauses running into one another, the calamitous effect being a commucation train wreck, the reader having to go back to the start and reconsider. Beware, and understand that [ READ MORE ]

The Author–Editor Relationship

A good book editor has to be capable of mentoring a person: after hacking at the fundamental structure of an author’s manuscript, an editor needs to be there to field questions, lend support and generally reassure the author their early work has not been one big, protracted period of self delusion and folly. A good editor [ READ MORE ]

Ironic Questioning

The use of ironic questioning in clarifying the meaning of an ambiguous phrase or sentence is often counter productive, as the author will usually read your question literally and begin to doubt your intelligence, undermining the authority on which the uptake of your suggestion depends. [ READ MORE ]

Liberalism

Here is a Bertrand Russell quote that constitutes my favourite aphorism: The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. I don’t know [ READ MORE ]

Editing

I haven taken to writing aphorisms lately, in lieu of having the time to sit down and complete longer thoughts. The first one is about non-fiction editing: A good non-fiction editor is a non-specialist – one who has no previous knowledge of the subject, and therefore no preconceptions or predilections for facilitating the expression of a [ READ MORE ]

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