yourpassions.tk

If there’s anything as satisfying as laying eyes and hands on the first print copy of a book I’ve written, it’s having the same experience with a friend’s book. Especially when I know how hard that friend struggled to make the book happen. Thus I whooped with joy last week when Ellen Dehouske handed me a copy of We Feed Each Other: Nourishment through Friendships , her “memoir of sorts.” Joyful tears filled my heart as I beheld this substantial volume with the strikingly gorgeous cover and lovely layout. I had witnessed many of the labor pains preceding the birth of this book. I first met Ellen about three years ago when she took an Osher Life Long Learning class I taught at the University of Pittsburgh on writing description. Subsequently she began attending the Life Writers group that meets at the Monroeville Public Library twice a month. I’ve known for a couple of years that Ellen had resolved to write this book, but I did not fully comprehend what she had in mind. I only knew it wa...

Comma, common. Yes, commas are common, but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve respect. Strangely enough, this common little punctuation mark intimidates legions of writers. Others treat it in a cavalier fashion. I admit to being one of the latter. In 1984, I flippantly told Kay DuPont, a national speaker and author of a book on grammar and punctuation that “I punctuate intuitively and put commas where I think I need them.” Was that pity I saw in her glance? When I saw buckets of red ink the Lighthouse Point Press editors sloshed all over my first book, Do’s, Don’ts and Donuts , I realized I needed to get serious about learning proper comma usage. To my surprise and delight, I discovered that commas are quite friendly. The main thing to remember is that commas cue readers’ eyes to pause for just a whiff of breath to tide them over to the end of a sentence. They sort information inside the sentence, clustering words into meaningful chunks. The guidelines below cover the main areas of ...

Make new friends, but keep the old, One is silver and the other gold. This classic friendship song began endlessly looping on brain radio the other day. Inspired by Kathy Pooler’s blog post, A Tribute to My Girlfriends , I sat down to pen a post about friendship. What emerged is far from what I set out to write. I began writing about the fact unlike Kathy, who has remained close with numerous friends for decades, my friends are more situational, coming and going as our respective interests change, and … that paragraph was never finished. Something about the thought didn’t quite ring true, and a recent memory displaced it. A memory of a brief encounter I recently had with four friends I’ve been out of contact with for over fifteen years. How do those friendships fit in the silver and gold category, I wondered. They don’t! As I wrote, I realized those categories don’t work for me. I realized how limiting categories and labels are, how they inherently imply boundaries and barriers. Degre...

“All sentences are not created equal.” That sentence jams a cactus into my brain, triggering wild buzzing and a whirl of obsessive thoughts. Even if the story I’m reading is sweet and beautiful as a cactus blossom, when I hear any variation of “All men are not tall”,  my brain revs up like an angry hornet. I know the intention: to contradict the clearly false idea that all men ARE tall. The literal meaning of that sentence is that no men are tall. Obviously that’s as false as the initial statement. The world is full of men of a wide range of heights. The accurate meaning is “Not all men are tall.” Or, “Men are not all tall.” But hey – I know you could find a better way of stating that within the context of your story. I saw that opening sentence in a review of  Jenny Davidson’s book, Reading Style: A Life in Sentences . The review quotes that inflammatory sentence from the first chapter of Tankard’s book. How, you ask, would I edit that sentence?  That’s a fair question. The real messa...