Writing Tips

I owe everyone a huge apology. Two weeks ago, I told you about the summer I learned to type. I included this sentence in the original: “I could bang out 17 words a minute with no more that six or seven mistakes.” Mindy, who sends the Tips to you, thought I did it on purpose because the typo appeared in a sentence about making typos. And because she knows I have a weakness for irony, hidden jokes, and generally stupid, tongue-in-cheek stuff, she thought, "How deliciously ironic." Although still ironic, that was a real typo, but I thought, "What a great idea!" Then I thought, Even better, instead of that-which-should-be-than, let's make it sex-which-should-be-six. That way, nobody will miss the joke. HaHA!

From deep in my soul, I apologize for writing this Tip. So many of you have asked me about this, however, it begs for comment, and I have a weakness for the inane. But this is the lamest, least important writing Tip I have ever written, or will ever write. It’s not even a “writing” Tip; it’s a “typing” Tip.

The Dalai Lama told me  to embrace my enemies, to be thankful for them, because only my enemies could bring me challenge, and without challenge, I would never achieve Enlightenment. So I welcomed into my life all manner of obnoxious persons who disagree with me from my porkpie down to my saddle shoes. I feel much better now and have only one stop left on the road to Enlightenment.

Every time NASA calls, it’s the same: The angst, the hand wringing, the terrible indecision, the leaving behind, the goodbyes. That well-worn black satchel sits in my office ready at a moment’s notice to go anywhere in the world. Or out of it: 30 minutes to race to the landing field to board the helicopter to take me to the airport to catch the plane to fly me to Orlando to jump in the limousine to drive me to Cape Canaveral to launch my hide into outer space. Once I get to the Cape, I’m fine. Waiting atop a rocket that rises from beach sand and points into a blue sky, I'm looking forward to eating all that Spam and Tang for free. But I have to travel light: A toothbrush, a change of underwear, and 35 words.

I’m sure many of you read about the archaeological find along a windswept slope of peat and heather on Scotland’s Isle of Skye: the jawbone and tusk of a woolly mammoth dating from the mid-Pleistocene, which places it tens of thousands of years before the Sumerians chiseled the tale of Gilgamesh into clay tablets. This is significant because lining the jawbone nine feet out to the tip of the tusk appear tiny, consistent scratches from a life form not quite animal, but not yet human. Curiously, not one of the crude sentences describes a living creature doing something. Things happen by themselves. Archaeological linguists theorize that prehistoric “writers” constructed sentences like this because people had not yet been invented. A small sampling:

You know how it is. You’re at 14,000 feet, dropping down the other side of the Cordillera, trekking past the trickles, dropping into the headwaters, paddling along the Huallaga into the Ucayali, destined for the Big River itself, when suddenly, WHAM! What! A dam? Who stuck a dam out here? Everything was moving so nicely!

We’re shuffling around the Writing Style Bar with others who also write, reaching out, dropping and slopping and plopping all sorts of goop onto our sentences, anything to make the words go down better. We begin with our own fresh All-Natural Writing Style, squirt it with ketchup, slap it with mustard, sprinkle it with Worcestershire, A-1, maybe a little Tabasco, toss on some relish and onion, add avocado, bacon bits, mayonnaise, tomatillo, chopped almonds, shredded cheese, sliced olives, jalapeños, and top it with a dollop of sour cream. Somewhere beneath all of that same stuff everyone else has piled onto their Writing Styles lies our own pristine All-Natural Writing Style.

As you might have heard, I am really good at impersonating former presidents. Like Ronald Reagan: “Wellllll.” See what I mean? If I didn’t know it was I, I would ask myself for an autograph.

For weeks, I’ve been trying to think of a way you could dazzle friends with clever comments about pronouns. At first I tried for something oblique and dismissive, but thought-provoking – like standing before a painting at Chicago’s Art Institute, thumb and forefinger caressing your chin, and muttering, “It’s so derivative.”

I think we left off last time with Tweedledee telling Alice about the Walrus: