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"Let your forcefield drop / sensors out / and try to communicate."

:: –From “Communiqué” by Prick.

A few books on writing

; One Continuous Mistake : Zen approach – the four truths are: writers write; writing is a process; you don’t know what you will write until that process has completed… and, damn, I forgot the last one.

; Singular Texts/Plural Authors : looks like an interesting book about collaborative writing (which of course is relevant to thinking about CBPP as well as day to day life).

; Writing as a Visual Art : I really recommend this book and am heading back to the library tomorrow to try to finish it. The forward by Marvin Minsky was very interesting. The book itself is written by an Italian linguist and AI-ist, and from what I understand so far, the development promises to be worth paying attention to.

; The MLA Style Manual : An oft-referred to text with some reasonable advice, even for people who aren’t in the humanities. MLA, by the way, stands for Modern Language Association, to which one may add, of America. The edition I found seemed a little dated (much discussion of publisher relations, galley proofs, the creation of indices, etc.).

I’ll post more when I think of them. Of course, the book [http://sut1.sut.ac.th/strunk/ Elements of Style] ought to be required reading. The link is to a copy of a 1918 edition, which I believe is now in the public domain (I don’t know of any reason why it wouldn’t be, although it is not listed by Project Gutenberg).

What the MLA Style Manual says

Here’s a quick summary of what the MLA style manual has to say. (I haven’t actually gotten to the section on Style yet, this is all just the preliminary material.)

Basic points

  • Identify the audience: is it general or scholarly?
  • Use terminology that is appropriate to this audience (no jargon for non-specialists).
  • Use non-discriminatory language.
  • Understand the rules of English usage. Some books are recommended, a few

that I noted are: ## A dictionary of Modern English Usage, Fowler ## American Style and Usage, Copperwood ## Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, Evans

  • Understand “style”. Again, some books:

## Thinking Straight: Principles of Reasoning for Readers and Writers, Beardsley ## Writing without teachers, ELbow ## Style: an anti-textbook, Lanham ## Style: ten lessons in clarity and grace, Williams

  • Know how to edit your own work. The book:

## Line by line: How to edit your own writing, Cook

  • Don’t plagiarize (Where plagiarization is, notably, rather different from

copyright infringement, and specifically means taking someone else’s work and presenting it as your own, whether verbatim, or even through much rewording. Note that AFAIK there is no law covering plagiarism.)

Specific thoughts for the editor of a compilation

  • The editor bears ulitmate responsibility for the work’s success or failure.

(As a compilation, I’d add.)

  • The editor must identify:

## Objectives ## Audience ## Guidelines

  • And the editor must communicate to and with the contributors on an ongoing basis.
  • Other important things to do:

## Figure out if there is a market for the book. ## Spell out guidelines to everyone who is invited to participate.

Note that some of these pieces of advice would apply somewhat differently to, say, the FEM, which is based on an already existing compilation, and which is “run” in a somewhat peer-produced fashion, e.g., thoughts about guidelines are actively solicited at this point, not thought up in solititude and handed down.

A few other interesting thoughts about the MLA Style Guide

  • A “prospectus” to be submitted to a publisher is sort of like a grant preproposal to be submitted to a potential funding agency.
  • Copyeditors must think a lot about their work, and authors must make all needed changes. (Or else!)

On “Writing as a Visual Art”

Quotes From the Forward

“In my opinion, the very concept of grammar is perverse, because it suggests that we can understand what language is without any idea about how it works.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a group of thoughts in which each lends meaning to the rest the way that each strand in a rope or a cloth keeps the others from falling apart.”

General reflections

The notion that much better communication can take place through person-to-person interactions than in print is common in mathematical culture. Bill Thurston wrote a paper about this called [http://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236 On Proof and Progress in Mathematics]. Interestingly, the paper came out right about the same time as “Writing as a Visual Art” – I guess this stuff was the zeitgeist of 1994.