I love the acronym BOMFOG, which stands for Brotherhood of Man, Fatherhood of God. If ever there was a bombastic acronym, BOMFOG has to be at the top of the short list.

Long-standing and now-leaning rules of grammar say that when referring to persons, one must use the male pronoun forms to indicate mixed-gender groups.

The debate over this in the Church goes by the label inclusive language. The wider debate gets folded into the overworked phrase culture wars.

No one fights more fiercely than Christians among themselves, in my view, so I pick up the narrative there.

In the Church, matters of the male-as-genderless pronoun have importance on two levels. The first question is how to treat biblical references to persons. The second question is how to treat biblical references to God.

If church talk of any sort gives you the fantods, you may go now. But I do hope that you will stay. I’m not your mama’s churchman (don’t even know her). Plus this is good stuff.

I know one minister who would argue with anyone who thought that inclusive language is a load of crap or a serious challenge to traditional authority. She was fired from her first church over this very subject. Church people, it seems, feel strongly about their male pronouns.

To use another trite phrase, this was a hill like Calvary that she was willing, and did, die on.

In the wider culture, inclusive language takes on other labels. We talk about the fitness of using the male pronoun for all uses that refer to both men and women – words such as mankind, which can yield to humanity with little fuss. Or to give a specific example, in sentences like this –

Every person should be free to worship at the church of his choice.

When this sort of restrictive sentence surfaces during worship when my wife and I are sitting together (which happens seldom, since we serve different congregations at the 11 o’clock hour on Sundays) I lean over and whisper, Sorry, Honey, just the guys, I guess. Better luck next time.

Which brings us to the crux of the debate, whether in the pews or on the streets — the feminist critique.

Feminists, male and female, have fueled the fires of creativity concerning alternatives to using the masculine forms as also the inclusive forms.

Let it be stipulated between us that there is no grammatical alternative to pressing the masculine forms into this double duty. What we have are several ways of breaking the rules, a few workarounds, and at least one coined word.

Breaking the rules

Many of us, particularly in informal writing and speaking, will say something like, Every person should worship at the church of their choice. It is a flouting of the rule in question – the double duty of the male forms – but we really don’t worry overmuch about that.

The challenge comes when we write for others or when we write formal things such as dissertations. Flouting the rules of grammar just isn’t wise when a supercilious committee or a pompous boss or client is involved. The alternatives are to use constructions such as, Every person should be free to worship at the church of his or her own choice.

That alternative is grammar-legal, and banal.

Another alternative is to say, Everyone should be free to worship at the church of their choice. Sticklers will insist that the apparently plural everyone is another way of saying every one, which is singular. Soon we are beyond the banal and into the heart of the absurd. This will happen when we apply rules to words, which like birds can be hard to keep in cages with rigid bars.

A few workarounds

Probably the best solution for one who is opposed to the use of the male pronoun to denote both men and women is to rewrite the sentence.

For example –

Where I go to church is my choice, and the same goes for you, too.

That is fine but has a different aim than a sentence concerning the church of one’s choice. What started out as a philosophical utterance over cigars and brandy has become loud words from atop a soapbox.

Another example of rewriting the sentence –

Every person should be free to worship at the church of one’s choice.

This may work for some of us, but the tone has become snooty. Substituting one’s for his distances the reader from the sentence, which had been emphatic in its rule-bound form using the male pronoun his.

Coined word – a penny for your thoughts

The one coined word that has been struck in this debate over word genders is s/he (or (s)he), which some of us advance as a better way of saying he/she, or he or she and related forms of that kind.

I suppose one would pronounce it she-he (with a never-ending wrangle over which gender gets the emphasis).

That sucks.

And that is a shame, because the faults s/he is trying to fix do need fixing, and not just because language as a changing art can and should be allowed to solve such questions through the way we talk to one another in the marketplace or upon our pillows.

▪ ▪ ▪

It is not acceptable to refer to half of the world’s population using conceptual male forms when the persons in question are actual female forms. Just because it is only words does not make the debate any less sharp or important. I believe that language is a window into the soul, and if I am happy to call women men for some rigid rule that is man’s and not God’s, I am also going to be ashamed of myself and of my culture and of my church.

To insist that we must follow the rules puts rigidity above equality and justice, and perpetuates social forms that continue to put women in the one-down position.

This is real, this is ugly, this is wrong.

That said, I tend to use the male pronoun when referring to God, even though I am fully aware of the many good arguments against this practice. I try to be sensitive to others but draw the line at the Father/Mother God approach. I do not see God as either male or female but I have the habit of calling God he in my sentences when I am not being very, very careful to be inclusive.

When I write liturgy, I will repeat God instead of using he, as in … and God said to God’s people … .

I do note the choice of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible to leave masculine references to God as they are but to make the references to persons inclusive wherever possible.

For example I will make you fishers of men becomes I will make you fish for people. Even though the poetry dies a terrible death, I welcome the change for political reasons.

The points to take away for you, the writer, and you, the editor, is that you either go with the rigid rule, choose alternative forms, or rewrite the offending sentence. This holds for formal expression. In informal forms, you can break the rule at will. In the end, in the marketplace or upon your pillow with the door shut and the lights out, you can say, Every person should be free to make their own choices.

As far as s/he goes, you already know my preference.

Words, all on their own, can topple kings and queens. Words can scar children for life. Words can create and maintain political and social forms that keep people down.

Do you know what the lion’s share is?

Anything the lion wants.

What gender do you think that lion is?

 Some words, be they ever so small and shy, provide a big service — signposts for the reader. Many writers take away these little words when they should be adding them to mark the path to understanding in the dark forest where the reader can become lost. The writer’s task is to provide good guidance. If a reader gets lost, it is the writer’s fault. That is the unspoken rule, or covenant, or contract.

Even if you the writer won’t see this and sign on –

■ You are the guide.

■ The reader is in your care and follows you in trust.

One of my mentors, a wise man who guided me during seminary, was fond of using the image of a massage, and the image of the proper petting of cats, when he talked about how to lead. In both cases, he said, you keep one hand on the person or cat at all times. This is for reassurance and for being grounded to avoid static electricity.

Think of what happens when you pet a cat on a dry, windy day in spring. Or when you reach out to touch your cat, with love, on its wet little nose.

Sparks fly.

It amazes me that my cats allow me to touch them after a few of these poorly grounded incidents.

Perhaps readers are like cats. You maybe can get away with startling them in unpleasant ways through inattention.

I doubt it.

Cats, as smart as they are, cannot form the thought-with-powerful-feelings-in-tow that goes like this –

How dare you!

Cats can’t, but readers can.

If cats could read, our readers would adore us in exchange for treats. Our readers have less adoration and make more demands on us than our pets do.

The best practice for writers flies in the face of the rigid rules that writers have received, or embraced, or introjected from self-sealed, so-called experts of the dim past. To help readers stay on the path, you must be sure that certain words such as that are present in longer sentences.

For example –

He said that writers need to be kind to the little words and that those little words have a big job to do.

About now, many of you will become aware of a voice in your writerly head that says –

Write tight. Remove extra words. Search and destroy.

 Like most inner voices, this voice batters you with stern advice that actually has some merit. The problem comes with the extra zap of static electricity. That jolt has the effect of forcing compliance at the cost of making your brain go flat. All you care about is being compliant lest you get held up to the class as a dunce. Maybe you experienced that fear often enough to make you a good little writer who always follows the rules and who never does dumb things that make you stand out from the rest of the class.

The drive to conform runs over the one who desires the benefits of conformity — it’s a form of auto-abuse. Some so-called expert made sure that you would continue to inflict upon yourself her harsh rules after she was long dead and gone.

Instead of watching out for the reader, in fear you watch out for yourself. This, my friend, is crazy, and this, my friend, is something that all writers do. The saving grace appears when you can see what you are doing and stop.

Here is the way to get out of this impasse over whether to leave in or take out the little words that create the rhetorical structure of your sentences. When you hear yourself spouting rules that others have forced upon you, stop like a mule. Sit in the crossroads. Refuse to move. Say hee-haw if you wish. Just do not continue down someone else’s narrow-minded path. Do not move until you have made your own decision about the rules thundering in your head.

The story is told of the baseball pitcher who suddenly stops and simply stands on the mound. He looks at the two runners on base who are there through a combination of his poor pitching and some fielding errors. The catcher calls time out and runs out to the mound. He demands to know why the pitcher won’t pitch.

If I don’t pitch it, the pitcher says, they cain’t hit it.

I will be the first to agree that becoming mulish is not the entire strategy here. Sitting down and refusing to act on someone else’s rigid rule is a way of reminding yourself to think for yourself. The next step is to identify the rule in question.

Write tight. Remove extra words. Search and destroy.

You just know in your bones that this voice in your head hates words like that. Such words being optional must die.

The next step is to ask yourself, Have I ever at any level questioned this rule? If the answer is no, the next step is to question that rule, right now.

Why must I always remove words that aren’t necessary?

When might I want to add words that seem unnecessary?

How can I restate the rigid rule in more helpful terms?

If you follow the steps, if you question authority to the end, you will arrive at the conclusion that there will be times to remove and times to include words that may seem to be unnecessary. Optional does not mean unnecessary.

Now. Here is my view on those words, which are usually small and unassuming in their size (but not in their intent), and which give the reader critical guidance at confusing points.

These are some categories of signpost words –

 ■ Parallel constructions.

■ Synonyms (or not).

■ Redundant words that say things twice.

Parallel constructions

The world would be a simple place if writers would stick to sentences having a subject followed by a verb followed by a direct object.

See Jane Run.

Run, Jane, Run.

See Tom hit the ball.

See Spot run after the ball.

Run, Spot, run.

Most writers will vary the tone, length, and the structure of their sentences, and this laudable goal will quickly find the place of impasse if the writer ignores the importance of signpost words. A long sentence with inadequate and partial attention to signpost words is like a guide who gives you a box of matches when you arrive at a branching of three paths in a cave. Good luck, he says, and runs out on you.

For example –

 I want you to know when you are breaking a rigid rule, and I want you to know what your own and not someone else’s opinion is in the matter. You, too, are an expert.

When you want to be very, very clear about something, the best approach is to repeat yourself to set up a cadence of authority for the one whom you seek to educate. Not only will you repeat words, but you also will repeat phrases.

Can you stand it?

If you take out some or all of the repeated words — the signpost words — sense will fly out the window like a bird on the wing.

For example –

 I want you to know when you are breaking a rigid rule, and what your own opinion is.

 This is the sort of sentence that one writes when one allows someone else to rule their writing. Do not repeat the same word in a sentence, the voice in your head thunders. Do not use unnecessary words. When in doubt, take it out!

When in doubt, take it out is a poor way to write sentences that readers can follow to the end. As the mighty poet Dante says, In the journey of the middle of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.

And what does Dante do? He takes on a guide.

Look at the sentences in question. The first sentence is sturdy in a subtle way, like a stool with four legs. The second sentence with some signposts removed is vague, though on the surface it is a sentence and not a fragment. The words that were removed were optional by rule (but crucial to sense). The fault is that I have removed one of the four legs of a stool without rearranging the remaining three legs in a three-point stance for stability. If your reader sits on this three-legged stool, she will end up on the floor.

I have weakened the structure of my sentence, which in turn has muddied the tone of the sentence. By weakening the formal structure of parallel elements, or clauses, (I want you to know), I have discounted the expert tone that I wanted to use. The alternative sentence is shorter, yes, and vague. And absolutely banal and irritating, like a warm spit bath on a hot, dry day.

If I go with the shorter version of the sentence, I will give away the power of my convictions to please some rhetorical jerk who moved on a long time ago.

The reader wants a meal but gets a snack.

Synonyms (or not)

It may sound like heresy to you, but repeating words rather than taking out words is usually the better choice. One famous example comes from the book The Careful Writer by Theodore M. Bernstein. He cautions us to avoid synonymomania.

For example –

 I went to the garden shed to grab a shovel, but my son had taken my spade with him to use at his house, so I went next door and borrowed Bill’s earth-turning implement.

 One must not ever repeat the same word in a sentence.

Right?

This is an extreme example, I grant you. For everyday errors of this sort, listen to the news on the radio or television.

For example –

Europeans are worried this morning about the Euro. It seems, the experts tell us, that the common currency is facing some new problems. And these experts add that the beleaguered coin of the realms may never be the same after all is said and done.

 Your mileage may vary, but I would much rather hear the same word — Euro — twice in that sentence, or even three times. Circumlocutions take us to the edge of the circle and away from the point. Being specific, by repeating the key words, keeps the reader’s feet dry. Circumlocutions put the reader’s feet right in the mud at the side of the path.

A final example –

 Word surfaced today that the president has made an unannounced trip to Afghanistan. The leader of the free world arrived in the war-torn nation just after midnight, sources say.

 I have seen editors and reporters help one another think up these crazy synonyms. Talk about your air of freaky holiday.

Redundant words that say things twice

 This is where you can take away words and leave a sentence in better shape than when it started out. And if you occasionally fall into the error of repeating yourself unnecessarily, it is not a large deal. Your reader will either not see the small fault or will readily forgive you.

However, if you say things like “the circular ball”, “the flat pancake”, the “thin veneer”, or a “tiny blip”, one after another, the reader may decide to quit you and move on to someone who knows how to write tight in the best meaning of that phrase.

You are being redundant when you add detail that is already included in a word’s definition.

For example –

 Haven vs. safe haven.

A haven, by its dictionary definition, is a safe place. If you say safe haven, and you will do so if you think it is the right choice because everyone says it that way, you have fallen into not one but two errors. You have 1) been redundant and 2) jumped out the window after all your loser friends.

And that is not all. You have implied that there is such a thing as an unsafe haven. Why would you specify that some havens are not, er, safe but unsafe?

If you suspect a redundancy, turn the phrase around and see if the opposite makes sense. If it doesn’t, fix it.

If your word choices and your excising of helpful words  make your readers sit down in the crossroads like mules and hee-haw about what you might have meant, and about where the path continues, be certain that that is the response that you want. Maybe you think that your readers will thank you for their long, floppy ears and braying voices.

Your reader is right behind you.

Lead or get out of the way.

Setting aside the examination of actual errors, let us take up the subject of apparent errors.

Such as cuz.

As in Jerks and quirks: Stuff I do cuz I can.

It just looks wrong, almost.

What I did in choosing cuz was to think of the word because and reject it, since it is a word that I overuse. I wanted to introduce an apparent error right away, and I think that cuz works well here. It is a bastard contraction of because and as such should rightly be rendered as ’cause. This I rejected as being about as stirring as an all-white church choir singing operatic versions of negro spirituals. I moved on to cuz and dropped the apostrophe. After all, I was by now in the land of coined words and could do as I would.

The working title for this essay was It’s My Bleeping Book/Blog/Website, or IMFW. In earlier days of the Internet, you might have seen the acronym IMFW alongside such old favorites as IMHO, YMMV, and – my favorite – RTFM. Since I am bound (another example of stuff I do cuz I can) to avoid four-letter words of a frank nature, in view of my work in the Church, you might be better served to Google any of these acronyms that you don’t know or cannot puzzle out. My use of the word bleep to mark such occasions does not move you any closer to understanding, so JFGI.

One of the joys of walking on the waters of language is knowing where the barely submerged rocks reside. When you know the rules, the bending or breaking of the rules becomes second nature. And let us face it, you are free to do as you will. My one bit of advice is to count the cost of your choices when it comes to bending or breaking the rules and conventions of grammar and usage.

Language itself, in its tumbling in the marketplace of writing and speaking, changes again and again without end. When a variation gains widespread use, the grammarians among us call the result an idiom.

An idiom is a slang phrase that has moved uptown.

You are free, here too, to choose whether you will use idioms or not. In your doctoral dissertation, you probably will avoid most idioms and related forms such as slang and four-letter words of a frank and startling nature.

Once you can call yourself doctor, you can cuss like a trucker if you choose to, particularly if you have tenure.

Dr. John Bremner was a master of the startling phrase.

When Bremner said, Balls, cried the Queen, had I but two I would be King! I paid attention. At the same time, I have yet to explore than amusing phrase in my preaching.

Not only do we make choices about rules and conventions concerning words and phrases, but we also make choices about typography and style.

For example, the book that these blog posts will be part of will be printed in Bookman Old Style. Why? Well, it pleases me and so I chose it, when I was wearing the hat labeled POD publisher. My first novel is printed in a sans serif typeface called Trebuchet MS. Why? It pleased me to challenge the old saw that says serif typefaces, the ones with all the little index marks, are easier to read. I wanted to form my own opinion based on a book-length sample. I liked the choice of Trebuchet.

Here is the contrast –

 This sentence is rendered in Times New Roman.

 This sentence is rendered in Trebuchet MS.

Bookman Old Style (which I cannot render in this blog due to the limitations of my text editor), though a serif type, is also lively and lyrical, especially when compared to the old and tired Times New Roman. Trebuchet is lean and strong like a gymnast. The point, however, is that I get to choose the typeface that I use, and I get to challenge long-held conventions about typography. It helps that I have a nodding acquaintance with typefaces, since I am determined to do something bold.

While I broke one rule, I do adhere to another rule of typography, that a book or newspaper or a slinger that you put under all the windshield wipers of all the cars on your street must be confined to one typeface for the body type, one typeface for the headlines and such, and the body type as typeface for indented quotations and examples. I generally confine myself to a total of two typefaces, but form a variation by using the headline type as the type for the indented material. I could easily break this rule, and use a different headline typeface on each page, but the result gives a book an air of freaky holiday, which is seldom in sync with content.

Another rule that I bend and/or break is to shun the use of italics in favor of bold plus italics.

For example –

This sentence is rendered in italics.

 This sentence is rendered in bold plus italics.

There are two reasons for my choosing to use bold plus italics rather than the traditional italics alone –

■ I cannot pick up italics easily on a computer screen. By adding the bold, I can see the words treated this way and I still can understand at a glance that the bold plus italics means the same as italics does in traditional printed materials. I also think that italicized words on the computer screen look more pixilated and TSR 80-ish than the bold alternative.

■ The addition of boldness makes the page look more interesting and lively for the reader, who needs all the help he can get from the writer and typographer to maintain interest in a world that spins much more quickly than once it did. I am such a reader. I read fat paragraphs only if the material will be covered in the next pop quiz.

I could add a third reason. I do these things cuz I can.

My use of journalistic paragraphing is a choice that I make that is related to this idea of helping the reader stay awake, alert, and engaged. It helps to know the rules and conventions. In general, formal writing will make use of paragraphs that start with a periodic sentence of subject followed by verb that states the assertion or aim of the paragraph to follow. Such paragraphs end with a sentence that sums up what has come before. A hint of whimsy is tolerated here, but only just.

Pity, that, but formal is in the end formal.

A journalistic paragraphing style will make use of single-sentence and even single-word paragraphs to highlight the important or amusing stuff.

Really.

Journalistic paragraphs usually won’t rattle on for more than a few sentences before a new paragraph begins.

By contrast, my copy of the stylebook aimed at psychologists says that one will not use single-word or single-sentence paragraphs. One will not use single-word sentences. Ever.

Fine.

I have sought to mix the two paragraphing styles.

You will be the judge of the effectiveness or lack thereof.

Many so-called rules have long-since been retired, such as the rule that forbids one to end a sentence with a preposition. Sir Winston Churchill, who did as much to save the language as he did to save the free world, had this to say about that –

That is something up with which I shall not put.

Another venerable rule for writers and speakers says that one must keep the parts of a verb together.

For example –

To go hopefully forward …

 … becomes …

 To go forward hopefully … .

 Following the rule makes of a phrase with poetic and metaphorical possibilities a phrase of plodding banality.

My advice? If your copy editor is a slave to the rules, find another copy editor. Especially if you write fiction. Being right by the rules is wrong when the music of the sentence dies. Characters don’t always speak the King’s or the Queen’s English. Narrators vary in their training in grammar and usage.

There are a number of rules and conventions of typography that do not make sense to me. I put a space before and after ellipses … and if the ellipses end a sentence, I add another space followed by a period … . The traditional approach…is cramped in my view, and the use of four periods like birds on a wire to denote the end of a sentence seems nutty to me….

Traditional typography makes use of em dashes and en dashes and jams everything together—a practice that gives me claustrophobia. I use two hyphens — and I put a space before and after. My software usually jams the two hyphens together and I just go with that.

I use typography to help the writer, not to punish her.

I use a dash instead of a colon, in most cases where I want to set off examples.

For example:

My eyes simply do not see colons in type.

Same goes for semicolons; I rarely use them for fear of losing them.

What I want you to take away is a sense of the freedom that can come from assuming the yoke of rule and convention for an initial period like an apprenticeship. Once you know as much as your elders know, you can play with that knowledge, and all will be pleased.

If you break rules like a mom who runs over the bike in the driveway because she is too tired to see it, your elders will be more likely to frown that to smile.

There is a joke about a priest, a rabbi, and a minister. The three holy men decide to go fishing. The priest and rabbi, as old hands in the community, want to get to know the young minister who has just recently come among them.

So they go fishin’.

After a few hours in the rabbi’s boat, the priest announces that he feels the call of nature and must seek a bathroom. He calmly steps over the side of the boat and walks over the water to the shore.

The young minister is startled, to say the least.

After the priest returns, the rabbi makes the same trip, over the water to the shore, to answer the call of nature.

After the rabbi returns, the young minister decided that if his colleagues, who after all believe in the same God as he does, can walk on water, he should be able to do so as well, particularly if he makes of his faith a platform and steps out upon it.

Or so he tells himself.

However, when the young minister steps over the side, he finds no footing and sinks into the water, over his head. When the priest and rabbi fish him out of the water and place him back in the boat, the minister sputters a question.

Why couldn’t I do what you did?

Ah, says the priest, it helps to know where the rocks are.

To which I would add, Let those with ears, hear.

I started this book project about a year ago, with one goal from the start: Address the dirty copy issue that so many print-on-demand and electronic books suffer from. I wanted to make that problem my own and offer a solution for all. Sounds grandiose, but that was my goal. In setting such a goal, I set myself apart from the dirty masses and made them out to be the asses.

After all, I would be the one with the solution.

I was angry. I bought an eBook that promised to teach me how to sell my books. All I remember, now, is all the typos and grammar/usage mistakes. My wife told me about a popular thriller writer’s latest book, published by one of the big-name houses in New York City.

Same problem. Mechanics.

I got a copy of the thriller, hoping to put another poison arrow in my quiver. I decided that the thriller writer had demanded upon the strength of several best-selling books that  the original back-story manuscript be published, presumably  to do something for his ego.

It is common for writers who score big to make such demands about book manuscripts that got no respect in their early days.

The big house printed the thriller writer’s manuscript warts and all. Each page has its own little embarrassment. No editor was harmed or even present for the making of this book.

As we say in the Church biz, be careful what you pray for.

Thriller writer got the gold mine; readers got the shaft.

I decided that I was going to give writers tools to build better worlds than the ones I was encountering. I was reviewing, editing, recasting, and proofing my own novel manuscript – The Mystery Man Murders. I was more determined than I ever have been to produce clean copy. When I finally published the novel in December 2011, after four years of solitary confinement with the manuscript, I was confident that I had a clean specimen. Instead of a mere workboat, I had crafted a museum piece out of hull cloth.

Then I began to get feedback of a different sort.

One early reader of my novel, a church friend whom I had given a complimentary copy, told me that he saw a number of typos but had not marked them. He remembered seeing about a dozen typos.

I considered paying him to re-read the book and flag the typos, but I was not willing to create a dual relationship. The only right relation with this person was person and pastor. My faltering resolve was made firm when my wife, also under the same ethical imperative concerning dual relationships (we are co-pastors of this congregation), spoke against the idea.

I began to repent of my high-horsey attitude toward the mistakes that others, who actually received cash advances, had rushed into print. I was, I told myself, with some heat and a good deal of scorn, no better. In fact, I was worse. Rather than seeing this as evidence of low self-esteem, I saw it as accurate. I resolved to re-read the manuscript myself until I found those typos. This time, I said sternly to self, no nodding off in the middle of sentences.

Me, myself, and I knew the probable outcome.

I love my own words with an extravagance that is only matched by my inability to stay awake after an hour or so of editing those words, golden though they be.

While this fond hope of staying awake and being ever watchful while self-editing fed my fantasy life, my brother-in-law, without my knowing, was making a list of my boo-boos – a spreadsheet, no less – and checking it twice. A few weeks ago, he emailed me a treasure map that told me just where to dig. He had found twelve typos, one of which was more than my usual fault of dropping the final letter in a word that still passed the spellchecker but did not make any sense. I had said confident when I meant to say confidant. I know better; my fingers, however, are mindless in their scurrying around the keyboard like a bored-silly squirrel in a cage.

Why do I single out this one mistake of twelve?

No one else would know that I knew the difference between confident and confidant. I was at some level mortified.

I also at some level tend to the dramatic.

Beside the twelve typos and where they lay, my brother-in-law gave me some thoughtful editorial suggestions.

In sum, priceless.

That was the word that came to mind as I made the fixes and uploaded new files to the various virtual places that my novel is available for purchase.

Priceless.

When I did the math of comparing his finds with my church friend’s impressions, I decided that my book was most probably, and at long last, clean.

What a relief.

Writers who go the traditional route cannot make changes as easily as print-on-demand writers can. The high-tech printing press that puts out our POD books does so in about a New York minute, and we can bespeak as few as one copy at a time.

From ordered to boxed and shipped – less than 24 hours.

Those of us who do our own publishing work can fix a problem in less than 24 hours, with most of the time being the lag between uploading a new file, and getting the all-clear that the new file will indeed fly, from production traffic controllers at places like Amazon and Smashwords. Although traditional writers cannot do this high-speed fixing, their minders usually produce clean copy the first time. Otherwise, the only chances to make fixes come with later printings. If there are no later printings, the errors stand for all to see.

In the case of that thriller writer, it was a matter of who knew? I forgot that gaffes are a petty crime against readers.

No fixes on the fly there.

By printing a book with a dozen dumb errors in it, I felt like I had failed in a fundamental way, and I expected to feel that way after I finally received, passively, a way to fix the problem.

Not so. I feel grateful and humbled, and I have a renewed confidence in my novel. It now is the best book that I could write, when I wrote it. As I reviewed the formatting of the newly fixed and uploaded book file, in a desktop utility that emulates the turning of pages, a father’s fond smile dawned on my face.

I am so grateful for my brother-in-law’s support. All I did was give him a copy of the book, as a Christmas gift. He did the rest, quietly and completely. I emailed him as follows – I love you in all caps, man!

He doesn’t always check email, but he will read this.

As one with an editor’s eye, I sometimes will alert bloggers and writers to problems that I encounter in their work. The response varies. Some say thanks, I needed that and some say nothing at all. The hard thing for me is busting past my own self-talk. I easily convince myself that people will see me at best as a tight-ass and at worst as a mean, negative pick-sniffer. The argument that works for me, against me, is realizing that I would want to know if my blog post or novel or whatever had errors that I could fix if someone would simply show to me the kindness of the stranger.

I encourage you to alert others in a frank and friendly way about errors that you find, especially if you only find a few.

You can start with me.

I still don’t know what to say to a writer whose copy has more wrong things in it than right.

I’m working on that, in recovery.

I’ll try to be brief about this. You will see why.

A while back, I posted this Tweet on Twitter –

In reading blog posts, again and again I find myself wondering who edits this stuff. If your novel needs an editor, your blog might, too.

The problem with hiring an editor to clean up your blog posts is that the cost may be more than you can bear. The problem with posting to your blog without a backstopper is that you can make yourself look about as smart as a roadkill on a moon-lit night out on the highway.

That is the catch.

You have no catcher.

The reader’s thinking goes something like this: If this blogger is this clueless in blog posts, why would I bother with his book? More material would just mean more boo-boos from this guy. No thanks. See ya.

Am I right?

So what can you do?

Think small, or, Size does matter

 Consider posting in chunks that you can manage on your own, if that is your choice (and given the hourly rates of good editing help — $25 to $75 — that certainly is the choice that I make). If you can produce three tightly written paragraphs that avoid typos and glaring errors of usage and grammar, make three paragraphs your target. Pick a target of a size that you can hit every time out.

Most blog posts run on for a lot longer than they need to. After all, brevity is the result of effort and ability. Most of us, when we blog, do not have such goals, even though we would benefit from this kind of thinking.

Write tight, then read the post backward from the bottom of the page to the top, from right to left. Typos will pop out like bagels in a toaster. Next, change the font, point size, and font color of the post, and read it again. Let the post sit overnight. Read it again. Every time you make a fix, read the entire post again, making double-damn sure that you didn’t introduce a new typo. Post the post to an eBook reader. Read it again.

Now you can hit the send button.

Those who have a staff and budget can conform to the standard in publishing called The Rule of Seven. That is, seven pairs of eyes must look at a manuscript each time it changes. I wonder who can hit that target of seven pairs of eyes, or even wants to.

If it is up to you, you find seven different ways to look at your manuscript, every time you change it.

Typos, usage problems, errors in grammar, poorly written sentences, and so many more of the things we do to our writing are damaging to one’s reputation in any form, from blog to book, but the smaller platforms, such as blog posts and comments on other writers’ blog posts or reviews posted to Amazon, do the most damage.

If your Tweets and such show inattention, that is what you will get from potential readers.

In the end, you need protection

There is no substitute for relying on an editor, unless you are yourself an editor — and an editor with medium- to high-miles who knows her shortcomings and bad habits.

I have been some sort of editor for most of my adult life, so I venture into self-editing, aware of the admonishment that anyone who edits himself has a fool for a backstopper. The first place that I check is in the additions that I make or the changes that I make to my texts. I know me, and I am a proven generator of typos when I edit text.

If typos had motility, my name would be Mr. Sperm.

When I published my first novel, I soon heard back from my first readers that about 10 typos remained in the text, and at least one fact error. This has led me to realize that when this book on grammar and usage is done, someone smart will read  it behind me. I’m already saving up for that day, because once that crackerjack copy editor turns on the bubble machine I will be looking at a bill of at least $350. My Sweet Baby, who goes off to work every day while I sit in my sweats and write stuff like this, agrees that there is no alternative, especially for a book that sets me up as some kind of authority on editing, grammar, and usage.

A lot of you know smart people who can edit your manuscript. I know a boatload of smart people, through my work as a minister, but the problem is that dual relationships are frowned upon by peers and middle governing bodies in the church. Any time there is a mismatch in power, and any pastor-person relationship will be an example of that, I will not call upon that person to help out with my editing needs.

Most of you will not have to worry about dual relationships.

You can call on your friends. Remember, however, that the honesty that a good editor brings to the job may not go down well if that person is also your best friend or your spouse.

I know from long and somewhat bitter experience that I do not often appreciate any editor’s candor, particularly if it is accurate and not of a tone or sort that I expected.

One piece of aggressive good advice is this. Be specific in what you ask of a friend who agrees to do editing for you. If you want typo patrol and nothing else, say so. If you want typo service and some opinion on the overall value or interest of your manuscript, say so. If you do not want your editor friend to silently fix anything, no matter how small, say so.

Another piece of advice is this. Be generous. Give a gift. If you settle on a price or a barter deal, add something nice for lagniappe.

And if neither of you knows what lagniappe is, look it up.

Picking up before the cleaning person comes

I can’t resist one final piece of aggressive good advice.

Before you bring in the cleaner, pick up your clutter and consider running the vacuum cleaner. This is a source of amusement for a lot of us when it comes to stories about cleaning up before the cleaning person arrives with all the tools and toys of home beautification.

When it comes to the copy editor whom you are hiring to clean up your precious prose, you need to clean the thing as best you can, in advance, for two reasons –

 ▪ You will end up paying a lot less for the service.

▪ You will be less embarrassed by what you missed.

I definitely will add this need for editing in the small places to the list of things that make writers look dumb.

Let us talk about rhetorical pairs.

What little that I know about poker could fill a penny-ante pot with room left for the experts to give their two cents’ worth. I do know, however, that two pair beats three of a kind. As one who knows grammar and usage, I also know that form does indeed follow function.

Where do these discrete facts leave us, and why should you care? The answer has to do with that infamous list I’ve started  — the top ten things that make writers look dumb.

You know more than you realize about rhetorical pairs, including why I choose to use the word rhetorical.

Here is an example of rhetorical pairs –

 Not only am I backing in to this topic, but I also am creating confusion rather than making sense.

With me now? Here is another rhetorical pair –

 On the one hand I desire to create clarity, but on the other hand I seem to be good at creating confusion. Let us hope that that confusion proves to be creative.

Another example of rhetorical pairs –

 Neither the reader nor the writer knows the answer at this point in the proceedings. Do I wish to be rhetorical or right?

And finally, this example of rhetorical pairs –

 Either I give clarity or you walk away. It’s that simple.

 ▪ ▪ ▪

Rhetorical pairs in writing serve some important functions — functions flowing from the form. If I say on the one hand, you will expect me to quickly say something like on the other hand. If I do not complete the pairing that I have brought up in your mind, you will have divided attention for whatever else I want to say, for a few sentences. By the passage of a few sentence, you will have decided to either forget the exciting of your unmet expectation or you will decide to leave me to my darkness and do something else or read someone else.

This is not an outcome I desire. I write so that you will read. It is a form of communication — the honoring of an implied contract and the reason why I break my silence.

This is why I am putting rhetorical pairs in my list of the top ten things that make writers look dumb.

Readers and listeners get angry and go away if you promise but do not deliver.

▪ ▪ ▪

I like that this subject — rhetorical pairs — is subtle.

I like that you can choose to ignore or modify the rules and conventions concerning rhetorical pairs.

And I like that intelligent persons disagree with me on the importance of these rhetorical pairs.

The argument from subtlety

 I agree that one could argue that most readers and listeners do not care about or attend to such subtle structural cues as rhetorical pairs.

If I say (playing off of that Blues music standard The Sky Is Crying) that Not only is the sky crying but the moon is down as well, I have created an expectation that I will follow not only with but also. However, the sentence is stronger in its present form than it would be if it simply followed the formula that says not only must or should or usually is followed  by but also. I gave you not only … but as well and you either did not notice or did not care that I broke a rule. What you probably did notice was an interesting and fairly poetic sentence.

You might even have said, Tell me more.

I agree that the argument from subtlety has merit.

However, what I agree to is this. In that sentence I excite your expectation of one thing but supply another thing that you did not expect but that you can see will satisfy your need for order and your need, however submerged, for adherence to the rules and conventions of standard communication.

I gave you something better than you expected.

Chekhov somewhere said sometime like this: If you put a gun on the set in the first act, be sure that someone fires that gun by the final curtain.

We expect to hear KABOOM. We will settle for KAPOW.

This leads to my second assertion.

The argument from equivalence

 Any used-car salesperson or politician knows that bait-and-switch, even though it is a transparent, overused trick, works often enough to keep bait-and-switch as an option in any situation these salespersons encounter.

If I bait you with the first part of a rhetorical pair, I have two options –

■ Supply the second part of the rhetorical pair.

■ Offer a substitute that does the job as well or better.

It is perfectly fine to do this in writing. Either option will maintain the fragile contract between reader and writer. In fact, if you excite an old expectation and supply a new solution, the reader will perk up and be more solidly committed to staying in your presence while you seek to communicate with her.

This anticipates my next assertion.

The argument from utility

 If you choose to excite expectations by introducing a commonly held assumption about a pairing of words, you can score double points by introducing a fresh end to the promised beginning.

The previous example will serve –

 Not only is the sky crying but the moon is down as well.

This sentence works. It has utility because it works. This sentence also creates interest rather than irritation in the reader because of the creative alternative to the traditional pairing of not only with but also.

The tradition solution would be this –

Not only is the sky crying but the moon also is down.

An astute, and strict, reader will not be satisfied by anything else. The rest of us, however, will appreciate the superior flow of the alternative of –

Not only is the sky crying but the moon is down as well.

The first duty of the writer is to produce a complete sentence (unless the writer has a defensible reason to write a fragment instead). The alternative sentence satisfies, at a minimum, this expectation that most of us have when we read, that most if not all of the sentences that we read will have a subject and a verb.

In the matter of rhetorical pairs, there is an additional expectation, that the writer will not excite expectations that she does not satisfy in ways that most readers will not only find to be according to the rules but also find to be of a sort that can include the fresh and surprising.

We settle for sense, and we dote on freshness.

My goal as a writer is to be rule-aware rather than rule-bound. I want to excite expectations that I can satisfy in fresh and interesting ways. To do this, I need to know the rules and regulations and conventions and expectations. Otherwise, when I offer something that I think is fresh and interesting, the reader will say, I saw a gun appear on the set. No one fired the gun before the final curtain fell. This leaves me feeling cheated and play with. I do not like to be cheated and play with. I’m out of here.

Form does follow function, and this I think is another way of saying what I’m seeking to say. If you set up a sentence in a particular form, the sentence will only function as you intended if you understand the form you use.

If you do not understand the form, your reader will not understand your writing.

No one wants this to happen.

When Subject and Verb agree, everyone feels a gladness.

If any one or any thing can express gladness, it would be the Parts of Speech, inanimate though they be. Without these Parts, our speaking and writing would be far less than even partial in effectiveness. We would be dumb, in all the senses of that short, wide, blunt word.

When Subject and Verb disagree, no one is glad.

No one.

And sometimes, the disagreement sulks just under the placid surface of the pond of our prose like an ugly family secret hidden from all eyes.

Oddly enough, the Parts of Speech, so eloquent on other occasions, remain silent in the face of slightly submerged faults. This is when you step in and make things manifest and fix all errors. To do this, you will need tips and tricks.

Here are a few –

■ Notice that I said Subject, not Noun. The subject of a sentence can be any one of a number of things other than a simple noun referencing a person, place, or thing, or animal, vegetable, or mineral. Phrases in particular can act as nouns.

For example –

Of Mice and Men deserves a place on your bookshelf.

■ It is true right now and likely to continue as true in the future, as it was in the past, that the subject of a sentence will never be found in a prepositional phrase. This bear trap with bone-shattering jaws awaits your blundering step in its direction. For an example we need go no further than what I wrote a moment ago –

Oddly enough, the Parts of Speech, so eloquent on other occasions, remain silent in the face of slightly submerged faults.

The actual subject of the sentence is Parts, and the functional subject of the sentence is Parts of Speech taken as a phrase acting as a noun.

The real subject of the sentence?

Flip a coin and take your pick.

The important thing here is that the noun Speech, falling within the prepositional phrase of Speech, cannot stand as the subject of the sentence. The subject is plural, not singular.

All verbs should make a note of this, and you can, too.

■ The subject of a sentence can be the presence of an absence. That is, the subject of a sentence can be assumed by the context. For example, I could say –

Am I right?

You know that I am right.

Or I could simply say –

Right?

Right

… and you would know the meaning, and the subject, of the sentence by the kind of detective work that anyone who speaks or writes knows how to do without thinking about it.

■ Finally, in a few cases you must make a choice, if press, or if you are diagramming sentences. Is the subject of the sentence the noun Parts, which gets the nod by function, or the phrase Parts of Speech, which gets the nod by its function as a noun phrase?

Oddly enough, the Parts of Speech, so eloquent on other occasions, remain silent in the face of slightly submerged faults.

Usually, no one will give a rip.

▪ ▪ ▪

The question of subject/verb agreement makes my list of the top ten things that make writers look dumb. There are two reasons for this.

The first reason is this: Readers will judge you by subtle things such as subject/verb agreement.

The second reason is this: When I was a young copy editor, our Editor called the news editor and copy editors into his office and gave us an ultimatum. The next person, the Editor said, who allowed an error in subject/verb agreement to appear in the lead paragraph of any story printed in the paper would be fired. The five of us took this threat seriously. The Editor was a vain and proud man whose social skills were eclipsed by his my-way-or-the-highway style of management. No one of us (and that chunk of speech — no one of us — is a good example of the problem we copy editors were dealing with) doubted that the Editor was deadly serious.

As much as I disliked his style, I also felt embarrassed.

We did what we could to amend our faults of the past. We conducted side conversations and general conversations about troublesome lead sentences, especially for the first week of sudden-death copy editing that followed that visit to the Editor’s woodshed.

Several things became apparent –

■ Lead sentences that included variations on the word one were to be hunted down and recast. For example –

Nobody and no one — none of us — wanted to be fired.

The pitfall in this example is that the sense of a word like nobody was the equivalent of saying no body – one could argue that this is a singular subject. The alternative phrase none of us is a tricky way of saying the equivalent of no one of us. Also, in effect, singular rather than plural. Remember, nouns inside prepositional phrases such as of us will never be the subject of the sentence.

The extreme example was not the kind of thing that any of us wanted to fight for, with the Editor, even if we were right.

We could be right but end up wrong, at the Editor’s whim.

For example, consider these two alternatives –

None wants to be fired.

And –

None want to be fired.

The word none is a functional contraction of the phrase no one (a singular noun phrase). That was the correct version, not None want to be fired (which is the same as saying No one want to be fired, which puts subject and verb in disagreement. Each of us on our own decided to simply recast any such sentence rather than run the risk of debating points of grammar or usage with the Editor, who was of the school that said you win all arguments with those you have power over by escalating by any means until the point is carried.

The take-away is this. If you look at a sentence and suspect that it is in error, rewrite the sentence in a way that you can prove is correct, at least to your own satisfaction.

As we went through that first week of post-threat fear and trembling, we copy editors noticed others words and phrases that deserved banishment or recasting. For example –

Two inches of snow is the forecast.

If confronted with this sort of lead sentence to a news story, we might have quit on the spot and switched our line of work. Two inches … is it an it or an are? If you get it wrong in the eyes of the Editor, right or wrong you know the probable penalty. And notice, too, that the example has an inverted structure — it can be argued that the subject is the forecast but the structure of the sentence has been turned inside out, making the copy editor’s job difficult indeed. The best fix was to rewrite the sentence like this –

The forecast is for two inches of rain.

That makes for a clearly singular subject that demands a singular verb. Done.

Some of us argued that the order in which the words appear is the ruling factor, leading to the absurd but technically, they said, correct version being this —

Two inches of snow are the forecast.

The rest of us had two things to say about that.

■ When you fix a sentence to be correct but also make the sentence absurd or ugly, you need to recast the sentence rather than fix it by the book.

■ The phrase “two inches of snow” is a single idea and thus must be treated as a singular subject. Although we were on solid ground here, none of us wanted to debate the choice with the Editor. That snowball had a rock tucked inside it.

Thinking about this sort of thing led me to the Jack and Jill Test. If you can substitute Jack and Jill, a known plural subject that is the equivalent of they, you had a plural  subject that demanded a plural verb. For example –

None of us wants to be fired.

… becomes …

Neither Jack nor Jill wants to be fired.

The following sentences by this test would also be correct –

Jack does not want to be fired.

Jill does not want to be fired.

Jack and Jill, as a team, do not want to be fired.

Neither Jack nor Jill, as individuals, wants to be fired.

▪ ▪ ▪

In the end, no one of us copy editors was fired (or, in the end, no one of us copy editors would lose his job).

What happened was a gang of outlaws learned how to work together despite in many cases loathing one another. We also had a lot of fun talking about Jack and Jill in some funny situations. And mean old Mr. Editor had to find other ways to be our Lord and Master Even Unto Death.

In short, a good time was had by all.

This is my final thought on the subject — if you can, have fun with your editing efforts.

If you find that you cannot have fun in this fashion, build into your budget the cost ($25 to $75 per hour) of hiring someone who will both have fun and take your cash.

Or accept that the work of editing yourself, though the equivalent of eating dirt, is still less sickening than watching some stranger play with your writing and your gold.

No one really wants an outcome like that.

It’s past time to talk about modifiers, those words and phrases that make simple things less simple and more rich. The flip side is important, too. Getting these things wrong makes what is simple also absurd or misleading.

In particular, we will be looking at dangling modifiers and squinting modifiers.

Along the way, we will discuss the nature of attribution in matters of grammar, style, and usage. Just who, in other words, is the expert here.

Dangling modifiers

 When I was a young man, I wanted to be a poet. This is a sample of my work –

Walking down the hill,

the bright edge

of dark clouds behind me.

The poem was supposed to be a haiku, and I guess that it is. Fourteen syllables with a focus on nature and sudden turn. The poem also is an example of a dangling modifier.

The idea is that if you begin with a phrase such as walking down the hill (comma), the word that follows the commas is supposed to be the subject of the sentence. In my poem, the subject is meant to be me, but my construction, or form, indicates that the subject is edge. No big deal, right? Well, it is a big deal, since edges, even edges of dark clouds, cannot walk up or down the hill or the dale.

To fix the grammar, but do violence to the poem, I could say something like, Walking down the hill, I sense the bright edge of dark clouds is now behind me.

My poem, though I did not know it when I wrote it, is close to a popular way of explaining the absurdity that follows a dangling modifier –

Walking down the street, the moon shined brightly in the sky.

Such a clever moon, to be in two places at once.

This dangling-modifier error can be fix in a few ways. If the subject of the sentence is I, you can say, While walking down the street, I saw the moon shining brightly in the sky. Or if you want the focus to be on the moon and its brightness in the face of the darkness, you can say, The moon shined brightly in the sky, making my steps sure and certain in the silvery world of a brilliant night.

Why are dangling modifiers important? After all, this is not an existential question. However, dangling your modifiers is high on the list of the top ten things that make writers look dumb.

No one seeks an outcome like that.

Squinting modifiers

It was not a book but a person that introduced me to the wonderful world of squinting modifiers. My new boss at the newly merged Salem, Oregon, newspapers, pointed to my huge, pixilated VDT screen.

“Look, a squinting modifier!” he said.

“What’s a squinting modifier?” I said.

“A squinting modifier,” he said, “looks both ways.”

If you get this one wrong, it is both more apparent and less damning than dangling your modifiers.

For example –

 The moon in its glory, the sun cannot touch — these things are true and also will be so.

A squinting modifier looks both ways, and this causes confusion for the reader. In my example the phrase the sun cannot touch operates in two ways. As you read the sentence, the phrase seems to set up a poetic contrast between the beauty of the moon and the sheer candlepower of the sun, which for a nanosecond is a pleasing thing, but the rest of the sentence makes it clear that the writer was listing two things, largely unrelated, that he sees as true yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

The way to fix a squinting modifier is to be clear with yourself on your goals and recast the sentence to remove the problem. For example –

The moon in its glory, the sun cannot touch, I said to myself in awe of the silvery landscape of darkness before me. Darkness, darkness, I sang, draw me closer.

Another example of a squinting modifier –

The day’s theme, to be clear, said a lot about the weather and the speaker.

The phrase to be clear seems to operate as the idiom that it usually is, or does it? We also seem to be talking about a speaker’s announced topic that may or may not be titled, To Be Clear. Fixing such a sentence is a matter of erasing confusion and penciling in clarity –

The speaker’s theme, To Be Clear, said a lot about the speaker and the weather. It just happened to be a lovely day of the sort that makes sitting and listening a chore. It is a good thing that the speaker was compelling and passionate. And clear.

Although the fault in the original sentence may seem small, you only get so many chances to engage your reader and keep her interest. Even a small goof or two can send her on her way. Readers keep score, and their tolerance varies, so our job is to be clear in our writing. That means hunting down and fixing our goofs.

I would put dangling modifiers in the top half of the list of the top ten things that make writers look dumb. I would put squinting modifiers in the bottom half of the list.

Truth is, anything on the list will make you look dumb, so the rank may mean little.

Just who is the expert here

I own a number of books about herbs. Something that I noticed after reading a number of such works is that the authors borrow and steal from one another and from other sources without any attempt to cite their sources in any fashion. It is amusing and also slightly irritating to see a myth such as herbs should be grown in poor, rocky soil like they do in the wild get copied and offered as gospel again and again until someone finally points out that his herbs grow like weeds because they grow in rich soil and get lots of water.

Books about grammar and usage have similar challenges. I became competent as a copy editor by learning from other copy editors and from reading books about grammar and usage, and by looking up every word I did not know how to spell or define. When I sat down to write this book, I could see that I was going to need some help. I have tried to stick to the dictionary (Webster’s II) and my favorite usage experts — Fowler and Bremner — and I have given simple credit where due if I have had to go further afield for answers, usually to Wikipedia.

It goes almost without saying that one must assess the truth of answers that one finds on the Internet, even Wikipedia. You must assess the experts’ accuracy. What does that make you?

However, no one is really an expert on language. Language is free and easy. Language is either growing or dying, and everyone or no one is an expert when it comes to language. Still, there are agreed-upon norms that writers do well to understand.

If you are bent on breaking the rules, first you should know what the rules are, in fine detail, or you will be seen as a dumb writer rather than as a fresh or bold one.

No one wants that.

Markets are conversations.

– Doc Searls, writing in Linux Journal

If you think about it, puns cause laughter or groaning without inflicting injury or insult. This cannot be said for the other forms of humor, where the cleverness pivots upon disaster in some form, like a ballerina losing her focus in mid-twirl and falling quick and hard to the floor like a crumpled rough draft flung from a frustrated writer’s hand, missing the wastebasket.

If there is not a banana peal to slip upon, no one laughs.

Don’t like puns? How about wordplay? You do like Shakespeare, don’t you? If there is no wordplay, there is no Shakespeare.

I’m thinking about that line from The Taming of the Shrew that goes, The oats have eaten the horses.

If that ain’t word-playful, I’ll eat that horse and chase its rider.

One of my favorite Bible verses says, My people no more will be put to shame. Although I am as amused by shame-based humor as the next person, I do think that self-deprecation has the edge over scatter-shot shaming, even if it is sham-shaming. It is the difference between the pratfalls of frequently falling comic actors and shock-troop stand-up comics who see audiences as target-rich environments.

That brings up another aspect of humor, the need for distance. When the water from the upstairs neighbor’s overflowing shower drain is filling my ceiling light fixture’s covering dish, it is hard to find any humor in the situation. When yours is the foot that leads the body into disaster atop a banana peal, it is hard to laugh on your way down.

One person’s floor is another person’s ceiling, and the two do differ.

* * *

So much for cleverness. And density? That would be the part of writing that mixes the fun of wordplay with the satisfaction of things such as genre-bending, unreliable narrators, and simple love of words at play.

You might wonder where the title, Clever and Dense, comes from. It is a phrase that the marketer in me made up while talking to a friend about my first novel, The Mystery Man Murders, which she had just finished reading.

She quickly pointed out and I as quickly agreed that the novel is as concerned with language itself as it is with furthering the plot.

Dense, I suggested.

But in a pleasing way, mind you, she indicated.

I know, I said. We could say that the book is clever and dense.

Her reply was the short, barking laugh of amused agreement.

Another friend told me that she was starting over with the book and had reached page 60 without incident. She suggested that my writing style was something like that of Thomas Pynchon. I replied that I had started many Pynchon books and while I had enjoyed them very much had yet to finish one. She said that her son loves Pynchon. Maybe, she said, I should give him your book.

Another friend, whom I usually talk to about DIY projects around the house, told me that my novel reminds him of film director Woody Allen’s way of introducing and describing characters. I was nonplussed, since I have been told that my sermon delivery is reminiscent of the pacing of  the actor James Stewart. This friend also noticed and appreciated the tone of hard-bitten noir detective in some of the narrator’s speech.

Others have noticed that there is a juxtaposition of a tight mystery genre story and the simple love of watching words at play. Same goes for the spy thriller genre, which undergoes even greater violence from my love of language-as-language.

Dense.

Since I am ten times a writer as I am a marketer, I have no firm ideas about how one would market such a book, except to warn readers in a friendly way that the book is more of a novel than a mystery or thriller while still being both mysterious in turns and thrilling at whiles.

My sister found that after studying painting to the level of a master’s degree that her vision of what a tree looks like was generally not pleasing to the people who came to art-for-sale shows in her backwater community in the wilds of northern California. I am happy to report that she did not change her way of painting trees, or faces, or anything else.

She was more interested in expressing herself than in making sales.

***

When I talked with my wife about how to market my novel, she encouraged me to point out to prospective readers that there are a number of large themes in general and most particularly the theme of redemption. Yeah, I said, and added my sense of the importance of using a framework of blog posts that allowed me to play with time, narration, and point of view. Yeah, she said, there is a lot of good stuff going on that people would be glad to know about.

I wanted to write a book about a guy who had been a spy and who had been thrown from the train and under the bus by those whom he had allowed to create who he was in decades of covert work. I wanted to show his anguish and rage and impotence in the face of hands far stronger than his own.

I wanted to let him speak, at length, and to repeat himself and contradict himself, and expose himself for the dirty deeds he had done.

I wanted him to find peace and healing, and not a sword.

Redemption.

***

I remember reading a column by Doc Searls, circa the year 2000, in Linux Journal. Markets, Searls said, are conversations.

Wow.

I quickly preached a sermon about how churches, like markets, are conversations. It suddenly made so much sense.

At the time, Searls was senior editor at Linux Journal and had just co-written the book The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Searls, as I recall, cited those whom he said gave him the seminal idea about markets as conversations. It’s like the laying on of hands, what we in the church call apostolic succession and what others call each one teach one.

Humans can’t not communicate is the way one of my mentors in the practice of pastoral care and counseling put it. One of my professors, David Steere, wrote a book titled Bodily Expressions in Psychotherapy.

We talk, and our bodies talk, both verbally and nonverbally.

No one can stop this, no one can avoid this.

Like God, we even communicate through our silences.

***

Writing is even more of a conversation than painting is, and I am struggling with just what it is that I am seeking to find in writing and sharing my work in print, blog, and POD. As resident theologian in two churches that I serve as pastor and as co-pastor, I know that some modern theologians say that God would be God with or without us. By extension, I ponder the alternatives of having or not having readers with whom to share my writing. I cannot imagine myself writing without the sense of at least one person out there who is reading my stuff with interest and occasional satisfaction or irritation. And in biblical terms, where two or three are gathered, there is a conversation going on, with a spirited fourth person in the midst.

That is my goal in sharing my stuff, I guess. A conversation.

That conversation has been a large part of the joy of releasing my novel to the out there. It is fascinating to hear what people make of my golden and precious prose. This conversation is ego-stroking, certainly, and also stimulating, but it is not the entirety of the matter. The conversation I am imagining is also a marriage of true minds sort of thing — a mysterious joining of energies in the void of consciousness as well as a face-to-face meeting of writer and reader in the quotidian.

My writing, after all, begins in my mind and is partly a transcript of my internal conversations with God. In a real sense, I am passing on to you what I hear in my heart and attribute to God with whom I am pleased to claim in these magical moments a co-creation.

I say this without ego because it is simply the way writing can be for me, when I am flowing and recording and creating in a place that must be a lot like what people mean when they talk about heaven.

I could no sooner write without sharing my writing than my sister could paint a sinuous tree on the wall in her closet and shut the door when she was done and walk away empty-handed.

***

I figure that my way of writing down my conversations with the Spirit of God may sound woo-woo or weird, but the conversations that I have with most of my readers are stranger still, because most of my readers are strangers to me and our communication, though a conversation, is one-sided on each side.

I know what I want to say. I have no idea what the other wants to say. This channel is not open for me in the way the woo-woo channel is.

Writing is both mutual enjoyment and solitary vice.

This is not likely to change.

Thank God for the voices in my head.

Ready to ramble?

Some writers make me larger, and some of these same writers just make me feel small and inadequate. These writers, however, take me higher and farther than I can go on my own. Being small, at least in comparison to a hill, dale, or mountain, I am easy to lift.

I’m thinking of Shakespeare, of Mark Twain, of newcomer Karen Russell, and of Orhan Pamuk.

I can tell by the quality of my own writing when I’ve been reading one of my favorites.

The same goes for my preaching.

When I hear a dynamic speaker, I sound more dynamic in my own ears for a time. After hearing President Obama on television, giving a eulogy at a memorial service for victims of a shooting spree in Tucson, I heard his rhythms in my own phrasing. Same thing happened after I heard a tape recording of William Sloane Coffin preaching. My delivery improved immediately.

▪ ▪ ▪

You see, there is content and there is process.

Cargo and carrier.

There are ideas of power, and there are powerful ways of communicating those ideas. Sometimes, the words alone, in startling new order, have a power that exceeds content and process.

When you read about Jesus, who knew how to stir up a crowd, you can see him provoking you with the whippy stick of the content of his presentation in order to make a sharper point about a process that he really wants you to understand. The tipoff is that after a catalog of outrageous sayings, such as you must hate your mother and your father and your sisters and your brothers, Jesus will use a summary sentence, such as I came not to bring peace but a sword.

The lucky ones among us get the point.

The rest of us wander in a guilt-ridden confusion.

If you get hung up on the provocative content that Jesus puts out there, you miss the process, which is the heart of the matter, and you wander down paths of pointless agitation.

Think of Jesus’ saying that if your eye offends you, you must pluck it out. Sheer desperation can drive you to understand that a biblical metaphor is not a way of acting but  a process of thought leading to a decision that guides actions in general. Can you say, Aye, Matey?

I learned a lot about content and process in the practice of psychotherapy, during seminary. If the person across from me was telling a crazy and frightening story, I listened with divided attention for the themes. Otherwise, there would be two scared kids in the room instead of one. Rather than solving problems, which is impossible anyway, I could help a person with the processes. If you decide something, a lot of different and wonderful things, or terrible things, can flow from that one process-level decision.

The presenting problem is never the problem. The inner process is the problem.

▪ ▪ ▪

How can one writer both lift me up and run me down the  way that Karen Russell does in her first novel, Swamplandia!? Russell has a wonderful feel for the words themselves. Watching her at play is a pleasure almost separate from the sense of her story, though her images are apt and always further the plot.

For example, in the book’s afterword Russell thanks this person and that person and this person over here. And, oh yeah, the friendly family that put her up on their couch on many occasions –

… if this were interactive, I would give each of you an ovation and a Cadillac.

Reading Swamplandia! makes me happy and sad.

Content and process. The levels of the game.

Elation and envy.

▪ ▪ ▪

My Editor in Chief in Oregon agreed to edit my book reviews before I gave them to the Sunday Editor. That was huge, all on its own. Editor Ed was dean, friend and colleague of powerhouse journalism Prof. John Bremner’s for a time at University of Kansas. When the group from Salem had gathered with others to hear Bremner at a hotel in suburban Portland, Bremner came over and asked us in a resonant whisper, “Where is The Dean?”

Ed taught me three things –

● Book reviews must be the best writing in the paper.

● Do not use pronouns.

● If you want to improve your writing, read good writers.

Ed gave me a year’s subscription to The New Yorker. He insisted that I write no more than twelve column inches per book review (down from my usual twenty-five and higher). After a season, Ed passed me on to a staffer whom he admired, who ran the newspaper’s morgue, where press clippings go to die. By then, I was writing tight, and I had a new confidence. My writing voice sounded right to me.

▪ ▪ ▪

I understand Shakespeare.

After all, I was an English Lit major.

Shakespeare cannot leave words alone but will worry at them like a cat with a hat or a dog with a scarf. Shakespeare wants to show the possibilities of words at play, the way meaning comes like a servant anticipating the master’s summons.

Always the first to claim some pun-mined patch for Queen and Country, Shakespeare leaves his footprints all over the map, even at the margins where it is written, Here there be monsters.

Twain reminds me that few things in God’s green earth lack some pinch of humor. When Twain toured the world with friends (as told in The Innocents Abroad), he and his buddies got tired of local guides with names no one could say or remember. The three merry pranksters decided, by fiat, that all guides would answer to one name, Ferguson.

Ferguson was not amused and in some cases was rageful. Thus does Twain mix mirth and rue to improve our humors.

Twain tells of getting a rubdown after a Turkish bath –

Please inform my family of my death, he said, for I can tell from the stench arising from my body that this is so.

Words to that effect, anyway.

And who has not heard some version of Twain’s reaction to  a false rumor concerning his health? I remember it as –

The news of my demise has been greatly exaggerated.

Twain describes how a sleepy river town comes alive for a while on a hot day when a steamboat puts in for water and wood to make more steam. Everyone, Twain said, is grateful for the noise and confusion.

▪ ▪ ▪

Content and process.

Jack and Jill.

I’m not absolutely certain of how this ramble of mine has any bearing on the subject at hand, which is grammar and usage, unless I offer it to you, at a discount, as a nod to matters of style.

Style in its many meanings –

● Style as in typography.

● Style as in tone, as in writer’s voice.

● Style as in the particularities of language … such as style sheets.

● Style as in Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.

▪ ▪ ▪

The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, writing of and from Istanbul, amazes me. I am so much more glad that God is whispering fireworks of phrasing and cartwheels of ideas into Pamuk’s ear than I am sad that my own God-given strings of firecrackers only hug the ground of their being and go pop-pop-pop.

Noise and confusion, silence and smoke.

Pamuk rewards the reader with work worthy of the name literature. His novels connect and cover the spaces among the dots, all the dots, no two alike. His essays do not merely assay or intend but come solid as gold and stay like diamonds set in the mind. We are made rich by Pamuk’s either/ore, and we stand in awe of his Grammar of Gold.

Colors, patterns, intelligence, feeling, and cunning — Pamuk’s work in the service of the creator of us all. Only God can create, and only those with the ears to hear can try to tell us, in silence borne of letters, dumb until we bestir them for news from above, of the glories out there and down to here.

Content and process.

Pamuk, in his autobiographical book Istanbul, describes growing up in a wealthy family of privilege and of how the money ran down and the family prospered in its way though the mid-20th century decades of our life. Pamuk began as a fine artist but quickly switched from the paintbrush to the press, of the pencil, on the page. His work earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. His latest book to be translated into English, a slim volume titled The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, gathers lectures that he gave in 2009 at Cambridge, Massachusetts — the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Privilege meets privilege, and we benefit from the riches and wealth.

Two things impress me about Pamuk.

First, that Pamuk’s Istanbul has no western-style street signs, according to a map of the territory that I bought at the bookstore. One must hire a Ferguson to help one get around.

Second, that Pamuk writes at a location separate from his home and family, like a father going to his job, which is the profession of speech.

Orhan Pamuk’s father was a writer of the hobby horse variety, and he wrote best in French, in Paris, far away from his wife, two sons, and legion of relations and circle of friends.

Pamuk wrote with deep compassion of his father in an essay printed in The New Yorker after Pamuk won the Nobel.

▪ ▪ ▪

Musing on favorite writers gives me the urge to ramble on for a while, myself. OK?

When I was 10, my mother found a loose thread. When she pulled on it and pulled on it, our life began to unravel as she did. She found herself in the car, down by the river, trying to decide once and for all whether to jump in and drown or go home and cook supper for six.

One morning during this time of unraveling, I was sitting on the porch in the cool of a perfect day in June. The last day of school was over, and I was waiting for my father to drive up in his logging truck, shattering the quiet of the street, and take me with him for the rest of his work day.

We thundered through the streets of our town and headed for the woods, and a log landing two hours away, in the drainage of the Trinity River in northern California, way over by the tiny lumber mill town of Hayfork, on the Hayfork Creek fork of the south fork of the Trinity.

Remember Gertrude Stein’s swipe at Oakland, California?

There was no there there.

That was Hayfork, too.

Somewhere along the long way, thundering down a river road, we stopped at the spot where a rusty pipe that tapped a spring in the hillside stuck out toward the road in a roadcut. A rusty tin can sat in the wet rocks below the quickly dripping pipe. My father drank, and I did, too, realizing that a rusty can would not be something I should tell the others of when I described My Day with Dad.

Across the river road, past the pitch-perfect trailer load of Douglas fir lengths, limbed and bucked at about 20 feet — tons of heavy chaos in a triangle stack of potential — was an abandoned placer mining dredge platform. I guess you could call it a boat. Given water enough, it might float and it might stay upright. The placer miners who worked the riffles and panned the slurry for gold flakes had shut down the machine and walked away, a long, long time before. They left behind berms of worked-over gravel that you never forget.

The water was sweet and cold.

Refreshing like a cool morning in June.

I was free until the fall, but not after.

Happy and uneasy.

That tin can, though clean, was rusty to a fault.

As my mother showed her iron will, my father showed me that can. And so many others.

And so I ramble.