PureBlogging

Happy beginning-of-the-week, everyone. As promised, I saw The Dark Knight over the weekend and, unsurprisingly, nearly pooped my pants with glee. A little plot-heavy, a little crazy at times… but good gravy, what a Joker. And that Aaron Eckhart was pretty damned unbelievable as Two-Face as well. I still haven’t seen Mamma Mia (nor have I heard good things about it, sadly), but that’s why the good lord made weekday matinees. I’m pretty sure they got made on the fourth day, somewhere between naked mole rats and Tejano music.

So, let’s see what’s going on in the world this week…

(opens newspaper, shakes creases out)

Freelance Writing Gigs asks: Is a Blogger a Writer? My answer: Sure! Every blogger is a writer! Not every blogger is a good writer, mind you…

Two good Twitter-related posts over at friend-of-the-site Crenk: Steven Finch points out ten great tools for using Twitter, and Luis Sandoval offers the top ten Twitter add-ons for Firefox. I’m about the world’s worst Twitter user; I tweet about once per week. Or I won’t tweet for five days, then make between six and eight updates in two hours. Then I’ll neglect it all over again. You know where I belong? 1850, that’s where.

Speaking of Luis Sandoval, he’s got a great post that asks one of the purest and most important questions every writer should ask his- or herself: Are you writing intentionally?

The folks over at SEOmoz are in the midst of a great discussion: What part of the SEO process is hardest for you? For me, it’s pretending I know what I’m talking about. Kidding, kidding. Or… am I?

At the Writer’s Bag, there’s a brand-new post about semicolons which does two things: Settles a discussion I had with commenter PS3 after my comma post, and makes completely obsolete the post I had planned on semicolons.

Cracked offers up its holiest of holies in two articles: The Top Seven Secrets for Writing a Cracked.com Top Seven List, and Seven Cheats for Hitting the Front Page of Digg. My prediction is that they won’t work for you. But then, I’m a depressive, pessimistic bastard who likes seeing other people fail, so I may not be the best source of advice. Again, I’m kidding. We all know by now how awesome I am.

Now: Stop reading websites and start writing something that excites you.

So, you’ve all heard about Starbucks, right? They’re closing down something like 600 stores in an effort to get everyone to stop making jokes about how there are Starbucks cropping up all over the damn place. Also, they’re apparently hemorrhaging money like crazy.

But I know the answer, and it’s so simple that I’m going to offer it to Starbucks right here, at no cost.

The answer is vocabulary.

And bloggers can learn a lot from Starbucks’ mistake.

Let me explain.

This morning, after some pointless shopping at my local Target, I stopped at Starbucks for the one drink I enjoy there: A green tea frappucino. I know that’s what it’s called because it’s not on the menu, and someone served it to me by accident once. Since then it’s taken me about five visits to get the name right, because Starbucks refuses to treat me like an adult. Read more »

Good morning! Anybody else see Hellboy II over the weekend? I was sorely disappointed — I was hoping for something vastly better than the first movie, but got something only marginally better. Oh well — I’m still looking forward to this weekend’s double-whammy of The Dark Knight and Mamma Mia.

And speaking of Batman…

Warren Ellis has called for an end to linkblogs. Maybe the whole Boing Boing vs Violet Blue thing soured him — I know it soured me. Meanwhile, Quark Soup makes some pretty reasonable complaints about blogs in general (h/t Gerry Canavan). Remember: There’s no niche too small. As blogs become more and more localized, will we stop caring about the generalists and focusing more on the experts?

The Writers’ Bag offers a cool tutorial on speed writing. As someone who keeps a moleskine handy at all times, I think I’m going to try this, since my brain often works much faster than my hands.

MetaFilter reminds us that Terry Rossio, half of the screenwriting team that brought you Captain Jack Sparrow, is blogging again. The blog itself seems to indicate that the table of contents was last updated in Fall of ‘07, but hey, a goldmine is a goldmine.

“Trust and credibility are worth more than a fast buck,” say the Men With Pens. It’s a lesson many of us could stand to keep learning. Not me, of course. I am a paragon of virtue.

The adorable manga girls at Dosh Dosh remind us to contextualize the information we share. Also at Dosh Dosh: You’re not just a writer, you’re the editor in chief.

I enjoy cooking. I’m not really spectacular at it — my roux always seems a little pasty and my soups too often turn a bit too soupy. But I’m pretty good with spices. Which isn’t surprising; I got a lot of practice using commas.

Learning to use commas is like learning to use spices. Add too many, and they can utterly destroy the flavor of your content. Read an essay with too many commas in it, and you’ll be tasting commas for the rest of the day. And whenever you see one, you’ll recoil, even if it’s used properly.

But if you don’t use enough commas, your writing will be a flavorless, incomprehensible mush, a bizarre melange of non-flavors that intrude on each other like chicken gravy spilling over the TV-dinner-tray barrier into the chocolate cake compartment. And that’s just unpleasant.

(Another thing you never want to do when writing is use half-assed mixed metaphors that you’ll later have to apologize for. But that’s another post.)

In my travels across the Internet, I’ve noticed that most writers generally tend to take the same approach to using commas that I used for talking to girls in college:

If I don’t do it, then I can’t screw it up.

The same way I avoided Alicia Wrobleski, most bloggers avoid using too many commas, figuring that not using a comma is better than misusing a comma. Of course, this is nonsense. Not doing something is usually worse than trying and failing. And just as the bedpost in room 311 of Sherwood Hall could have had a lot more notches in it if I had just put forth the effort, so your writing can flow effortlessly through your readers’ eyeballs into the Broca regions of their brains.

So: If you only remember one thing about commas for the rest of your life, remember this: A comma is a breath. If you’re a long-winded writer, commas are some of the best gifts you can give to your readers.

Consider this sentence from an advance review of The Dark Knight, posted on one of the Web’s more popular movie sites:

I personally am not a fan of the Joker and find him often grating and overused foil for Batman but there’s no denying his place in history and to many people the first film’s Achilles Heel was the lack of the signature Batman villain.

There’s actually a lot wrong with this sentence (though I agree with the sentiment it expresses). The word “personally” as used here is unnecessary, and really, this whole thing should be broken down into two or more sentences. But let’s see what we can’t fix with commas:

I personally am not a fan of the Joker, and find him often grating and overused foil for Batman, but there’s no denying his place in history, and to many people the first film’s Achilles Heel was the lack of the signature Batman villain.

It’s still not perfect, but see how much simpler a few commas made your reading experience? Commas aid in comprehension in ways that are subtle and subconscious to many of us.

Here’s another example — one that’s more easily fixed — from a popular political site. Here the writer is reacting to a column on marriage in the New York Times:

I just think it is unrealistic and feeds into those crazy ideals we have to internalize and then adds more pressure on our relationships.

One of the problems with failing to use commas when offering your opinion is that it’s easy to come off with a lecturing tone. Again, there’s plenty wrong with this sentence, but it can be patched up pretty well with the addition of a few commas:

I just think it is unrealistic, and feeds into those crazy ideals we have to internalize, and then adds more pressure on our relationships.

But you didn’t come here for examples. That’s not where the hot, wet grammatical action is. You came here for rules.

So, with the caveat that the rules of grammar are really more like guidelines, I offer a few simple rules (um, or guidelines) for using commas.

1. Commas go before conjunctions introducing independent clauses. Conjunctions are words like and, but, or and yet. Independent clauses are sentence clauses with a subject and verb (think of them as clauses that could stand as complete sentences if need be). Keeping an independent clause separated from the rest of the sentence by a comma helps the reader know when he’s moving on to a new thought. The sentence “Alicia Wrobleski was a total babe, and I’m still kicking myself for never having the nerve to talk to her” is a good example of how to use a comma to separate clauses.

2. Never use a comma when a semicolon will do. Don’t simply use commas to separate two independent clauses; doing so betrays a lack of wordsmithing acumen. (See what I just did there?)

3. The rules for lists aren’t as hard and fast as you think. Some people will use commas throughout a list, as in “apples, oranges, grapes, and bananas.” Others will eschew that ultimate comma, opting to write “apples, oranges, grapes and bananas.” Either way is correct, so don’t sweat it.

4. Use commas to separate nonessential elements of sentences. What constitutes a nonessential element may be a bit hazy at times, so try to think of this as one of those times when you’re giving your reader a chance to take a breath. Think about this sentence:

Barack Obama, who is originally from Hawaii, is running for president.

Now imagine it without commas. Pretty hard to read that way, isn’t it?

5. Don’t use commas after conjunctions. Look at every use of the words and, but, nor and or (as well as subordinating conjunctions like although and because) — how would they look with a comma stuck after them. Pretty bad, that’s how.

I know I’m going to get a lot of arguments from big-money SEO types about how this kind of stuff doesn’t matter if it doesn’t affect your clickthrough rate or your pagerank. And to be honest, the rules of good grammar are malleable not always trustworthy. But trust me: This stuff is important. How you sound to others is important.

It probably would have impressed Alicia Wrobleski. At least, I like to think so.

Well, it’s still Monday morning on the West Coast. For a little while longer, anyway.

37 Signals offers some great motivation (and good ideas) for finding revenue streams.

Hacker News has a great discussion on the nature of SEO.

Copyblogger has tips on managing the length of your blog posts.

Men With Pens asks the Ultimate Question: Why do we blog?

Seth Godin makes a great observation about Wall-E and the bravery of creating great content.

Has anyone seen Wall-E, by the way? For my dollar it’s the best movie of the year. If I ever make it as an actor, I’ll be able to cry like a hungry baby, on command, just by thinking of the scene where EVE is trying frantically to find a new circuit board to replace Wall-E’s broken one. See, there I go right now. Big salty tears, right in the keyboard.

I never watched much Saved By The Bell. And I’m reasonably certain it’s not a great show.

But there’s a lot it can tell us about writing.

The show, which ran on NBC from 1989 to 1993 (and in syndication thereafter), documented the dating adventures of a small congress of high school students — sort of like the Archie comics, but less sexually charged, as though each episode were given Tipper Gore’s stamp of approval. During the years it was on TV, I was just old enough that social pressures forced me to think it was stupid, and not watch it. Of course, those social pressures turned out to be correct, and the upshot is that I’ve never really seen a whole episode.

But there is one thing I have noticed about what I have seen of show: The lead character, Zack Morris, has the power to stop space and time. He does this roughly once per episode, mostly so he can talk to the audience. I can’t imagine what this is like from his perspective — how does he perceive the audience when he interacts with it? Does he know it’s out there? Or does he perceive it as some horrific Lovecraftian space-god, hanging massive and aloof at the edge of his consciousness, having granted him this celestial power that he may entertain it before it devours his soul? Is that weird prickly energy we see in Mark-Paul Gosselaar not tenderfoot acting, but barely restrained terror?

Frankly, I don’t care. Whether or not the pitiful vestiges of Zack Morris’s consciousness mourn for the days of summer love and Sadie Hawkins dances as they lazily flap from the muscularis mucosae of Nylarhotep’s oily duodenum is of no matter to me or you.

What does matter is that, whether you’re using Microsoft Word, a pen and paper, or a rusty Smith-Corona with a missing K, you are far more powerful than Zack Morris could ever have hoped.

Most of us tend to forget that when we write, we are the master of all we survey. When faced with rules of grammar and usage, and the panoply of websites telling us how the Really Good Writers do it,  and the many, many voices out there claiming to be experts, we fail to appreciate the pure power we have when we site with a blank slate before us. And even more, we fail to appreciate the extent to which that power grows once we’ve committed words to that slate. The editorial process is scarier to many of us than Zack Morris’s ancient and polypous captor was to him. So too often, we bloggers dash off a post without drafting, without taking a third look, without an editorial process that goes beyond proofreading.

I do it too. And the reason is because I don’t really absorb the full scope of the power I have as a writer. Like Zack Morris, I can stop time. But I can also change the past. I can travel back in time, to six paragraphs ago, and make a change that reverberates throughout all four dimensions of my essay or short story or blog post. I can create the future before the past has even happened — then create a past to match it. I can make changes whose ripples create other changes, whose results I could never have dreamed of.

Too many of us see the drafting process as something that limits us — a slate-grey mechanical process with no art to it, far removed from the blossoming spring of initial creation. A few weeks ago I met an aspiring screenwriter who boiled all of this thinking down to four simple words: “Write drunk. Edit sober.” Usually, any aphorism that advises heavy drinking is one I endorse. But not here.

Editing is power. Drafting is creativity. And to end the writing process after the initial heady thrill of creation is to rob yourself, and your readers, of all the brightness and Brobdingnagian creativity within you.

You owe that to yourself. You owe it to your readers.

And, god knows, you owe it to Zack Morris’s soul, as it is slowly digested over thousands of millennia.