The Business End of Your Pencil

One day when I was studying with Schoenberg,
he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said,
"This end is more important than the other."

— John Cage

It's one thing to praise brevity, another to achieve it. Brevity begins and ends with "chunks."

The basic chunk is the paragraph. 

Think of the paragraph as a form of punctuation. Just as sentences would be hard to read without commas, colons, and periods, writing would be hard to read without paragraphs.

As a rule, short paragraphs (like this one) are effective.

However, while writing short paragraphs can be a virtue, paragraphs need not be short to seem brief. They simply have to follow a proven, four-part formula:

1. First, get your thoughts down, even if they take the form a single paragraph.

2. Next, "chunk" your separate thoughts into separate paragraphs.

3. Then, polish your paragraphs:

• Make sure your topic sentence—establishing the main point of the paragraph—is up front.
  
  
• Make sure the topic sentence transitions from the prior paragraph. That means it begins with something familiar to your reader, namely, the idea last expressed at the end of the previous paragraph. 
  
  
• Shape the entirety of your paragraph so it progresses cohesively and coherently. Your sentences should flow one from another (that makes them cohesive) and at the same time link to a single topic—the one captured in your topic sentence (that makes them coherent). Whenever your sentences don't link readily to the main topic, introduce bullets or numbers, or simply begin a new paragraph. And don't bother writing a "summation" or "conclusion" at the end of your paragraph. Just leap to the next one.

4. Lastly, apply the business end of your pencil and revise. As you're doing so, be sure to express all your ideas with precision and to cut your words by a third, at least.

“Writing is revision,” as Tracy Kidder says.

Here's an example of a paltry paragraph—lacking a topic sentence, lacking cohesiveness, lacking coherence, lacking precision. It's short, but godawful:

London's weather had been unusual for September, so Londoners took advantage of it to linger in the parks and visit the popular department stores. Even though an occasional air-raid siren would sound, the barrage balloons that flew overhead provided them a sense of security. They also attended plays and went to "picture shows," seeing films like Rebecca, The Thin Man and Gaslight. Considering England was at war, Londoners on the whole were quite complacent.

Here's the same content in the hands of Erik Larson, a writer who knows the business end of a pencil (the passage is from his new best-seller The Splendid and the Vile):

The day was warm and still, the sky blue above a rising haze. Temperatures by afternoon were in the nineties, odd for London. People thronged Hyde Park and lounged on chairs set out beside the Serpentine. Shoppers jammed the stores of Oxford Street and Piccadilly. The giant barrage balloons overhead cast lumbering shadows on the streets below. After the August air raid when bombs first fell on London proper, the city had retreated back into a dream of invulnerability, punctuated now and then by false alerts whose once-terrifying novelty was muted by the failure of bombers to appear. The late-summer heat imparted an air of languid complacency. In the city’s West End, theaters hosted twenty-four productions, among them the play Rebecca, adapted for the stage by Daphne du Maurier from her novel of the same name. Alfred Hitchcock’s movie version, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, was also playing in London, as were the films The Thin Man and the long-running Gaslight.

Tighten Your Spigot

Be silent for the most part; or say only

what is necessary and in few words.

― Epictetus

A phone call with a salesman this week reminded me why I dislike so many salespeople.

He would not shut up.

What should have been a 10-minute call wound up an hour-long harangue.

Citing the "Golden Ratio," sales coaches advise you to "talk less, listen more." The ratio of talk should be 3:2 in favor of the customer.  

But this guy isn't buying it.

And I may not buy what he's selling—simply because I can't take another drenching.

Worse, he followed the call up with a 600-word email (not including his two attachments). I've yet to read it all.

If only he knew about Star Style.

Ernest Hemingway mastered Star Style in 1917 during a seven-month apprenticeship at The Kansas City Star. It would propel the writer to fame only nine years later.

In a 1940 interview, Hemingway recalled how the paper's city editor taught him to write by demanding adherence to 110 rules. "Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,'' Hemingway said. 

Foremost among them were three: Use short sentences. Use vigorous English. Eliminate every superfluous word.

Hemingway revered The Star's rules. "I've never forgotten them. No man with any talent can fail to write well if he abides by them."

Hemingway added to the rules one of his own, which in Death on the Afternoon he labeled the "Iceberg Theory."

"The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water," he wrote. 

"If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them."

The Greek Stoic Epictetus, 2,000 years before had urged followers to abide by comparable rules for speaking.

"Be silent for the most part; or say only what is necessary and in few words," Epictetus advised.

"Talk, but rarely, if occasion calls, and never about ordinary things—gladiators or horse races or athletes or feasts; these are vulgar topics; but above all not about men in blame or compliment or comparison. Turn the conversation, if you can, by talking about fitting subjects; but, should you be among strangers, be silent."

If you're prone to saying too much—in person or on paper—consider your audience. Show them some charity. Tighten your spigot. 

Maybe the Golden Ratio should be 9:1 in favor of the customer.

Maybe the gold in the Golden Rule is—silence.

When I'm Sixty-ur

It's 64 AD and the Stoic philosopher Seneca, by coincidence, is 64. 

He's been retired from his job as Nero's chief of staff two full years now, and has time on his hands. 

He likes to sit by the waterside near his villa outside Rome and people-watch.

Seneca sees the sail of an incoming mailboat one day, and studies the sudden stirring of the "rabble" on the docks.

"While everybody was bustling and hurrying to the waterfront," he writes to his friend Lucilius, "I felt great pleasure in my laziness, because, although I was soon to receive letters from my friends, I was in no hurry to know how affairs were progressing abroad."

Seneca's bemusement stems from the thought that he has "more travelling-money than journey;" in other words, that he won't outlive the wealth he's accumulated, because his remaining life will likely be short.

He can travel as much as he wants—or not at all.

A journey is frustrating, he tells Lucilius, if you quit half way before reaching your destination; but, as a metaphor for life, a journey need not be completed to be rewarding. 

"Life is not incomplete if it is honorable," Seneca writes. 

"At whatever point you leave off living, provided you leave off nobly, your life is a whole."

Leaving "nobly," Seneca says, is leaving "bravely" and "resolutely;" "gliding from life," no matter the reasons. 

Those reasons—the reasons for your death—"need not be momentous," he says; "for neither are the reasons momentous which hold us here."

The rabble on the docks awaiting the news amuses Seneca, because it never stops to ask, what bearing does the news have on the journey?

Why should I care that Jeff Bezos will blast into space? That Britney Spears refuses to tour? That the Queen remains disappointed with Meghan Markle? That Trump now hates McConnell?

Like Seneca, I'm in no hurry to know how affairs are progressing abroad. 

So please don't ping me, text me, tweet me, or IM me.

I hit yet another sexagenarian birthday yesterday and, in Stoic fashion, am content just to sit and watch the rabble rush to the mailboat.

If you have news to share, please, as the expression goes, tell me something I don't know.

How to leave here nobly would be a great start.

NOTE: You can read Seneca's whole letter to Lucilius here. 

In Your Face

Retailers have found a new way too get in shoppers' faces: facial recognition.

Macy's, Lowe's, Ace and Apple are among the retailers identifying shoppers' faces, Axios reports.

The sannning technology lets them catch chronic shoplifters.

More than three dozen advocacy groups want to ban it.

Good luck with that.

Retailers could use facial recognition technology to "personalize" shopping.

They could use it, for example, to push digital coupons to shoppers as they enter a store; improve the merchandise displays based on foot traffic; and streamline shopping (China's Alibaba assigns robots to follow loyal shoppers around, performing the role of "automated shopping carts").

But US retailers don't; they use it for store security.

Axios says they'll soon introduce other "biometric" technology in stores.

One interprets facial expressions; another detects sweat; and another senses an elevated heart rate.

Retailers will know not only that you have shoplifted, but that you're about to do so again.

Taken for Granted

I don't want politicians deciding what's exciting in my life.

— David Hockney

Last year I was elected to the board of directors of our HOA by the residents of our development.

Although a thankless job, my involvement has taught me something fundamental about people.

No one wants her needs taken for granted.

That fact, I now see, forms the eye of our nation's political storm.

I've been trying for nine months, along with the other board members, to advise a group of 20 neighbors about the peril their homes face.

A commercial developer is about to build a nursing home uphill of them that will cause their properties to flood during rainstorms.

They don't care.

Not a single one of them has responded to the board's many recommendations for a course of action, nor even acknowledged the repeated emails and letters we have sent them.

They don't care.

We have been reading them wrongly.

We've been assuming flooded yards and basements would represent an inconvenience; and that they ought to worry their homes' sale prices will fall.

They don't care.

I see clearly, as a result, the dilemma every politician creates for herself by taking others' needs for granted.

As board members, our duties (which stem from state law) include the "duty of care," which means we must do our homework and make prudent decisions.

We try always to do so.

Where we went wrong in this case was to neglect to ask the 20 homeowners affected if they cared their homes will flood.

They don't care.

Imagine how peaceful the public forum would be if the politicians from both parties ceased taking our needs for granted.

Imaging if they quit deciding for us what concerns us; what we care about and need.

Imagine if they asked every constituent:

Do you need oil wells and coal mines?

Do you need to carry a gun? 

Do you need your own bathroom? 

Do you need to protect kids from 1619?

Do you need to shelter Jeff Bezos' taxable income? 

Do you need to incarcerate every criminal?

Do you need to turn back every immigrant?

Do you need to deny an abortion to a woman you'll never meet?

Do you need to guarantee that food costs less in Cuba, that Palestinians can find jobs, or that Afghanis can read Teen Vogue?

Do you need the federal budget balanced?

Just imagine if the politicians asked us those questions.

They'd find out, like the owners of the 20 homes in my HOA, we don't care. We have totally other needs.

What a wonderful world this would be.