Amounting to Something

Photo by flickr user freefoto

I’ve run across a lot of misuse of “amount” lately and thought I’d give a quick tip for when to use “amount” and when to use “number.” In short, if you can count the thing you’re talking about, you’ll generally want to use “number.” If it’s a collective thing that you would never assign a number to, you’ll use “amount.”

So for example, you would never say “I have seven water,” and so it’s correct to say “I was so parched that no amount of water would slake my thirst.”

But you might say “ten thousand golden daffodils,” and so you would never say “I had never seen that amount of daffodils in my life.” Instead, you would say “I had never seen that number of daffodils in my life” (or, since that’s awfully stilted, “I had never seen so many…”).

A minor point of possible confusion is when you’re taking a collective noun like “water” and parceling it out into countable portions. If you’re talking about cups of water, then the modifier here attaches to “cups” and not “water.” Since you can count cups, it would be correct to write about the number of cups rather than the amount of cups of water.

For a related topic, see my post of six months ago on the distinction between “less” and “fewer.”

Why, Why, Why, Why, and Why

Photo by Flickr user chrisinplymouth

Often we hear that a writer should keep in mind the Five Ws, questions that answer who, what when, where, and why. A colleague reminded me this week of another set of Ws, a problem solving strategy known as the Five Whys. I’m bad about remembering this strategy as I solve coding problems as part of my day job, and the result is often that I solve a symptom of the problem at hand rather than the root cause. As a programmer, I should strive always to solve the root cause. So, on to the method.

Given a problem that needs solving, you first ask why it’s happening. Then you ask why again. And again. And at least twice more. And yet more times if needed. The idea is that by imposing on yourself the rule that you must ask why at least five times in succession, you stand a better chance of getting to the bottom of a problem rather than fixing only its manifestation. The example Wikipedia gives is as follows:

Given the problem that your car won’t start, you might ask these questions:

1. Why won’t the car start? - The battery is dead. (first why)
2. Why? - The alternator is not functioning. (second why)
3. Why? - The alternator belt has broken. (third why)
4. Why? - The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and not replaced. (fourth why)
5. Why? - The vehicle was not maintained according to the recommended service schedule. (fifth why, a root cause)
6. Why? - Replacement parts are not available because of the extreme age of the vehicle. (sixth why, optional footnote)

If you stop after that first why, you might replace the battery but still have a broken car, since a broken alternator will cause the battery to lose charge again quickly. Even if you could get the car to start with a fresh battery and a broken alternator, the car would die again shortly because you fixed a symptom of the problem rather than the root cause. If you stop after the fourth why and before the root cause, you might spend a bunch of money fixing your car but neglect to take it in for routine maintenance only to encounter the costly problem again in the future.

While thinking today about some ideas for things to write about, this strategy popped into my mind and I wondered if it might not be useful in writing as well, and especially in creative writing whose goal is to do more than simply relate a story. Let’s try this with a silly example and see where it takes us. I hereby posit that a freshly minted character, Bocephus, has a habit of painting his pinky toenail red.

1. Why? He wants to paint one nail red but doesn’t want it to be as obvious as his pinky fingernail.
2. Why? He’s emulating the magician Penn Jillette, but he fears that he’ll be ostracized and treated as effeminate if he goes around with a red pinky fingernail.
3. Why? Once when he was a child, he got into his mother’s nail polish and his father ridiculed him for it, and it really made an impression.
4. Why? Shortly thereafter, his father walked out for the proverbial pack of smokes and never came back, and Bocephus felt (being only a child without a great grasp of such things) that it must have been his fault and that his girly fingernail painting had been the last straw.
5. Why? Because children labor under the false and probably universal impression that the world is governed by even the most trivial of their thoughts and deeds.

Using something resembling the Five Whys strategy, I’ve gone from a random statement of a character trait that I pulled out of the air while sitting here to a fact about the world that could serve as the kernel for a story whose theme is childhood perceptions of power and agency. Even if I decide that Bocephus is a silly or uninteresting character (he surely is), I’ve landed on an idea that might be fun to explore, and with that idea in mind, I can begin to pull together other details that might make a good story centered on the theme.

A similar strategy is useful when doing persuasive writing, though it requires that you ask not only why but also why not. That is, for any statement you make that you wish to persuade someone to believe, you must ask what’s plausible about it and what objections one might raise to it and then knock those objections down one by one. So even if you’re not trying to write fiction, the general approach of mindfully asking why or why not as you outline your argument stands to be useful.

Swearing

Photo by Flickr user edwick

It’s a simple fact of life that people swear. If you’re writing fiction about real people, or at least real people of certain fairly common temperaments under some circumstances, you ought to be prepared to write the occasional swear word. Of course, we’re not all writing fiction, and there’ll be many of us writing fiction who stick to “cleaner” topics and characters. Still, I thought swearing might be an interesting topic to bring up.

There are plenty among us who’ll see swearing as a degradation of the language, and there’s a very frequently-used argument that if you must resort to using swear words, your vocabulary must not be very good to begin with. I don’t think it’s a sound argument, but then, I do love to swear, so maybe I’m biased. Comedian and author Stephen Fry has taken up the topic as well and agrees with me, for what it’s worth, noting that many of our writers with the most prodigious vocabularies are also fond of swearing. You can watch a short video here if you’re interested.

So, what do you think? Is swearing an occasional evil necessary for the sake of realsim or is it perhaps even an art in its own right? Or is it something to be avoided at all costs? Let’s keep Erica’s tips about writing about controversy in mind and keep the comments clean no matter the opinions we’re expressing. There is, as they say, a good time and place for everything, and this blog is by and large a family show.

If a Tree Uses a Dangling Modifier and Nobody Hears It…

An Ent. Image courtesy of user vladeb on flickr.

A dangling modifier is a grammatical construction in which a modifying word or phrase is placed at too great a distance from the word or phrase it aims to modify, resulting in a lack of clarity or, in some cases, hilarity. An example from the Wikipedia article:

Walking down the street, the trees were beautiful.

The “walking down the street” here is intended to modify (or describe) the person who is expressing the opinion that the trees were beautiful, but since that person makes no appearance within the sentence, the grammar of the sentence is such that the phrase applies to the trees. And we all know that outside of certain fantasy fiction, trees do not walk.

To clarify this sentence, we might rewrite it as follows:

Walking down the street, I thought the trees were beautiful.

Here we’ve added the subject “I” right next to the modifier “walking down the street” so that it’s clear which subject the modifier belongs to.

Another example:

After being beaten to a froth, the cook poured the egg into the pan.

Because that opening clause appears right next to the subject “the cook,” it is understood to modify that subject rather than the intended noun “the egg,” resulting no doubt in a very unhappy cook. We might correct as follows:

After beating the egg to a froth, the cook poured it into the pan.

Or:

The cook poured the egg, beaten to a froth, into the pan.

In both cases, we’re putting that “beaten” clause closer to the egg so that there’s no ambiguity about which noun we intend the phrase to describe.

I suspect that the dangling modifier is often introduced when people are rewriting to correct other problems. For example, I could imagine someone writing the following sentence:

After being beaten to a froth, the egg was poured into the pan.

It’s a perfectly good sentence, with the modifier placed correctly so that it’s clear that it applies to the egg. But it’s written in the passive voice. So then the author might try to fix the passive voice issue by introducing the cook as a subject — a noble enough enterprise, but one half undertaken in this case, since any time you change the subject of a sentence, you have to check all the other moving parts of the sentence as well.

If you search the web for “dangling modifier” or “dangling participle,” you can find all sorts of funny examples of the error. Have you run across any especially funny instances of it?

Pre-Writing

Everybody thinks his daughter’s pretty special and has cornered the market on smarts and creativity, but it’s actually true of my daughter. Really. She reads like no kid her age outside the Guinness Book of World Records and has a memory I really envy. Her ability to use context to understand the essential meanings of big words she has no real business knowing is dazzling. From time to time, she’ll go on little writing jags. After getting a kitty for Christmas, she decided to write a little story from the cat’s perspective, homing in on things like how funny it is to the cat that these strange people prepare a box for her to potty in and so on.

My wife volunteers once a week in my daughter’s second-grade class, and yesterday she texted me a photo of a page she had found hidden in my daughter’s desk. The page was from a journal we had given her on whose cover she has written dire warnings to keep out and drawn protective chains. So of course my wife looked.

The page in question was one of apparently many many pages of pre-writing for a story-in-progress including things like character sketches, plot summaries, important notes about relationships among the characters, and explanations of things key to the underlying mythology of the story (e.g. “sirens are like evil mermaids”). As a seven-year-old, she’s doing things she’s never been taught to do that I’m often not disciplined enough to do with my own writing as an adult who’s been exposed to such exercises.

I could go on all day about my daughter and the likelihood of her rise to fame in the belles lettres, but this blog is supposedly about providing tips, tricks, inspiration, and discussion to help the readers get to writing. So I’ll put to you a question: What kind of pre-writing do you do, if any, and how important is it to your process as a writer?

Roundup of great advice on blogging

In the last weeks we’ve had some excellent posts on WordPress.com’s news blog with solid blogging advice. I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss any of them:

1. How to get more comments
2. How to get more page views (based on research by Stanford University)
3. How to turn you blog into a book
4. How to get more traffic

What other advice are you looking for that goes beyond using specific features and tools?

We can share what we know right here on DailyPost – just leave a comment and ask away.