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| Blake's illustration of Milton's Paradise Lost |
Once again I can feel blessed
to have people who help me learn. I believe the words they have shared with me
will help others too. In fact, I know they will. The words from my various contributors
have already inspired readers to do things they might not otherwise have
attempted. Of this I have proof.
Constance Hale. If you read
my blog regularly the name should ring a bell. I named her book as one of my
best for 2012. But I am not alone. Her book has shown up on numerous ‘top’
lists. She is a world-renowned expert who really fills the bill in a world in
which ‘experts’ are often self-styled rather than externally proven with data.
Bleached rhetoric may appear pure, but sometimes sin surprises us into meaning
(apologies to Milton and Stanley Fish).
She has on ongoing series on
writing that appears in the New York Times, is a contributor to many forums and
magazines on the art and craft of writing and grammar, and is committed to
making the way we write help us find the slanted truth or the fictional way things
should or shouldn’t be.
I have learned much from her
work and I know others will too. She is also accessible the way few famous
writers are. She has been very kind to correspond with me on her work and on my
efforts on my blog.
More importantly for the
public at large, she has given me permission to encourage teachers and students
and educators world wide to take some of the materials she has posted, for
free, to help writers write.
I would encourage those
students who look to other sources about writing essays to stop and look at her
work first. She has the gravitas, the wit, and the writing ability to make writing
more than a formula or a grammatical textbook. Most of the advice that I come across for students applying to colleges, while well meaning, does not always make
meaning well. She does. Sound and sense, sin and syntax. The willingness to
encourage risks and to discover new ways of making meaning define her as one
who knows all writing is creative. Hers words themselves then take the stage
and dance and pun and have fun. Pedants and scribes pound down rules on a desk
and then hand out a multiple choice quiz on litotes or chiasmus and expect this
to train future rhetoricians. Not bloody likely.
Here is the place to go:
And if you think I am giving
a lesson in hyperbole with my words about Ms. hale, here is what Wikipedia has
to say:
After graduating from Princeton, Hale spent a number of years
writing fiction and drama, performing her own solo pieces in the San Francisco
Bay Area. She completed her master’s degree
from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at
Berkeley, then worked as a reporter and editor at the Gilroy Dispatch,
the Oakland Tribune, and the San Francisco Examiner, before
taking a position as copy chief at Wired magazine. There, she says, she
began “dabbling in the idiosyncrasies of the mother tongue,” which led to the
publication of Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age,
in 1996, and later to Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose,
in 1999. She has been dubbed “Marion the Librarian on a Harley or E.B. White on
acid.”
Hale has written about Latin plurals and Latino culture, Berkeley
politics and Hawaiian sovereignty. Her journalism has appeared in The
Atlantic Monthly, Health, Honolulu, National Geographic
Adventure, Smithsonian, Writer’s Digest and The Writer,
among other magazines. Her travel essays about the islands of Hawaii and other
unusual places have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning
News, Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, Via,
Afar, and numerous anthologies.
Currently Hale teaches narrative journalism to midcareer fellows at
the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. In 2008 and 2009
she chaired the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism in Boston,
Massachusetts. In addition to teaching at Harvard University Extension School
and U.C. Berkeley Extension, she speaks at writing conferences all over the
country and gives workshops in both newsrooms and boardrooms.
Hale also works as a freelance editor for Harvard Business School
Press [and various private clients. She is a
founder of The Prose Doctors, an editors’ collective, and a member of The
Itinerants, a Bay Area writers group.
Bibliography
•
Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing (2012)
•
Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose (2001)
•
Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age (1997)
•
“How Do You Say Computer in Hawaiian?” in "Cultural
Diversity Supplement No.1"
•
“The Saints and Spectres of the Alpilles,” in Provence
•
“Souvenirs,” in A Woman’s Europe
“Cutouts,”
in Italy, A Love Story and Best Travel Writing 2006
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