Re: Y&R OT The Word I heard

On Jun 7, 12:21 pm, "D.M. Stillwood" <dmst...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<jaie...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

It's a memoir.  I've had ppl read it for the first time and be aghast! that
it isn't more "serious," given the subject matter.  But it was what it
was--we were just a bunch of snarky kids.  Aside from the surgery and
therapy, it was pretty much like any group of adolescents and teens.  I
guess a lot is in context, too--once those same ppl read the whole thing,
over time, they came to understand the seemingly irrereverent tone.

That's what I got from the brief passage . . . and, hey, if you can't
be irreverent about your own life history, then you're just not
enjoying life. You have my whole-hearted approval to kerfuffle away.

I know you didn't post for this reason, but two minor suggestions: No
hyphens between adverbs and adjectives acting as they normally do
("closely-curled dark hair"); they are correct for compound
adjectives, e.g., a closed-loop system or a one-time event.  (For some
reason, half the educated population, including editors and writers,
gets this rule backwards.)

I will have to check the sources for that--this piece has been workshopped
to death

Definitely don't take my word for it, even if I've been personally
endorsed by Strunk & White. : )

(I just got my MFA in Nonfiction Writing)

Congratulations!

and I'm surprised that at
least my thesis advisor didn't catch that, since she was very (helpfully)
nitpicky.

That doesn't surprise me. The "ly" adverbs sound as if they should be
hyphenated, but they're really just doing their ordinary job of
modifying adjectives. Plus, I think many educated people tend to over-
correct. I remember being shocked ever since law school at the number
of my highly educated peers who won't use the words "me," "him" or
"them" when they are clearly the correct words in a sentence--it's
always "I" or "myself," "he" or "himself" and "they" or "themselves"
regardless of the word's case, so: "Joe went to the store with myself
and a friend" or "Joe went to the store with a friend and I" instead
of the correct "Joe went to the store with me and a friend." This one
is a real pet peeve of mine, and I hear it so much now that it
occasionally slips into MY speech (shudder). I hear it all the time
on sitcoms now, so there's probably no stopping that one.

Do you write/edit?  I edited my classmates' work for two years, and after
editing my thesis (a gargantuan task), I feel ready to take on freelance
work!

I was an English major in college (though the nuns in high school
deserve the credit for my grammar knowledge) and edited for magazines
for a few years before law school, but I haven't done much since. I
really loved it. Probably the one thing (other than the pay) that I
hated about it was finding other people's errors creeping into my own
writing. I might have had to look up 50 words total for spelling in
the first six months. But after that, I'd become so accustomed to
seeing the writers' misspellings that I probably looked up 50 per
day. Sigh.

One of these years, I'll probably start writing again, but I have a
few other pursuits that take up most of my time. Still, I enjoy being
part of the process whenever I dabble through someone else's work, so
who knows. Maybe the book I've been working on in my head for eight
years now will finally meander over to paper.

I don't mind at all.  You have to develop a tough skin in those MFA
programs, b/c your work is being picked apart constantly.  

Definitely. You can't be in that racket if you're not prepared for
criticism.

Thanks for the
feedback!

You're welcome.
.

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