🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct1.135451.13758@nocusuhs.nnmc.navy.mil>, yoshi@nocusuhs.nnmc.navy.mil (D M Yoshikami) writes:
|The Map is not the territory.
|You can fold up the map, but not the territory.

Tell that to my daughter.  The first time we took her to a restaurant,
she tried to eat the menu.

|Perhaps the best way to get rid of overusing "is" would entail reading much
|good writing, and perhaps imitating the style.  People continually rediscover
|the same basic principles.  Read the sentences you write -- you should
|carefully look at what you just write and ask yourself: "Does this sentence
|REALLY reflect what I want to say?"  You may have to write "one word at a
|time" instead of "one sentence at a time".  You'll get rid of a number of
|overused "to be's" as well as a lot of other garbage which is WORSE!
|Expressing thoughts concisely can be arduous work; but it has many rewards too.

Watch out for this word by word stuff.  Taken the wrong way it can lead
to galloping deconstructionism, which leads nowhere fast.  What you want
to do, in my arrogant opinion, is to splat down what you think you want
to say on the page as close to all-at-once as you can manage.  Then go
back and read it carefully to see if anything seems to contradict the
sense of what you were trying to say, or to lead off to undesireable
tangents, and fix those things by splatting down something on top of
them and then repeating the review process.  This is easiest with an 
electronic word processor, which I have a tendency to use pretty much 
like an electronic food processor.  (This probably explains why my
daughter tried to eat the menu, come to think of it.)

Of course, none of you out there in netland have ever read my fiction,
so you have no idea what the results of this method look like.
Take it with as much salt as you like. 
-- 
--Fred, or another blind 8th-century BC  |  sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com
        Hellenic poet of the same name.  |