Making them up as I go (2)

1. Tell the truth.
2. Entice, or fail.
3. To emphasize, summarize.
4. If it ain't short, it don't work.
5. Be clear.


And so I don't forget:
Don't explain. Just tell a story.
Don't argue. Just say things that make sense.
Expect people to be bored by the writing, and shorten it.
Make the wording easy to take.

Remove Loose Ends -- the interesting one-liners that go nowhere.

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Petty Little Things

Working on a post for the economics blog. My technique is to read and revise from start to finish. At the moment, I'm stuck in the title. My working title for the post was

The Myth in 'The Myth of the Great Moderation'

But the first word in that title tells the reader there are no other myths in the thing, just the one I'm writing about. I don't want to say that. So I changed the title to

A Myth in 'The Myth of the Great Moderation'

But now it tells the reader that the writer is a wuss. In this form the title is weak. So hey, take the word out:

Myth in 'The Myth of the Great Moderation'

That's not bad.

It'll be great when I finally get past the title so I can start actually revising the post!
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1 comment:

The Arthurian said...

This idea, finessing the article maybe... as parts of speech, the and a are articles, right?... This idea comes to me from Arnold Toynbee, who named his great series of books A Study of History.

It wasn't wuss-like when he did it, probably because history is vast and comprehensive. Toynbee's use of "a study" was simple modesty.

And there you have it: Finessing the finessing.

May 10, 2014 at 10:11 AM

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