William Zinsser: Writing English as a Second Language

Michael Leddy links to a William Zinsser article on effective writing. Good stuff.

It has to look right

In high school I took an art class. We had to draw stuff and paint stuff, you know. (I'm such an aficionado!) There was an odd-looking tree outside our house, and I painted that. The teacher didn't like it.

I wish I could remember her name.

It was a big old tree, with a tiny little branch sticking out the side of it a foot or two above the ground. Weird: trees don't look like that. That was why I wanted to paint it.

Well, that was also why the teacher didn't like it. It didn't look right.

I didn't understand her complaint at the time. That was what the tree looked like. But that wasn't good enough for my art teacher.

I understand now. If you were looking at the tree, you could see what it looked like. You could see it was an odd-looking tree. But if you were looking at my painting of the tree, you could only see that it was an odd-looking painting.

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I was awakened by the phrase as rich as Croesus in my head this morning -- left-over from a recent post on my econ blog. So I started looking for stuff on Croesus on the internet. Found something that made me want to write this post.

From Sardis (the capital of Lydia in the time of King Croesus) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

In 133 B.C., Sardis came under Roman rule ... By the end of the first century B.C., it had become an important center of Christianity...

C'mon. There still wasn't Christianity yet, by the end of the first century B.C.

Or hey, maybe there was. But it sure doesn't look right.

If the Sardis article has its facts right, the wording should have been tweaked so that the odd little branch on their tree doesn't stick out like that.