Grammar Mines, page 23

I've been assured that it's good to rant. Within reason, of course. You can't just fill your life with ranting. But opening the steam-valve a bit when necessary does a world of good in getting the garbage and gunk out of your mind, leaving you fresh to work. So I'm feeling free. And I'm not promising to be any more coherent than the text I'm working on. But here I don't have to be!

Sometimes I think I'll never be done with this thing.

One of my problems is with the style of the manuscript. Style, you'd think, shouldn't be such a big deal. But it is.

When a scientist sets out to explain how something works, he describes how it works. References are added as support, but it isn't necessary to go into the gory details of what's in those references. If the reader wants to know more, he can go look it up. You just go ahead and make a statement, and at the end of the sentence you add [Smith, 2007; Jones et al., 2008b] to show where the data is that allows you to say what you're saying.

If as in my present case you're describing a field of knowledge, you can group together information from diverse sources into one whole. If they don't overlap perfectly, it's fine to say what's common, and what's unique to different studies.

What you don't do is use the references as the text. In 1998 Albertsen said... Then in 2002 Harris noted... Lastly Wickwood used the same technique but added a widget to get...

That's an annotated bibliography.

And it can actually impede the formation of a global idea of what's going on.

Putting the author and year up front makes that appear to be the prime information to be gleaned from each entry, when these things are in fact utterly dispensable to our understanding of the topic. Second, we're drowning in details about how each study was done, how many people involved, what exact disease, what exact measures. These details are not essential to the big picture. When a detail really is essential, okay. But you can't make everything top priority because then nothing is. Finally, the looked-for synthesis is never provided. We have a catalog.

Yes, the reader can ponder the gathered information and create a synthesis, but that's what the author should be doing. I'm not suggesting that reading a review should replace coming up with your own ideas, or that everything must be pre-digested, pre-thought. But we do in fact read reviews to have much of that groundwork done for us. So that we can continue on from there. Plus, as a chapter in a textbook, our readers usually have minimal prior experience with the subject. They're lost in the woods here, and describing yet another tree does little to advance their understanding the forest.

But maybe it's me who's getting lost in the woods. There's so much to mess with that I only just now identified my biggest style problem: there's not a single Topic Sentence in the whole 33 pages. Not a one.

I'm not such a Paragraph Structure Nazi that an odd paragraph now and then bothers me. You get them all the time in creative texts like blogs and novels and blatherings. There, not even sentences have to be complete, even words can get chopped or scrambled, and that's fine. But that's why I've had such a teeth-grinding time of trying to figure out what the point is. Aha. Mrs Kirby was right. Much as we hated having our metaphorical knuckles rapped with a ruler in high school English, there just might be something to it after all.

Topic Sentence. Who'd'a Strunk it?
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Monday Poetry Assignment: Observation in a café

I sat down two tables from an interesting-looking guy with a packet of papers maybe a good subject but no quicker than I reached for the beer list he was packed up & gone.
Whaddo I do now??
I had this whole poemy business ready to go. But my subject has flown the coop and I'm all fershimmeled. We shall have prose, instead.
Nobody else speaks to me, so to speak.
Not that the bar, the strangely-named Garden Ice Café, is empty on an early fall evening. Summer on the calender, fall in the sky.
Just across the open door from me two 30-something women are chatting. The brunette on the banquette leaning back against the window, the blond leaning forward across the table, empty glasses, Orangina and apple juice. The brunette's feet are several inches off the ground - she waves her feet around to keep the circulation going. Tan sandals, miniskirt, coat still on indoors. Hands gesturing constantly.
Two tables down, another pair of women in serious conversation. Nobody dressed anything special. Just an after-work stop.
Farther on again, a white-haired man. Maybe 80, maybe a hard-used 70. His umbrella rests against the banquette. It rained for about 5 minutes earlier today. He digs in the pockets of his blue cardigan looking for a tip to leave, standing up to go. He has no neck. His jowly cheeks and chin hang down to his white shirt collar.
A couple arrives at the bar. He fiftyish, casual summer blazer and jeans. She I can't really see, on the far side of Monsieur. They take glasses of water, nibble on peanuts, seem to be waiting for something more important. She plays with her straight brown hair, repositions her large brown bag on the bar, studies something outside. Quickly they're gone. People with a destination.
The pairs of women are still deep in their hand-animated conversations.
Four people are now at the table abandoned by Mr Interesting with Papers. A young black woman with a long thick braid, speaking with an African accent. A man facing her, 20 years older, the one being spoken to. A brown baby, quiet but not sleeping in his stroller, a young man whose glassed face says Student beside the girl. They're the couple.
The men drink wide glasses of Affligem beer, the woman a cup of tea. Baby explores his yellow-trimmed bib.
The first girl couple leaves. A woman alone sits where the old man was. She pours a glass from a carafe of water, looks over the room from behind her clasped hands, elbows on the table. She could be me without the notebook. Oh, she does have a notebook, and a green pen. Then it's back to observing, one hand to her chin. Maybe she's working on a poem.
Or maybe she's not observing, but staring off into space. Looking vaguely toward the black woman, whose baby good-naturedly tolerates being dandled by the older man, without seeing anyone in particular. I know that. I do it often. Sometimes people speak to me and I notice on what must be the third or fourth overture. One man at the cafeteria remarked what a solid silence I had around me. I was just reading the Sunday paper.
She's eating a salad, my mirror. I know that too, having dinner out on my own. Purely functional. I only do that when I'm travelling now. I wonder if this woman is traveling too. Her hair is straight and brown and thin. Nice glasses. A little soft in the arms. Could be me but I have shoulders like a farmer, all tendons and bones.
The other women have gone, and a man in a yellow polo shirt is at the table by the door. 55, balding but not hiding it. He's served coffee, pays in coins. One sugar. He looks around, glances at the tv, looks like he'd rather be sitting there with a friend. Just bored there on his own.
Ms Mirror consumes her salad the french way, in huge forkfuls. I always break down and cut it. I hate getting dressing all over my face. She pours the last of the carafe of water. I'd have had a glass of white wine. She watches the tv, which is more or less above my head. A concert is being shown, some pianist and singer. I wonder what she'll have for dessert. It seems she'll be staying for dessert: it's too early to retire to an empty hotel room. Ice cream, or a crepe. No, the fruit salad. She's the fruit salad kind.
People start smoking just outside the open door - the smoke comes right in, right to me, so I pay for my beer and leave without waiting to know what's for dessert.

Cat of the Month: Kathea

It's September, time of beginnings for all people academic. An appropriate time to recall a different change of everything in my life - moving to Minnesota in the early spring of my junior year of high school. New climate, new school, new friends, new house, new pets. (no, we didn't leave any behind, it was just fate that we lost both Blackie and Errnestine shortly before the move.)
Our Minnesota house, in the suburb of Eden Prairie where any farther to the west and you were out in the flat dull countryside with nothing but corn and wheat for miles, aside from the odd lake, was big and nondescript and catless. It had a basement, and thus stairs, a novelty. But no cats. Must get a cat post haste!
So we got one. Maybe from the pound, maybe from a neighbor, maybe from a colleague of my dad's, I don't remember from where. She was a strange-colored cat. Sort of patchy, off-white, greyish, brownish, hard to say what color cat. We couldn't think what to name this cat. Couldn't get a handle on her.
It was a time of new boyfriends, too. I was introduced to Joel, a law student at MacAlester College, who ran a dungeons & dragons group that my dad found for my brother and me, a way to get us quickly into some sort of social group. Joel may have been some years my senior, but we discovered in each other a sort of magic that we didn't dare explore. A couple of dinners, movies, tv nights at my house, it was a sweet time of taking it slowly. We never even kissed until just a week or two before he took off for Zagreb for a year of study abroad.
But I digress.
Joel was our cat-naming savior. Kathea. Just like that. Took a good look at the cat, cocked his head, moved his mouth around, and said "Kathea".
And so it was.

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Friday Photo Shoot Out: Doors and Windows

I'm a little rushed this week, what with the start of the academic year and all. I may have to flake on next week's Old and Weathered, but I'll try. This is the door to my gardening shed.
One of the pocket-sized churches in a village within hiking distance of my town. The teeny windows are typical, making them very dark inside.

Same hike, different village, an old farmhouse. Too bad the windows on the right tower are all bricked up. On the other side, they've torn out most of the wall to put in huge, modern windows.

The patients' entrance to our oncogenetics consultation - soon to be destroyed (see the work starting off to the right...).

The door to my office, where I spend more time than anywhere but my bed.

Parasailing

I swear I'm going to do this some day!

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