The Wretched Scribbler

The Wretched Scribbler blog features posts about writing, research, publishing, books, media, communications, idea platforms, idea entrepreneurs, and the people, projects, clients, and original concepts of Idea Platforms, Inc. Comments welcome.

The Comma Coma

Posted Mon, 07/19/2010 - 11:12am by Hannah AA

We always love it when Andi steps off his corporate jet to write a guest post for our blog. But I especially appreciated last week’s post about athletics because it reminded me of another favorite summer sport: copyediting.

Last week, I was part of an extensive e-mail string on the subject of the serial comma, which is the comma that goes before the final item in a list. “I like grammar, punctuation, and spelling,” I say. Or is it: “I like grammar, punctuation and spelling?” The serial comma, also known as the Harvard or Oxford comma, caused one writer (poet Robert Francis) to complain, “When I got to Harvard, no one had ever heard of the comma!”

This week we received the copyedited version of one of our manuscripts, prompting a flurry of editorial debates. Although historians say that English writing has been systematic since the middle ages, consistency remains hard to come by. Serial commas are simple compared to the use of ellipses in block quotes, the thin spaces between quotation marks, or the relative placement of punctuation around parentheses. And don’t get me started on the subject of apostrophes at the end of acronyms. (When you have more than one CEO, do you have CEOs, CEO’s, or a problem?) John likes to quote the epitaph on a successful editor’s gravestone: “Changed which to that.”

Some might say that obsessive copyediting is dehumanizing, or worse. Anna was telling me about Roald Dahl’s short story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” in which a man discovers the algorithm for good literature and invents a novel-making machine. The reduction of writing to rules and regulation results in the end of human creativity. It’s a tragic story.

But it’s not my story. In reviewing our copyedited manuscript, we spotted occasions where a misplaced comma or inaccurate punctuation changed the meaning of our writing, sometimes dramatically. Because words are an author’s only medium for communication, writers are dependent on the accuracy of their punctuation. And in my opinion, great writers are those who know how to create magnificent phrases out of the mundane. They do it with style.

Swock!

Posted Fri, 07/09/2010 - 9:38am by andivonravi

I am not exactly a jock, but I do enjoy sports, especially ones that are essentially business in disguise.
There are three of these that interest me the most: golf, tennis, and jousting.

We have been told, mostly by players themselves, that golf is one of the most challenging of mental games, that it tests one’s powers of concentration like nothing else. CEO’s, in particular, cannot get enough of it. Others maintain that golf is primarily a social activity, claiming that more business deals are closed on the green than in the conference room. Both may be true, but I see another value in golf. There is really nothing quite so satisfying as the sound of a club head smacking the face of a ball and blasting it two or three hundred yards down the fairway. It’s almost as fulfilling as a successful product launch, a million hits on the website, or firing somebody who really has to go.

Tennis. Management guru Peter Drucker likened doubles tennis to teamwork, a game in which he said “every member adapts to the other.” But no one cares about doubles. Singles is where it’s at and the really great thing there is the technology, especially the racket. Once again, you’ve got the thwack of string against helpless ball and the tremendous feeling of power as it distorts into an oval shape and spins away from you. You: boss. Ball: the issue you would like to fix, once and for all.

Jousting. Well, it is just beginning to take hold as the business sport of choice around the world. But the appeal is so obvious and simple: armor. Who ― male or female ― doesn’t look great in a helmet, cuirasse, and steel codpiece? Add a horse and you can gain what my friend George Stalk would call an unfair competitive advantage.

Of course, the best thing about all sports, and why businesspeople like them even more than business itself, is the beauty of keeping score. Who wins and who loses is indisputable, black and white, all in the final addition. In business, there’s always the nagging suspicion that the numbers are somehow lying, because they often are.

 

The Publishing iPocalypse

Posted Mon, 06/28/2010 - 9:59am by Hannah AA

The prophets have spoken: a literary apocalypse is on its way. Garrison Keillor says, “Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea.” Environmental writer Dave Gessner sees the future as a Terminator-like dystopia, complete with robots called Nielsen Bookscan and The Kindle and Google Books. Gessner also drew this illustration:

In the foreground, in a cave, is the wretched scribbler, looking slightly the worse for wear. The bones of other wretched scribblers are strewn in the field and buried under the last of the live oaks. One poor reader, paperback in hand, is writhing in the grip of what I imagine to be a modified iPad.

We appreciate the nostalgia that writers hold for their imagined past (Keillor is the acknowledged master of the good old days). But we see a different future for the world’s scribblers, wretched and otherwise. Because we believe, first, that the “apocalypse” is already upon us. And, second, that it’s opening up a brave new world of opportunity for writers and artists of all breeds.

Let the collaborations begin.

So far we’ve written about collaboration primarily in terms of the writing process. But what we see in the digital future is a world where the interface between the written word and other media, like pictures, like sound, and like video, disappears. When that happens, books will by necessity become the collaborative product of a team of cinematographers and app developers, animators and writers.

The result? A new breed of books that is a little bit more like A Prairie Home Companion, which combines prose, poetry, and music, and is currently streamed online. Or like Dave Gessner’s blog, which incorporates multiple authors, audience participation, and smoothly integrated illustrations.

We’ll keep you posted as we begin developing some of our own media enriched digital book projects. Meanwhile, for our next blog cycle, we will be writing about the places where we see writers using new media to their collaborative advantage. We think it’s time to move beyond the doomsday vision of a literary wasteland. Remember, the first brave new world wasn’t a dystopia at all. It was Shakespeare’s Miranda, looking beyond her isolated island for the first time. “How beauteous mankind is!” she cries. “O brave new world, that has such people in’t!”

IPI Ethnography

Posted Mon, 06/21/2010 - 9:37am by Hannah AA

Last week, we held a Bright Ideas meeting with our clients at CFAR, a consulting firm steeped in the traditions of psychology and anthropology. All this talk of Franz Boaz and Margaret Mead has awakened my own latent interests in ethnographic research. And so, I offer the following selections from my IPI field book:

  • December, 2009: Janine, Barbara, and John pore over an early draft of The Emotional Calendar, our recently completed book with Dr. John Sharp, with a pair of scissors. Janine is deftly cutting the document into sections while Barbara and John push them around the table, rearranging the book structure.
  • February, 2010: Seven enthusiastic professionals sit around the remnants of maple scones and cranberry walnut muffins, discussing the weaknesses and merits of a new book idea (now The Idea Entrepreneurs). John stands in a corner, wildly taking notes on an endless stream of flip charts.
  • May, 2010: Anna and I (in an ethnographer-turned-participant twist) sit in front of a computer screen, hotly debating word choice for a book proposal. I prepared the first draft: at the moment, Anna has keyboard control, but on occasion we both dive for the mouse simultaneously.

I offer you a case study in collaborative writing. Last week, Janine wrote about the history of collaborative writing. But at IPI we don’t just espouse collaboration: we live it. In fact, collaboration is a cornerstone of the way we operate as a business.

Not that it’s always easy. The first time I gave a position paper to Janine and received, one week later, what looked like the first chapter to an entirely different book, I was crushed. Like everyone who has ever dreamed of being a writer, there’s a little wretched scribbler in me. But then I read the new edition and I realized that, while my content remained intact, Janine’s revisions had brought the text in line with the voice of the book. And furthermore, while my love for science tends towards the technical, Janine had applied to the work her particular sense of humor. Perhaps for the first time, my writing was funny.

And in my opinion, that’s what makes collaboration great. When I write collaboratively, I can bring out my strengths, and bolster them with the strengths of other people. It’s a win-win situation.

We wouldn’t do it any other way.