Tortured Logic (redux)
What I wrote here five years ago still applies today.
Perhaps more so.
Why It Matters
Because this is what a man looks like.
Because of all the other images of men we see on TV and read about online — men who abuse women, who objectify them, who hound them out of the clubhouse for daring to show that they can play too. Men who feel that they have to prove themselves by defeating someone, or by being the loudest or the strongest, or by being the most aggressive. Men who live their lives consumed with secret fears — the fear of being weak, the fear of faltering, the fear of being vulnerable — and who lash out to try and convince the world that they are not afraid.
Because here is a man who can sit with presidents and prime ministers, who can associate with the rich and the powerful, who can stand toe to toe with rivals and competitors, who can control one of the most influential companies in the world — who can do all these things and be none of those other things.
Because for so long the dominant narratives of manhood we’ve had to choose from have been the unwavering, decisive hero or the dominating, conquering oppressor. Everything in between, we’ve been told, is somehow emasculated.
It matters because in 190 words, Tim Cook has just changed the narrative of what it means to be a man.
Confessions of a David Ogilvy Fan
I was fortunate to have grown up in an era when the Ogilvy & Mather style of copywriting was at its peak. You know the style: a fearless amount of white space, a bold headline in an ever-so-mildly self-deprecating font, and dense but frictionless copy conveying a sense of — how do you describe it? Not arch, exactly, but certainly knowing. As if the copywriter is discreetly tapping the side of his nose as you read it.
The whole package feels as if the writer can’t quite believe that his client was serious when they said they wanted you to know about this product. Because someone with as good taste as you must surely already know about it already.
So sorry to interrupt. But while I’ve got you, would you mind giving this a read?
I’m rereading Ogilvy on Advertising (I try to reread the classics every few years) and I am reminded what a superb writer Ogilvy was. Like the best of his ads, you read a story that feels like it’s being shared over a pint in a pub or over a brandy in the club, and when you get to the end, you suddenly realize — wait a minute, I learned something.
The alcohol metaphors are not accidental. Ogilvy’s writing is what a good single-malt Scotch would sound like if it could speak.
The man was passionate about writing. He understood that it is perhaps our most refined tool, and he used it with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker. His masterful understanding of the power of language allowed him to do some astonishing things with it. His words made people do things.
Most importantly, his words convinced people to do the one thing they hate doing the most: part with their money. And he got them to do it willingly. That commands a lot of resepct.
Ogilvy wrote that he liked to hire “gentlemen with brains.” People with an aristocratic sensibility who are savvy, literate, and imaginative. An aristocratic sensibility is an unfashionable character trait these days. But frankly I think commercial writing, and maybe the world at large, could use more knowledgeable snobs. They work very hard at making things fun.
Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won’t think you’re going gaga. — David Ogilvy
Of Human Keybondage
As I have written about before, I am on something of a personal quest to develop an “inline editing language,” something that will allow me to use the alphanumeric keys to edit while I write, as quickly as I write. I call it “wred” or “wreding,” for writing and editing.
Like your average computer user, I am adept at using native keybindings (keystroke combos that involve the fn, ctrl, opt, and cmd keys) and arrows to edit. However, in order to use them I have to leave the organic flow and take the cursor away from the rockface (or typeface?). In other words, I sacrifice forward momentum whenever I have to go back into the paragraph to manipulate the text, then return to where I stopped writing, and then resume writing.
Which of course is exactly the thing that creative writers are taught is “bad” — you should never stop to edit, you should just get it all down however it comes out, and then go back and rewrite later.
Copywriters and writers on deadline, on the other hand, generally don’t work that way. As Tom Chandler pointed out, “When you’re looking for 100 perfect words, fire-hosing the first draft is a wasteful exercise.”
What I want to do is to be able to “edit forward,” with my cursor never leaving the leading edge of the sentence regardless of whether I am putting words down or taking them away. I want to be able to write the equivalent of this:
“It was the grooviest, no, the gnarliest, no, the best of times, it was the crappiest, no, worst, of times, it was a time of really stupid idiots, no, the age of silliness, no, foolishness . . . “
. . . and let the computer make those changes to the text behind me while I keep on writing.
So far, the closest I’ve been able to come to my vision is the set of powerful keybindings developed for the Vim text editor. In my spare time, I’ve been teaching myself Vim’s basic editing combos, and they do seem to solve some of the problems that I’m talking about. But with Vim, I keep hitting a snag.
The Volunteer Matrix
Thinking of working with volunteers of the artistic or creative persuasions? Here’s a guide to the various types of volunteers that you may encounter, in handy graphic form. Cut out and save!
This graph is not based on my own recent experiences in any way. Nope, not at all.*
* = NOTE: Statement may not be factually correct.
The Society of Editors Who Don’t Get Worked Up Over Typos
There’s a lot of stuff floating around Facebook of late dealing with typos of all kinds: cute homework misspellings, SMS autocorrections, misspelled graffiti, flubbed tattoos, missing or rearranged lettering on signs, blown cake inscriptions, and so on ad nauseam — and now, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s viral hit video “Word Crimes.” And since I am an editor and I am known to consort with editors, many of these items find their way into my feed on a daily basis, usually accompanied by wails over the precarious state of civilization.
The thing is, I’m one of those editors who is not a grammar pedant. I don’t get worked up over a misplaced apostrophe or an incorrect homonym choice. I find Lynne Truss and her ilk to be tiresome, boorish, condescending snobs. In my opinion people who wander the city with markers correcting punctuation on signage aren’t defenders of good grammar, they’re just vandals. An original piece of spray-painted street art under a bridge is worth infinitely more to our society than all of their smudges combined.
That’s not to say that I don’t laugh at great typos (particularly ones that convey an ironic, double-entendered, or scatological meaning). I just don’t hold to the idea that a typo is an indicator of intelligence or a sign of declining standards.
What does dismay me about typos is that they have become a cheap way for people to heave bucketloads of schadenfreude and scorn upon the heads of people they don’t know via the safe distance of social media. We do not engage or persuade using debate and reasoned argument; we merely mock. In the reductio ad absurdum of social media-driven pop culture, we overlook a tattoo’s message of empowerment and confidence and focus instead on the misplaced apostrophe that means nothing.
In my job, I correct typos made by incredibly smart people. Likewise, editors correct typos that I’ve made all the time. No one’s intelligence is doubted. No one’s credibility is damaged. If people didn’t make mistakes, I would probably have to go out and get a real job. It is that way because language is really fucking hard to do well.
Believing that you’re striking a blow for language by going after typos is like saying you’re standing up for classical music by going to a concert and blowing a raspberry every time a musician fumbles a note or misses a beat.
Pretty dickish behavior, right? Well, same damn thing. So just don’t do it. Don’t be a dick.
The Three Gates
Vim a la Mode
Thanks to Tom Chandler, I now know that I am not crazy, just a little late to the game. It turns out that the terrific text editor Vim does an awful lot of what I have in mind for Wred, but best of all, Vim has been around for almost a quarter-century and has a dedicated and innovative user community to support it. I feel like the prodigal copywriter who has just been shown the way home. Thanks, Tom!
I am going to try using Vim as my text editor of first resort for a while, and hopefully I will be able to develop a basic competency in its editorial commands. I will try to be realistic; there’s a lot to learn. But I think that with a few months of daily use I can get familiar enough with it to know whether it is allowing me to write and edit in a more fluid fashion that suits my style — the whole reason for proposing Wred in the first place. If Tom’s experience with Emacs is any indication, I can expect good things.
The two philosophical goals behind Wred, however, remain:
- Modeless writing and editing
- Universal application
In Vim, you have to toggle between writing and editing modes. Granted, it’s a single keystroke each way, and I’m guessing that after a while that probably becomes pretty invisible. So that’s probably a minor issue at best.
But it’s the second point that is the nirvana of the Wred approach. I’m looking for something that lets me use these commands in whatever app I’m using, whether it’s composing an e-mail or writing a blog post or banging something out in Word or Nisus Writer Pro. The model here, as I’ve said before, is TextExpander. It’s always running in the background, allowing me to type my shortcuts no matter what app I’m using. That means that I’m always thinking in TextExpander-speak. I have a pretty big TE shorthand vocabulary that I use for regular writing, and because of TE’s ubiquity, that shorthand has become my default “language” when writing digitally. I’d like to have the same thing happen to my editing vocabulary. Being able to use Vim’s command-mode key bindings everywhere would let me get there much more quickly than if I am only able to practice them in the Vim app itself.
Vim can handle many file types, of course, but that requires you to open the file in Vim in order to use its command-mode editing features. That kind of stovepiping is so 1997. We don’t live in a world where we have to make the content go to the app anymore. We can now make the apps go to where the content is. Here’s a none-too-hypothetical example of why I need that:
Our hero Paul is working on a complex layout in Word that requires footnotes and section breaks and field codes and all that good stuff. The text — which, of course, was composed in Vim because Paul is a super-stud — is all locked down (because in this alternate reality, Paul’s client understands that you always, always lock down the text before you move into to the formatting and layout). Now, Paul is almost done with the layout, but then suddenly the product specs change and the client comes back to Paul — groveling apologetically and begging his indulgence — with some last-minute substantive revisions to the text.
If this was 1997, Paul would have to yank the text into Vim, do the edits, paste it back into Word, and reapply all the Word formatting. But since we’re in modern-day-amazeballs-world, Paul simply command-modes the heck out of it right there in Word, thereby saving the client money and himself precious, precious time, and everybody ends up happy, the client makes Paul the President of Spacetime, and The End.
So the Wred strategy at this point involves learning Vim and getting comfortable with it, while trying to convince people of the benefits of an app that would let people use Vim commands anywhere.
Unless someone’s already got that covered, too. I wouldn’t be surprised; like simultaneous writing and editing, it’s a really good idea for people who work that way.
Wred: a Proposal for an Inline Editing Language
Inspired by the discussion that followed this typecast just over a year ago (has it been that long already?), I’ve been working on developing a proposal for the editing language that I proposed in the comments. I call the concept “Wred,” which is a portmanteau of “writing” and “editing”. The basic premise of Wred is that it should be possible to use alphanumeric keystrokes to perform basic copyediting functions simultaneously with writing, resulting in a seamless “writediting” process that more closely reflects the iterative way our brains work during the process of creation, as opposed to the linear “write now, edit later” approach that we’ve always been taught and which, I contend, has been imposed by the mechanical limitations of the writing tools that we use.
Please note that Wred is envisioned as applying to on-the-fly copyediting (line editing) here, not developmental or substantive editing. The kind of thorough editing that leads to second and third (and fourth and…) drafts falls outside the realm of Wred.
I’ll be laying out my ideas for Wred here on Sotto Voce with the idea of making it an “open source” project that I hope will inspire discussion and ideas that could eventually lead to a working prototype and eventually a functional, expandable system. There’s a lot to cover: the theoretical basis for the Wred approach, finding the best methodologies for the various elements, figuring out how to kludge together a prototype, etc. But for now, here’s the case statement and hypothesis from the proposal. Please give it a read, and feel free to leave a comment or two with your thoughts and ideas (even if it’s just to say “That’s crazy talk!”).
