E. B. White - quotes

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world
and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the
day."

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the
frog dies of it.

Be obscure clearly.

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good
writer.

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.

Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get
the facts.

When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately
happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in
tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

Scott Adam's Tips on Writing

The Day You Became A Better Writer
I went from being a
bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business writing.”
I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you
don’t have to waste a day in class.

Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is
keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five
sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred
sentences.

Don’t fight it.

Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy”
when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It
doesn’t. Prune your sentences.

Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main
difference is in the choice of words. For humor, don’t say “drink” when you can
say “swill.” Your first sentence needs to grab the reader. Go back and read my
first sentence to this post. I rewrote it a dozen times. It makes you curious.
That’s the key.

Write short sentences.

Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as
you’d think.

 

Learn how brains organize ideas. Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball”
quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but
it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All
brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains
work”?)

That’s it. You just learned 80% of the rules of good writing. You’re
welcome.

Scott Meyers: Advice to Prospective Book Authors

Excerpt

If you deliver what you promised on time, all the whales in sales and
marketing that feed on the plankton of your words will develop a special
affection for you.

Remember, most authors are late with their plankton. If you distinguish
yourself by being on time, the whales take notice. That's important, because if
you're a sales rep with, say, 100 titles you're peddling to university
professors or corporations or buyers for Amazon or Borders, 100 titles on topics
you can barely pronounce (much less comprehend), which, say, 5 of those 100
titles do you push especially hard on your sales calls? Let's be frank, it's the
5 that you think will make you the most money. But there's something to be said
for goodwill, too, and I believe that authors who deliver on time make life just
a little easier, a little more predictable for the gamut of people involved in
sales and marketing, and those people are likely to try just a little bit harder
for the authors they like, for the authors who are trying to help them out.

A reliable author selling 5,000 copies a year can't expect the attention from
commission-based sales reps that an unreliable author selling 50,000 copies a
year can, but odds are that you'll be part of the masses of authors with
run-of-the-mill sales, so your real goal is to stand out from those masses.
Delivering on time can help you do that.

Delivering on time is good for your personal life, too. That's assuming you
have one, and by the time you're in the throes of completing your book, there is
a very good chance that you won't. For a great many authors (including me),
bringing a book to completion requires a tremendous expenditure of time, energy,
and concentration. It's common for it to displace almost everything else in your
life: friends, family, your "real job," etc. It stresses everybody, so it's in
everybody's interest to know when the stress will end. It will end when you
deliver your final manuscript, so it's good for both you and everybody you know
for that date to be the date you said it would be lo those many weeks or months
ago when you signed your contract.

(Incidentally, you may have noticed that the acknowledgements of almost every
book thanks the author's spouse, girlfriend/boyfriend, children, pets, etc., for
their tolerance of having been neglected during preparation of the manuscript.
Such comments aren't pro forma; they're sincere. Getting the damn thing done
typically does demand that you neglect almost everything else. On the upside,
the first glimpse of your freshly-printed darling goes a long way towards making
you forget about such things. Few things compare to the thrill of holding your
newborn book.)

This is especially relevant if one keeps in mind the remark by author Jeff
Ullman that authors should never keep track of how much time it takes them to
write a book, because if they do, they'll be able to calculate how much they
made per hour, and the result will almost certainly be depressing. I've also
heard from acquisitions editors that though they have a pretty good idea how
many hours it takes the average author to write a book, they never tell
prospective authors this information, because they fear it will scare them away.
(Sorry, I don't remember the number. I know that it's big, but having written
books of my own, that's hardly news. On the other hand, writing a book is also
intensely satisfying, and there's something to be said for a few thousand hours
of intensely satisfying work.)

Also remember that from a financial point of view, your goal is to maximize
your income, not maximize your royalty rate. If publisher A offers you a 20%
royalty rate and publisher B offers you a 10% rate, publisher B is still the
more profitable option if B can sell more than twice as many of your books as A
can. Of course, it's generally not possible to know which of two publishers will
be able to sell more of your books, much less by what factor, so you'll want to
listen carefully to your prospective publishers' marketing plans before deciding
whom to climb in bed with. In reaching your decision, remember that royalty
rates are only one piece of the compensation puzzle and that compensation is but
one aspect of the overall book-publishing experience. My advice is to try to
optimize the overall experience, not just the financial part.

Speaking of translations, I find that few things evoke quite the level of
giddiness as seeing a copy of your book in a foreign script. I, for one,
cherished my books in Chinese, and I continued to cherish them even after I
found out that they were actually in Korean.

If you write for profit, and if sales are important to you, then you can not
just leave promotion to your publisher. You need to be on the newsgroups
answering questions and gently (!) mentioning your book. You also need to be
ready to do book signings and other public appearances. If your publisher
doesn't set it up, do so yourself. Don't EVER knock anyone else's book, but
don't be afraid to mention your own book when asked for recommendations or for
guidance.

Be ready to support your book. That means constant attention to your
errata sheet, creating an internet (email/web) connection with your users and so
forth. And keep your book up to date.

Link

Coming is like El Nino !

El Nino is spanish word for child. Like all things spanish, it is dangerous.
It kills people and burn down trees. This child is more than a child. It really
isn't child at all. It is a storm. A deadly storm that kills people and burns
down trees.

Warm water usually builds up around Australia. But not any more with
El Nino. El Nino moves the warm water from Australia to somewhere else, namely
to other places. Where are these other places? These are places that also have
water, but water that usually not as warm as the warm water El Nino moves to
these said other places. These other places are to the east. Of the
water.

In Peru, they have many names for many things, one of the things
they have names for is for people who go fishing, go fishing to make a living.
If we had a word for this kind of people that would be "fisherman". But we
don't.

In Peru, they have different names for things that we do in
America. They call that kind of people "pescadores". That's Spanish. That's what
they speak in Peru. When El Nino comes, these "pescadores" can't catch any fish.
El Nino is caused when the peruvian god get angry. They have been angry for
millions of years and have made El Nino for millions of years. Many many moons
ago, the Peruvians commited human sacrifices to satiate there gods and end the
flood that was caused by El Nino. In todays modern dog-eat-dog work-a-day world
of scientists, diplomats, McSalad Shakers and George Bush Jr., we no longer have
access to such solutions. We are too proud. We will not commit human sacrifices.
We refuse to satiate the Peruvian gods. Thus, they remain angry and keep killing
us and burning our trees with El Nino.

Instead of satisfying the gods,
many of "these" scientists have tried to control El Nino with "science". They
put up expensive fish-attracting-buoys that run on flashlight batteries.
Imagine, fighting the power of gods with flashlight batteries! Needless to say,
they didn't work and everyone died

Jeremy Lavine

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Technology Quotes

Technology is dominated by two types of people: Those who understand what
they do not manage. Those who manage what they do not understand. Putt's Law

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading
edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a
stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer
programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.
They are, in short, a perfect match.

Bill Bryson

Lovers of problem solving, they are apt to play chess at lunch or doodle in
algebra over cocktails, speak an esoteric language that some suspect is just
their way of mystifying outsiders. Deeply concerned about logic and sensitive to
its breakdown in everyday life, they often annoy friends by asking them to
rephrase their questions more logically.

Time Magazine in 1965

A hacker on a roll may be able to produce, in a period of a few months,
something that a small development group (say, 7-8 people) would have a hard
time getting together over a year. IBM used to report that certain programmers
might be as much as 100 times as productive as other workers, or more.

Peter Seebach

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. - Leonardo da Vinci

You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more
to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the
necessary may speak.

Simplicity carried to the extreme becomes elegance. - Jon Franklin

if your customers don't experience quality in your product throughout, they
may conclude there is lack of quality everywhere - some developer

Omit Needless Words

My all time favorite !

Omit Needless Words

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.


- William Strunk, Jr.

To Blog or Not to Blog ....

People who are trying to decide whether to create a blog or not go through a
thought process much like this:

1 .The world sure needs more of ME.
2. Maybe I'll shout more often so
that people nearby can experience the joy of knowing my thoughts.
3. No,
wait, shouting looks too crazy.
4. I know - I'll write down my daily
thoughts and badger people to read them.
5. If only there was a description
for this process that doesn't involve the words egomaniac or unnecessary.
6.
What? It's called a blog? I'm there!

The blogger's philosophy goes something like this:

Everything that I think about is more fascinating than the crap in your head.

---------------------------------------------

by scott adams when he first started his blog..

A Common Place Diary

A Common place Diary is a record of things, we have heard and want to remember:
a proverb, a remark by a writer of unusual sensibility, a witty or wise saying,
or even silly or foolish or crass.

Simply Copying well-expressed sentence is one way of Learning to write.

In struggling to say what we are, we become what we say

By - Thomas S. Kane excerpts from The New Oxford Guide to Writing