What about the other side?

How America Lost its Mind
I read the whole article. Almost 13,000 words. I read every single one of them. Why? First, because I like to read. Second, because it was interesting. But then the article itself went haywire...

Somewhere in the late middle, in a paragraph right before the 1970s, Kurt Andersen quotes Stephen Colbert, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias," and then proceeds to run with that joke as a fact.

All of a sudden, everyone on the right is evil and crazy and illogical (which isn't entirely untrue), but never again is the left side of evil and crazy and illogical mentioned.

This article could have been FANTASTIC. Andersen clearly laid the foundation for explaining the crazy that is America. But somehow, after working so hard at explaining the academic start to the country's crazy, the article becomes a piece solely for the purpose of extolling the negatives of half of America. Seriously? Only half of America is evil and crazy and illogical? Doesn't it just prove your point, Mr. Andersen, that you have actually lost your mind? And then come to find out you wrote a whole book about it? What a waste of words.

The greatest rejection of relativism is critical thinking (now also being taught by academia). Anyone with any shred of logic capabilities can see that Kurt Andersen misses half of the story.

Leslie Broussard Can Tweet @Write_to_Think

I finally finally finally found a handle for Twitter that I absolutely adore.

If you have ever spent any time reading my writing, you know that I write to think. I write to process. I write about insight and enlightenment and conflict, but it all centers on my emotion about an event or idea. And emotion is what drives me.

When I got pregnant and the subsequent carpal tunnel inhibited my ability to write, I was one big mess of emotion. I didn’t have my journaling to corral that emotion into a profitable exercise. I didn’t have my written words to help me figure out what I was doing, thinking, feeling. The written word is my outlet, my avenue, my therapist and my center. I write so that you can learn how to not make the same mistakes. I write so that you can think about something in potentially a new light. I write so that I can learn from my choices.

It has taken me a long time to get back into writing after the carpal tunnel subsided, but I think I am finally at a point where I am excited to write again. And with the introduction of @WritetoThink, I am ecstatic to join the Twitter-sphere.

Big big thanks to EmiAnnie for the continual brainstorming for the most perfect name.

"Lazy Word Choice"

I received this email from "Daily Writing Tips," and thought my writing blog was a perfect place to share it.

Thanks to today’s instant communication, words used by one blogger or celebrity catch on at an astounding rate, spilling over into advertising, entertainment, and website comments.

One evening I became aware of two television ads airing back to back. One was for a telephone service; the other for a car. Both hammered the word crazy to describe features of their products: “crazy, crazy generous, crazy efficient, crazy protection.”

This mindless kind of usage strips words of meaning. It wastes the power of words that have more appropriate uses.

Take this headline, for example: Daylight Saving Time Is America’s Greatest Shame

Shame can be used in more than one sense, including a fairly meaningless social convention: “It’s a shame you couldn’t join us for dinner.” Used as it is in the headline, however, shame is a strong word, calling up images of the Indian removals known as the Trail of Tears, the WWII internment camps for U.S. citizens of Japanese descent, and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments that used untreated black Americans as a control group.

Daylight Saving Time may be a fraud. It may be annoying, unnecessary, disruptive or any number of disagreeable things, but is it really “America’s Greatest Shame”?

Sometimes the intended purpose of a piece of writing calls for deliberate misuse of words. Advertising and political speeches come to mind.

We live under a constant verbal barrage. It’s impossible to ignore the catch phrases of our culture. They enter our minds and speech. If we are writers, they creep into our first drafts. Happily, we can replace poorly chosen words as we revise.

Very. "Very" is the word I most despise using.

"Amazing" is the word I am guilty of overusing the most. I know it, and I have tried to work on it. Unfortunately, that meant on our recent trip to Bernheim for fall color enjoyment, I said, "remarkable" at least 32 times.

Technology is NOT to be trusted

I kept IMPECCABLE notes about Daelen in my phone. The most minute details that probably won't matter a year from now, but matter to me at the moment. Any and every little thing. Literally, every time he ate. Every time he did something new. Any time I felt the urge to just record who/what/where he was at that very moment. And it was so easy cuz I always have my phone with me.

The first two months, I was really good about emailing the data to myself periodically, just in case. Then I transferred that info to his baby book, his first year calendar and/or the notebook journal I started for him while pregnant. Because of the carpal tunnel, I had gotten away from the notebook, but now I see I'm going to have to go back to it. Technology is not to be trusted. Pen and paper, that's where it's at.

I've lost all my notes from 15 August to 31 August. I could cry. Do you have any idea how many truly amazing, wonderful, heart-melting things happen with a baby in 15 days?!

But alas, there is a lesson here, and this time, I will learn it. I am a writer (in my own mind). I am not a blogger, a Facebooker or a technology guru. I am a pen and paper writer. And my son WILL be blessed as an adult with all the letters, notes, stories and information I will record for him over the next 18 years.

posted from Bloggeroid

TOTALLY Guilty!

I use almost ALL of these words. I use them in my speech, my texts, my writing and my Internet postings. Oops.

5 Slang Words That May Never Be Legit
by Mark Nichol
OK, like, OMG, I’m totally not bagging on you for tweeting or FBing or blogging these words, but they are so bogus in formal writing. LOL

1. Amirite
This trendy favorite of commenters on pop-culture Web sites, meant to suggest a glibly tossed “Am I right?” — I figured that out after initially wondering what the heck uh-mere-uh-tee meant — has about as much chance of making it into the dictionary as fuhgeddaboudit. Save it for the fanboys — you can do better than that.

2. Craptastic/craptacular
These mash-ups of, respectively, crap and fantastic and crap and spectacular first cropped up in snarky online lambasting of overhyped pop-culture phenomena in the 1990s. I chuckled the first couple of times I came across them, but though they are ideal terms for assuming a sarcastic tone, they are best used in moderation and are not, and perhaps will never become, mainstream expressions of derision. Safer alternatives for general publication include absurd, laughable, ludicrous, preposterous, ridiculous, and risible.

3. Genius
Out of seemingly nowhere, online correspondents began to use this as a short form of ingenious, as in “That’s such a genius move.” It has not acquired legitimacy, and in other than jocular usage, you don’t have to be a genius to avoid it.

4. Ginormous
This collision of gigantic and enormous, dating from the 1990s, is a vivid term, but it is superfluous, considering that humongous, which also seemed to appear spontaneously in casual usage when it came on the scene in the 1960s, has already acquired a respectability the newer term as yet lacks.

Plenty of words meaning “extremely large” exist: colossal, gargantuan, gigantic, immense, mammoth, massive, monstrous, prodigious, titanic, and vast, for starters. None of them has the neologistic cachet of ginormous, but the letter is for now only suitable in informal writing.

5. A Slang Word That Isn’t
The adjective cliche, used in place of cliched, as in “That’s so cliche,” was originally on this list, until I looked it up and discovered, to my surprise, that it is a legitimate variant. Its sudden recent vogue lured me into thinking it was being misused in an affected manner much like the adjective genius (see above) is. It’s correct, but you’re welcome to use one of many synonyms, like hackneyed or trite.