----- Original Message -----
From: "jnagarya" <jnagarya@...>
To: <beadmethod@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 4:07 AM
Subject: Writing clearly --


As a professional writer and poet, I was shocked to learn from reading
their work that few well-known poets can't write prose to save their
lives.

It's even worse with guitarists.

Your excuses are that the editor's field is not music, and yours is not
writing. I don't expect guitarists to be poets, or professional
writers, but there is a minimum level of competence that a reader
should properly expect.

On writing:

Simple premise: Writing is thinking on paper. Our writing is an exact
mirror image of how--and whether--our thinking is organized and clear.

Simple method: Writing is rewriting; and that means one avoids loving
one's amazing phrases to the degree that one cannot let them go as they
are, therefore cannot correct and improve them. It is by means of
rewriting that one's writing is increasingly organized--bringing "like
ideas" together is key--and clear.

Tips: If a process is A-B-C, then the description of it should be A-B-
C. It can't be more than a third draft for the halfway attentive
writer to still have ideas which should be stated at the outset being
sprinkled as afterthoughts amid the material by which they should
instead be followed.

Circles -- whether "Circle of 5ths" or "Circle of 4ths" -- do not
have "corners". That error brings the reader up short, disrupting his
progress in "thinking through" along with the writer. That error is
a "shorthand" which reveals neglect to think through that which is to
be communicated, and the accurate terms in which to communicate it.

Respect: Writer must respect language--and reader. No mortal has time
which, when lost, can be replaced. Endeavor not to waste the reader's
time with having to reread (or worse, puzzle over) the unclear, or plow
through yet another repetition, or (if they know the topic
sufficiently) juggle a just-enountered idea back to where it should
have been before that point.

Spellcheck. This helps locate not only misspellings but also words
that are run together.

Your editor:

Until I saw the name of an editor on the title page, I thought the
writing was entirely your own. His field may not be music, but it also
isn't writing. Then again, authors often "know better" than editors so
refuse to allow changes which are actually necessary toward increased
clarity.

Learning guitar is difficult enough without a cheap guitar being an
obstacle to that learning. And learning the basics of music theory is
difficult enough without the instructional material being an obstacle
to doing so.

Perhaps, if I can find the time, I'll give you an example of competent
editing from the first several pages of one of your chapters in the
preview download by at least unjumbling a few incoherencies.

None of this is particularly difficult: "The 'Secret' to Successful
Writing" is: rewriting. And that means rewriting more than a specified
number of times. One rewrites until it is as clear as one can make it,
then puts it away for a while -- several weeks, sometimes months. The
reason for doing that is so the written piece is unfamiliar, as if
someone else wrote it. As if it's the first time the writer has seen
it.

Then one pulls it and immediately begins rewriting, from the beginning,
as one is reading that which appears to have been written by someone
else. The first few times you do this you'll be amazed at the number
of errors you didn't see -- many of them glaringly obvious -- during
the first stage. My respect for the language, and for my thinking, and
for the reader is such that I often rewrite even the ephemeral, such as
email, and as I did with this post.

It is, in a word, lazy to rely upon the reader to find your errors for
you. And, at the same time, you are charging them the price of the
book for the "privilege" of doing that work for you.

I am interested in that I've seen so far -- the stops and starts caused
by the failure to sufficiently rewrite being disruptive, frustrating,
and out-and-out pain in the ass -- but I haven't irreplaceable time to
do the thinking through for, and in spite of, the author.