A weblog devoted to spurring a conversation among those who use words to varying degrees in their daily work. Hosted by John Ettorre, a Cleveland-based writer and editor. Please email me at: john.ettorre@gmail.com. "There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real." --James Salter
One Man's Take on the Happy Life
I'm a Cleveland, Ohio-based writer, editor and writing coach, with more than 25 years of experience, including stints in Chicago and Washington, D.C. My work has appeared in more than 100 print and online publications, from the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor to local and regional publications. My work has been recognized by awards (including an Emmy) from four journalism groups.
4 Comments:
I really like this quote. I have a plaque on my wall that says, "It takes courage to live a simple, honest decent life."
Either way, it does take effort to have a sense of well-being and it always involves motives which affect the greater good.
(you always say 'we' in your posts. To whom else are you referring?)
Glad you liked it, Kass. And that "we" question has come up before, with one reader even assuming it meant my wife co-writes this blog, which I found hilarious.
No, I use it in what's known as the "editorial 'we'" fashion. I was pleasantly surprised that this phenomenon even has its own Wikipedia entry (link below), which does at least a passable job of describing it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We
Dictionary.com's entry notes that this form has been in use at least as far back as "Beowulf":
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/editorial+we
But I suppose the best parallel I can cite to how I intend it is the luminous way in which the saintly E.B. White wrote for years in his unsigned New Yorker magazine "notes and comments" essays. It was a device that helped take the attention away from the writer and focus it exclusively on the argument and the subject(s) about which one was writing. So there's some element of an homage to E.B. in my using it. In the end, it just sounds and feels right to me, and so I use it.
Anyway, I hope that answers your question, Kass. Now, aren't you sorry you asked?
I've always found it interesting when a person substitutes for "I" or "me" by using the third person, as in a news report when the writer refers to "a reporter" or even "a visitor" who obviously is the writer:
"A man who would not identify himself told a visitor the family was not at home."
That's a journalistic convention that defies all common sense, but nevertheless remains in force at most newspapers. The new journalism of the sixties reacted against it by including use of I to inject some realism into things, but that then often became overdone (Hunter S. Thompson comes immediately to mind). Somewhere in the middle of those two extremes-either pretending the writer doesn't exist or the writer's sensibility taking precedence over the material--is where it should be.
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