Confessions of an unrepentant word-stringer

You can trust me, I am a certified Human Writer.

Then there was the time my old college roommate (and St. Pete Times reporter) Dave Smith came to visit me in GNV.

I was a young Sun staffer, and, apropos of nothing at all, dating a local attorney. Over dinner, Dave told my date, Michelle, that he was quitting his job to go to law school.

He just wasn’t making a difference in the news biz, Dave confessed.

At which point Michelle gave me her most penetrating, learned-it-in-law-school, cross-examination stare.

“Don’t look at me,” I said. “I just like stringing words together.”

Anyway, here I am decades later. Still stringing words together because I gotta be me.

Lately, I’ve had scattershot exchanges with friends, old colleagues, acquaintances and such over how to string words together in reasonably coherent fashion.

And it occurred to me that I’ve never actually tried to…you know…writ how to write right.

(Disclaimer: None of what follows is remotely intended to explain how to punctuate right. In my entire life I never correctly deployed a semicolon. And I scatter commas like confetti.)

Listen, about writing…

True confession: I stole my annoying habit of starting random sentences with ‘Listen…’ from the late, great Molly Ivins. I once went drinking with Molly, and, over shots, we compared notes on the brothers Bush: Texas W and Florida Jeb.

And like my pal Shamrock McShane says: If you’re gonna steal, steal from the best.

Whoops! There I went again

Damn! I just violated my First Rule of How To Write Right. Keep it short and pithy. And right off the bat I named-dropped a newspaper legend while meandering all the way from Florida to Texas and back.

But I digress.

BTW, ‘But I digress’ is one of my favorite oft-deployed phrases. Right up there with ‘Life, the universe and everything,’ and ‘apropos of nothing at all.’

Where was I? Oh yeah. How To Write Right Writ Out.

Take your tips where you can get ‘em

Guess I ought to start with my First Rule Of How To Write Right. Even though I’m already kicking the stuffing out of it.

I’d love to tell you I absorbed this discipline from a writing legend like Hemingway. But it was actually John Belushi.

Because pretty much everything I know I learned from the movies.

In ‘Continental Divide” he played a Mike Royko-style Chicago columnist who gets romantically involved with an academician.

Who tells him that he should be writing books.

Belushi: ‘I like my column. It’s short.’

Listen, Sun news desk editors used to brag about my ability to deliver a weekly column that fit precisely into the pre-measured slot running down the left hand side of the Sunday Opinion section.

Five hundred words and a cloud of dust. Hi ho Silver!

It ain’t as easy as it sounds

Course, to get to the requisite 500 words I usually pounded out 750 or more. And then laboriously cut, rewrote and merged. The result almost always being a more reader-friendly piece of liberal propaganda.

Fine, mea culpa. I’m a lib. Sue me already.

Which brings me to another one of my oft-deployed phrases: Get in, get out, get on with your life.

But I digress.

The Red Queen and me

Let’s talk about ‘Alice In Wonderland.’

Stay with me here. I’m gonna make a point.

In ‘Alice’ the Red Queen divulges the secret to story telling: Start at the beginning, go through to the end, and stop.

Call it a road map to get from Once Upon A Time to The End.

What else?

Oh yeah, the best writing tip I ever got in J-School at UF: Keep it conversational. Good writing should be like having a chat with a friend.

Eat your heart out George Will.

And if you think it’s easy to be conversational about building code plats you’ve never covered the City of Tamarac for the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel.

I strive to be conversational. Oh, and funny when I can get away with it.

People keep telling me I’m not nearly as funny as I think I am. But of course they are wrong.

Which brings me to my next pro word-stringing tip.

(Yeah, I know. Belushi, Hemingway and Royko, are rolling over in their graves right about now. What happened to keep it sort, Ron?

Repetition is a cardinal sin

Sorry, but I gotta say this: Beware the Echo Effect.

I was on the elliptic machine at Planet Fitness Sunday when I saw this banner at the bottom of a CNN news report: ‘Trump criticizes reporters reporting of the Iraq war.’

Dammit! I shouted at the screen. It’s ‘Trump criticizes reporters coverage of the Iraq War.’

I hate the echo effect. I just wrote a blog about why Florida traffic engineers hate protected bike lanes. And I realized that I used the word ‘lane’ twice in the same sentence.

Made me want to chew glass. Or, I dunno, ride my bike in traffic.

I was advised to eschew the echo effect early on at The Sun by Rob Oglesby, then managing editor and, as it turned out, my lifetime mentor.

Listen, 37 years later, when I retired and started a new gig as Sun theater critic (I fancied myself walking into the Hip wearing a black opera cape and carrying a silver wolf’s head walking cane) Rob called me up out of the blue and said: Ron, you’re giving too much away” in my reviews.

And he was right. Dammit! Pass the glass.

Oh, one more thing and then I’m done. Promise.

Don’t hate yourself

It’s fine if you want to be your own fiercest critic. But you also need to be your own best fan.

Because listen pal. If you can’t look at something you just wrote and say “Damn, that’s good!” you don’t belong in the word-stringing biz.

Dedicated to Rob Oglesby