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James Harbeck

Performance of Text

The Performance of a Text

June 23, 2020 | Filed under: James Harbeck

If someone says, “How about some music,” and you say, “Sure — Beethoven’s Fifth?” do you think they’ll be happy if you just hand them a printed copy of the score? A musical score is intended to be performed, and you don’t have a performance without musicians, a conductor, and …

Opening Lines

Sure-fire Opening Lines

April 7, 2020 | Filed under: James Harbeck

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a novel in want of readers must be possessed of a good opening line. A book is a relationship — many of us spend more intimate time with books than with people — and it is important to start the relationship off on …

Artgoes ask if it's art

But Is It Art?

February 11, 2020 | Filed under: James Harbeck

Is writing art? And if it is, what is editing? If we say writing is “artful,” or “artistic” or “an art,” we mean that we appreciate it aesthetically and admire it for the skill it evinces. But if we say not “writing is an art” but “writing is art” — …

Words We Love

Words We Love Irrationally Much

December 3, 2019 | Filed under: General EAC, James Harbeck

I asked people on Twitter about words they love irrationally much. I got quite a few responses. Actually, I got so many that when I tried to retweet them all, Twitter finally told me I had reached my daily tweet limit. And did again the next day. The words that …

A graphic showing the word "splash" on a blue burst of water coming at the reader to symbolize how to write with a splash

How to Write Gleefully

September 17, 2019 | Filed under: James Harbeck

There are times when you want to make your prose more lively — if not flagrantly flippant then at least glancingly gleeful. James Harbeck discusses how to do that.

Novel Medical Treatments

June 4, 2019 | Filed under: James Harbeck

People with serious health problems are often subject to novel treatments. But that shouldn’t mean being treated like they’re in a novel. Health problems are human problems, and they can be important stories about real things affecting real people. But often, in telling them, we create another problem, because we …

Digital Enhancement for Numbers (Go Figures!)

April 9, 2019 | Filed under: James Harbeck

At the ACES conference in Providence, Rhode Island, in late March, the Associated Press announced changes to their recommendations for handling numbers and debated some others. About sixty percent of those present gasped when one of the recommendations was made — in fact, it might have been 70 percent. No, …

Yeet Citationality: Yippie-ki-yay!

January 15, 2019 | Filed under: James Harbeck

The voting is in, and the American Dialect Society’s Slang Word of the Year is… yeet. Yeet is not so well known to oldsters, but it is in vogue among the youth. Its popularity demonstrates a central fact of how vocabulary spreads. It also leads us to Bugs Bunny, Clark …

Eye Rhymes and iRhymes

September 11, 2018 | Filed under: James Harbeck

Or: Can You Rhyme Emoji? An eye rhyme is when two words that only look like they rhyme are used for a rhyme. This was an early annoyance from my childhood, when elementary poems rhymed good with food. Another famous one is from Shakespeare: If this be error and upon …

The Roots of Disagreement

July 17, 2018 | Filed under: James Harbeck

It was one of those crises that end up in the parentheses of memoranda; it concerned the geneses of several referenda among alumni (and alumnæ) about addenda to their indices: the criteria for the termini of Greek- and Latin-derived words. By what formulæ should we choose, for instance, schemata or …

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