Tag: word processors

The Writing’s Never Done

laptop keyboardI don’t know how other bloggers are about this, but I am constantly editing my entries. Not just the recent ones either!

Sometimes I’ll be drawn to an older entry, read it and be dissatisfied with what I see. It’s easy to open the editor and see if I can rework it.

Sentences formed of typed letters seems so much more permanent and meaningful than sentences formed of spoken words. I have to give them the proper measure of respect. Anyway, with Google, et al, what I write could live forever. That’s a lot of responsibility.

If an entry is rushed, as the one before this one was, the result is even more frustrating.

There wasn’t a lot of time between coming home from riding and going to work. I wanted to chronicle some observations. It never got more than a cursory re-read.

“What was I thinking,” I asked myself a few minutes ago. It’s just been rewritten.

The power of the word processor is one of the most amazing and enabling features of the PC. Back when computers were science fiction, no one predicted word processing would be a killer app! Word processors work so well, it’s almost as if they’re encouraging you to revise your work.

Editing is what makes writing good.

New Haven Advocate – Best Of

I am thrilled to have been voted “Best of New Haven” in the TV personality category. OK – it’s not like winning the Oscar (or the New England Emmy – ouch), but it’s the best I can do from here.

I enjoy going to the New Haven Advocate’s offices. They used to be in Long Wharf, but have moved to an office building atop the now closed Chapel Square Mall. They really do belong in Downtown New Haven (this is not a pejorative statement), considering they’re the pulse of local entertainment, dining and a bit of really good muckraking.

What makes going to the Advocate fun is hanging with people who write for a living. Writing good prose is not easy. Plus, there’s the jealousy factor. In a newspaper, the printed word is pretty close to permanent. TV is gone in an instant.

There’s another advantage to print, which you didn’t see, but I just used in the last sentence. I was able to revise my words and make decent writing a little better. Computers in general, and word processors specifically, have changed the skill of writers in much the same way the Hubble Space Telescope changed the astronomers!

I mentioned, to one of the reporters at the paper, how envious I was of writers . She said if I were writing, I’d miss television. There’s no doubt TV is the most powerful medium of expression ever unleashed on an unsuspecting public. It’s just not as elegant as the printed word.

The Advocate offices, on the 11th floor, have a commanding view of New Haven. It gave me the chance to get a good photo of a sad artifact of the city’s past. On a tower, atop the abandoned and derelict Macy’s Department Store building, is a broken TV aerial.

It’s from an era when there was a department store, with a TV department, in a pre-cable city. Macy’s has been gone since 1993. The fallen antenna lives on as sad testament to what was.