"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."
For the sake of the premise, I’ll pretend I’m not working this Thanksgiving day. Another part of the premise is that you are a writer without access to an editor. From the blog “Adventures in Editing,” here are 3 Tips for Editing Your Own Work:*
Editing your own writing is never easy; that’s why some people pay me to do it for them. But if you have a firm grasp on the basics of spelling and grammar, you’re not intimidated by dictionaries and style guides, and you’re willing to take the time to actually edit rather than “read-it-real-fast-one-time-and-hope-I-catch-everything,” you can make a significant difference in the quality of your writing.
Here are three methods I use to edit my work. These tips will help you approach your work with fresh eyes and a new perspective, which is exactly what you need to catch mistakes in your writing.
1. Set it aside.
Don’t write your last word and then go right back to page one and begin editing. Set the work aside for as long as you reasonably can. Hopefully you will be able to wait at least twenty-four hours. If you can wait a week or a month, do it. Even if you can only take an hour, do it. Go for a walk, do a load of laundry, watch a movie. When you come back and sit down to edit you’ll see your work with new eyes and catch errors you might have missed otherwise.
2. Read it out loud.
This trick is especially useful for catching any awkward phrasing. If you’re reading merrily along and suddenly your tongue is twisted, you may have some rewriting to do. Reading aloud can also help you spot repetitious passages and bland sentence structure.
3. Make it look different.
This is especially useful if you’ve already made one or two editing passes and you want to make sure you didn’t miss anything. Print the document out if you can. Errors you might miss on the computer screen will jump out from a printed page. If you can’t print your 300-page novel, try changing the font and/or font size (or even the color) and then edit on screen. Change the page size. Change the margins. Altering the appearance will give you fresh eyes for the document and help you see errors you hadn’t noticed before.
When editing your own work, anything you can do to approach things from a fresh perspective will help you. Try these tips, and please share any of your own favorite methods.
Write on!
* Chicago tells us not to use complete titles the way I just did:
8.185 Title not interchangeable with subject
The title of a work should not be used to stand for the subject of a work.
Dostoevsky wrote a book about crime and punishment. (Not . . . about Crime and Punishment)
Edward Wasiolek’s book on Crime and Punishment is titled “Crime and Punishment” and the Critics.
In their book The Craft of Translation, Biguenet and Schulte . . . (Not In discussing The Craft of Translation, Biguenet and Schulte . . .)
“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” – J.M. Keynes
Ezekiel 27:9. The ancients of Gebal … were in thee thy calkers.
Gebal (the modern town of Jubyl in Lebanon) is on the Phoenician seacoast about forty miles north of Sidon. In very ancient times, in the days when the pyramids were being built, Gebal may have been the most important of the Phoenician cities, but it was eventually eclipsed first by Sidon and later by Tyre.
An inscription in the Phoenicians’ alphabet (from which all other alphabets are believed to have descended) has been found in diggings in that city and has been dated back to before the time of the Exodus. It maybe conceivably have been in Gebal that the alphabet was invented.
In later centuries, Gebal was the center of trade in Egyptian papyrus, which was much valued for book production in Greek and Roman times. Rolls of papyrus came, therefore, to be called biblia from the Greek name of the city, which was Byblos. And since in Christian times, the rolls of papyrus on which the Scriptures were written came to be the books, they were the "Biblia" par excellence and to this day we call the holy writings of the Jews and Christians the "Bible."
In ancient agricultural societies, it was common to personify the phenomenon of the death of vegetation in the winter (or in the acme of summer heat) and its rebirth in the spring (or with the coming of the rains). The personification took the form of a deity who died and was taken into the underworld, from which he was later rescued by another deity. It was customary for women to bewail the death of the deity at fixed times of the year and then to rejoice loudly over the rebirth and resurrection.
To modern Westerners, the most familiar form of this sort of tale is found among the Greek myths. This tale tells of Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture, and her daughter Persephone. Persephone is stolen by Hades, the god of the underworld, and Demeter seeks her all over the world. While she seeks, all vegetation dies and winter comes over the world. Eventually, Demeter finds Persephone and a compromise is reached. Persephone may stay with Demeter part of the year and with Hades the rest, and this explains the recurring cycle of growth and death and growth again.
The Babylonians have a myth of this sort, too; one that long antedates the Greek version, of course, and goes back, in fact, to Sumerian days before the time of Abraham. In the Sumerian myth, Dumu-zi (the name which later became Tammuz) is the brother and lover of Ishtar, the goddess of earth and sky. Tammuz is killed by a bear while hunting, or, perhaps, through some thoughtless act of Ishtar, and must descend into the underworld. Ishtar follows and ransoms him only with the greatest difficulty.…
(The Babylonians called the month of the summer solstice Tammuz in honor of the god and the Jews borrowed the name. This heathen god, despite Ezekiel, is still honored in the Jewish calendar today, just as Western calendars contain the month of March, a name used freely by Jews and Christians alike though it honors the pagan god Mars.)
The Tammuz myth spread along with agriculture and always it was to the women that its rites particularly appealed. After all, in primitive societies it is the women who are most concerned with agriculture. In the western half of the Fertile Crescent Tammuz was called "Lord" (Adonai). This was "Adonis" in the Greek version of the name and Greek mythology adopted the tale of Tammuz when they told of Adonis, the young lover of Aphrodite, who was killed by a boar to the goddess’s infinite distress. (And gave us the word "Adonis" to represent any extremely handsome young man.)
Google Earth has made possible a vision of Imperial Rome in 320 A.D. (Constantine’s time) showing more than 6000 3-D buildings. If you already have Google Earth you’ll know it allows you to zoom around to all corners of the earth and see at least the vision from above of distant lands. This new “gallery layer” goes back further. You need to download Google Earth 4.3 and supposedly find the Rome 3-D within the Gallery layer. Unfortunately, my computer seems to be too old for it, so I can’t tell you anything more. If you successfully download it, please post your comments about the Google 3-D map of Rome here.
Great post, Carolyn. Brought back many memories, from my longtime love of my Oma’s burnt peas (she isn’t English, but she is a British citizen, so perhaps the paperwork has something to do with the culinary influence) to my very fond memories of pub lunch breaks in the middle of a long day of hiking through the rain — pot pie and a pint!
Like you, I recall quickly moving from English to Indian food during my visits in the 1980s. Good food memories, but not good English-food memories.
When Nathalie and I were in Scotland in 2001, I asked a waiter why the food was so much better than I remembered it. He said that British chefs were now being trained in France to cook English and Scottish food: local ingredients, local recipes, French training. Very smart.
While I have not been consistently antiwar all my life, I’m certainly there now. (Thanks to Murray Rothbard via Wendy McElroy, several years ago.) And yet, as I strive to remedy the holes in my historical literacy, I find myself drawn into ancient and medieval engineering, which, of course, leads to military history. I don’t love the culture of that niche, but I sure do see the appeal of the niche itself.
If you’d like to see an example of what I’m talking about, I recommend this episode of Nova, which you can buy on DVD:
Yes, it can hurl mini marshmallows across the room, although this first trebuchet has terrible aim. Paperclip trebuchet #2 will be better.
You can build a trebuchet with a static counterweight, instead of a swinging counterweight like these suspended batteries, but the swinging counterweight turns out to be better. I suspect, however, that a counterweight that swings in two dimensions (e.g., a padlock) rather than in three would be better still. We’ll see. Another way to improve the effectiveness of a trebuchet is to put it on wheels. To understand the math and physics, watch the Nova episode.
Or, if you’re smarter and more educated than I am, you can explore all the web pages out there, such as “The Algorithmic Beauty of the Trebuchet” (www.AlgoBeautyTreb.com).
(I suspect this will eventually be a big part of Benjamin’s homeschooling.)
November 27th, 2008 by 
bkmarcus
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From Joe Potts’s “Deregulation Reduces Racial Discrimination”: