blogthecat

Stimulating the senses

In my early twenties, I was a waitress at a fabulous bistro called Café Mika in Ottawa. I learned so many things at Mika: how to drag toothpicks through sugary glazes to make hearts; how to savour a bottle of high-end fumé blanc on which you’ve spent an entire night’s tips; how to harmonize Asian and western flavours into a fusion masterpiece; and how to make customers feel so special they won't only come back, they''ll tell a half-dozen other people about their experience.

Perhaps my favourite lesson at Mika was the art of writing food. Specifically, I was often charged with writing out the daily specials in cursive, as quickly as I could but not so fast that my script would lose form or elegance. Jude, Mika’s owner and chef extraordinaire, taught me how to compose mouth-watering menu descriptions. You knew you had hit it right when your stomach would grumble before you were finished writing.

There was no sitting around for the ingredients we listed: they had jobs to do, albeit pleasant ones. Tiger shrimp “nestled” into a heavenly sauce; filet mignon “basked” in an exotic reduction; and cilantro “mingled” with carrots and ginger. Just as important were adjectives: “crisped,” “smoked,” “seared,” ‘spiced,” “chipped,” “glazed” … The descriptions were specific and visual, with gorgeous syntax that foreshadowed how seriously the kitchen took the food they were about to prepare for you. At the same time, Jude taught me not to be pretentious—to let the words play with each other, just as the food would in the dishes she conjured up.

I’ve never come across a better menu writer than Jude, but the other night, I ate at a cute restaurant, Nyala (African), whose menu reminded me of how much fun I used to have writing food at Mika. Nyala’s menu—which is very silly—made me and my companions giggle, and had the effect of warming us up to the experience from the get-go. The staff kindly gave me a menu to take home when we left, so I’m going to excerpt a couple of the most charming entries.

Yeshimbera asa
Chickpea flour cakes awaken in a berbere sauce flavoured with onion, garlic and ginger leaving you breathless maybe, speechless possible, satisfied for certain.

Pinch me—PRAWNS?
Okay, you twisted our arms, let us now take this dish to the absolute limits of the universe bound only by the heavens and the size of your plate … piri-piri sauce will sing and tender prawns will dance to create this hypnotic moment in time.

Tofu stew
Tender morsels of tofu dress up in costumes of red pepper sauce, ginger, cardamom and garlic before coming to life on the stage we call your table.

You can't be in a bad mood after you've read Nyala's menu. By contrast, I'm often left unmoved and undecided when I read so many other restaurants' menus that rely to boring effect on the word “with” (e.g., salmon with red pepper vinaigrette, curry with lentils and cheese, etc., etc.). Why shortchange your kitchen with dreary writing? Menus can be powerful teasers that put your customers in the right frame of mind to enjoy your restaurant.

We had a wonderful time at Nyala: the food is great and our server was incredible … warm, attentive, happy to help us choose, and knowledgeable.

Nyala also provided me with memories of Mika, a place—or rather an experience—that will resonate with me my whole life. There’s just no telling where magic will turn up, but when it does, you know it’s there. Mika was magic.

Blank spots on the brain

No matter what your expertise, be it math, science, or wordsmithing, there are sometimes bits of knowledge in your supposed field that will always be a little harder to retain than others. At least there are for me. For example, there are certain words I always have to look at hard before I know I’ve spelled them correctly, like “Michael” (I always want to put the e before the a), “weird,” (the classic “i before e except …” issue), “exercise” and “exacerbate” (I always suspect a c should join any x, for some reason).

In any case, I’ve decided to excerpt (there’s that c) four choice tidbits from a section I like to put into the style guides we do for clients: common usage and grammar issues. I love compiling this section, since it hammers in some applications I might otherwise have to look up. You may find you totally know these rules already, but in case they’re tricky for you…

Affect vs. Effect
The verb affect means (a) influence or change, (b) stir emotions, or (c) feign. For example:

• Her attitude affected the outcome.
• His departure affected the staff.
• She affects a certain nonchalance.

The verb effect means accomplish or carry out. For example:

• They effected changes in the rules.

As a noun, effect—synonymous with result or consequence—is used far more often than affect. For example:

• One effect of the protest was new legislation.

The rarely used noun, affect, means emotional response or feeling. It’s used mainly in psychological or medical contexts.

Alternative vs. Alternate

As an adjective, both alternative and alternate can refer to a choice between two things or among more than two. For example:

• We have to choose an alternate/alternative route.

Only alternate can mean every second one. For example:

• They met on alternate Wednesdays.

When you need a noun to mean a choice between two options, use alternative. For example:

• There are six alternatives to choose from.

Comprise, Consist, Compose
Use comprise, composed of, or consists of as per the examples below. As Fowler’s notes, “The special function of comprise is to introduce a list of the parts making up the whole that is its subject; that is, it means to consist of or to be composed of. All the parts compose the whole; the whole comprises all the parts.” Therefore:

• The book comprises eight chapters.
• Milk, honey, and nutmeg compose the sauce.
• The sauce comprises milk, honey, and nutmeg.
• The committee was composed of nine representatives.
• The lesson consists of four sections.

Impact vs. Influence
Do not use impact as a verb; use influence or affect instead. Both impact and influence are fine as nouns. For example:

• The newspaper article will influence/affect the board’s decision.
• We have felt the impact of the budget cuts.
• She wielded her influence in the courtroom.

Writer, editor, and cartoonist Sarah Leavitt covers some more excellent grammar and usage conundrums (e.g., I or me) in her editing and copywriting category.

Writing that sounds like speaking

Last night I went through all my blog posts and replaced hyphens—which are the default dash in so many applications—with my beloved em-dash. The hyphens have been tormenting me since I started writing blogthecat entries, but I wasn’t sure how to change them. A quick hunt for HTML codes yesterday ended my misery, and I can’t tell you how merry—delirious, even—I was as I pasted the long, elegant line over each ill-placed and unsatisfying hyphen.

The em-dash is one of my favourite punctuation marks. I try not to be its slave, since it can certainly be overused, and anything overused is ugly and distracting. Employed sparingly, however, and to proper effect, it can dramatically punch up a piece of writing. It can also add to the sense that the author is speaking her writing right to you. I think there are two reasons for this:

1. Em-dashes can be used to begin and end an interruption or aside in a sentence. Consequently, em-dash-fragmented sentences mirror how most of us actually think. We don’t think in one pure burst of linear thought most of the time. We make room for the odd tangent or revelation brought on by a previous thought. Consider the following along these lines:

“He refused to tell anyone—least of all his wife—about that embarrassing moment during the medical exam.”

Without that em-dashed clarification, the sentence would be less interesting. Even if the clarification were kept, but surrounded with commas instead of em-dashes (as it certainly could be), it would lose power:

“He refused to tell anyone, least of all his wife, about that embarrassing moment during the medical exam.”

2. The ineffectiveness of the comma substitution above attests to the second way the em-dash makes writing feel like it's being spoken: via its visual impact. It provides a nice, long break between thoughts, so the reader’s eye can have a little rest to get ready for the next piece of information. It provides rhythm, and an uneven one at that. Who among us speaks in perfectly spaced-out verbal bursts? When you listen to someone speak, often it’s their pauses, their hesitation, their lingering, etc., as much as what they’re actually saying that’s so compelling. The em-dash may be the best punctuation mark at approximating this unpredictability.

Of course, it’s hard to get away from conventional wisdom that we should always consider other marks (the comma, the semi-colon, and the period—for different reasons) before using the em-dash. I keep this in mind, and I do change the odd em-dash into another mark. But not often. And with a sigh.

Knockout verbs

There is no end to studying language and writing—almost every week I unearth new insights to think about, and ideally apply. One book full-to-brimming with great writing tips is Constance Hale’s Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose. A former editor of Wired, Hale champions muscular writing, writing that makes the reader sit up and take notice.

I love what Hale says about verbs, and I try to remind myself of her advice whenever I can:

“More than any other part of speech, it is the verb that determines whether a writer is a wimp or a wizard. Novices tend to rely on is and other static verbs and lose momentum by stumbling on the passive voice. The pros make strong nouns and dynamic verbs the heart of their style; verbs make their prose quiver.

The first key to exploiting dynamic verbs is simply to use them. For some reason, even experienced writers pepper their first drafts with forms of be. Nothing wrong with that, as long as the writers indulge in many more drafts to go back and season the prose with dynamic verbs. Some writers devote one entire rewrite to verbs, circling every is and are and trying to replace as many as possible …

Notice how Wired writer Richard Rapaport worked his verbs to transform a description of the setting of the Sandia National Laboratories from a pedestrian catalog of nouns into a landscape shimmering with activity ….

[BEFORE (i.e., first draft) – verbs bolded)]

‘It is nearly noon, on a cool (temperature 66º), dry (humidity 21%), high-desert day. The azurescent New Mexican sky hangs languidly over a flat, antediluvian landscape. It is broken to the East by the glowering granite of the Sandia Mountains and off to the North by the shimmering hills that lie past the Rio Grande River, and mount up to the Jemez Mountains and Los Alamos beyond.’

[AFTER (second draft) – verbs bolded)]

‘At noon on a cool, high-desert day, the azure New Mexican sky hangs languidly over a low, antediluvian landscape. To the east the granite of the Sandia Mountains glowers darkly; to the north, the hills past the Rio Grande shimmer as they rise to meet the Jemez Mountains and Los Alamos beyond.’”

You know what’s crazy? It took forever to type in that first draft excerpt—I had to look at the book repeatedly because I had forgotten the words I had tried to memorize. But the second excerpt raced onto the screen (note “race”!)—its dynamism actually made it easier to remember! And sure enough, easier to read. Très, très cool.

Coming soon: John Updike’s mastery of the sentence twist. GEEK ON!

Writing as bully

I have no problem with the English. In fact, I usually fall into a tongue-tied swoon when one of them talks to me with that clipped, holier-than-thou, E. M. Forster accent, the one that makes the speaker sound unbelievably witty and unattainable. I usually lose my power of speech in the face of that accent.

So generally, I feel inferior around the English I’ve met. Cowed. Dumb. Entirely uncultured. Oddly, I don’t mind. But some people find the English more offensive. One such person is A. A. Gill, whose book, The Angry Island: Hunting the English, was just reviewed in the Globe. The reviewer included many excerpts from the book, which as you’ll have guessed, picks mercilessly on the English.

The best writers have that magical ability to create detailed pictures with their words. Gill appears to be one of these writers. Consider the excerpts:

“I’d better come clean. You may have suspected I don’t like the English. One at a time, I don’t mind them. I’ve loved some of them. A lot of my friends were born here between the cliff and the wall. It’s their collective persona I can’t warm to. The lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd of England.”

He had me at “beefy-bummed.”

“Collectively and individually, the English are angry about something. The pursed lip and the muttered expletives, the furious glance and the beetled brow are England’s national costume.”

Gill isolates one “achievement” of the English: “Their heroic self-control. It’s the daily struggle of not giving in to your natural inclination to run amok with a cricket bat, to spit and bite in a crowded tea-room, that I admire most in the English. It’s not what they are, but their ability to suppress what they are, that’s great about the English.”

Of the English “queue,” or line up as we call it in Canada, Gill attests: “The English queue because they have to. If they didn’t they’d kill each other. The pressure of boiling anger in the average post office is only contained by the shared knowledge that this is as fair as can possibly be arranged in this life. They would rip the head off of Mahatma Gandhi if he tried to renew his TV licence ahead of them.”

I love a good dose of acerbic writing. Martin Amis is one of my faves. Unfortunately, while I delight in the precision and cutting blows of writers like Gill, I have to consider that the person behind such writing is very likely horrid. The Wikipedia entry on Gill seems to support this possibility. In particular, Virgin Atlantic’s Richard Branson's summing up of Gill as “a complete and utter prick” gives me pause.

Yet artists don’t always feed on things lovely and warm. Tension, friction, and darkness are frequent motivators. Humour, especially, often sources unkind impulses.

So what to do with a widely despised man who I almost certainly wouldn’t like, but whose wordplay makes me chuckle aloud?

You know, some things were simpler in the days before the Internet. Too much knowledge interferes with a perfectly good read.