Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 247.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
[1] From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman.sheji@icloud.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.245: the parole machine (89)
[2] From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.246: the parole machine (25)
[3] From: Mcgann, Jerome (jjm2f) <jjm2f@virginia.edu>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.245: the parole machine (13)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-12-04 16:14:35+00:00
From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman.sheji@icloud.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.245: the parole machine
Dear Willard,
To my way of thinking, good writing is not a matter of rules, but some
heuristics help. I still find value in Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.
Three chapters are especially useful: 1) Elementary Rules of Usage, 2)
Elementary Principles of Composition, and 5) An Approach to Style (with a List
of Reminders).
Ultimately, any good writer must find a personal voice — but this is a good
place to start. I’ve made a habit of reading Strunk and White every year for the
past six decades, and I find something new and useful every time I read it. Or,
perhaps not new, but useful because it gives me an opportunity to reflect more
deeply on writing.
In English, at least, I also find a great deal of value in reading Shakespeare,
the King James Bible (and Tynsdale’s Bible before it), along with such exemplary
writers as Clifford Gertz, Herman Melville, Martha Nussbaum, Gordon Wood,
Bernard Knox, and Michael Polanyi. Sometimes I read Wood just for the pleasure
of his prose style. With Melville or Tynsdale, it’s like a rich dessert — after
a few bites, I’ve got to pause and think.
One of the most delightful compliments I ever received was that of a French
colleague who told me that she admired the way I use commas.
Other people have other views — there’s no hard and fast way to assess style. At
the turn of the last century, people admired long, convoluted sentences. Several
people tell me that my sentences are too short, my wife among them. Fortunately,
she married me for my cooking and not for my sentences.
Warm wıshes,
Ken
> On 4 Dec 2025, at 08:57, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 245.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2025-12-04 07:44:16+00:00
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
> Subject: unusual collocations
>
> To this day I remember and honour the memory of one Mr Hunt, a
> teacher of English in the American school I attended. One day,
> I recall, he read us some poetry written by a Korean lad about our age
> who was learning English. The boy's grammar wasn't the best, but the
> poetry hit us, or at least me, powerfully. Mr Hunt said something about
> what it really means to write well--my English teacher, mind you, not
> just hammering on about good grammar, about The Rules.
>
> Many years later, in my first experience of teaching English (as a
> teaching assistant in an MA programme), I had a student from Nigeria who
> had won a national scholarship to study in the U.S. I can still remember
> a composition he submitted about his experience as a child walking along
> a dirt road after a hard rain, looking into a puddle, seeing his face
> there and being very frightened--because, he explained, he had heard
> that the dead live there. He thought he had died. Simple English, very
> bad grammar, powerful prose. His other teachers, I learned, agonised
> over his marks as much as I did.
>
> Today I was looking into the Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students
> of English (2002) and immediately thought of what it means to write like
> everyone else--and what it means to be impressed by the performance of
> chatbots, just as some I know were years ago impressed by The
> Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed (1984), in particular one English
> professor I knew, who drew my attention to it as evidence of artificial
> intelligence.
>
> Perhaps such enthusiasts should read poetry.
>
> Comments?
>
> Best,
> WM
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
> Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-12-04 15:49:41+00:00
From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.246: the parole machine
I still teach grammar regularly. We take a sharp left turn and run off the
road into a ditch when we start talking about the "rules" of grammar. We
should talk about the "function" of grammatical elements of a sentence and
the "function" of punctuation. When someone says "a comma puts a pause in a
sentence," they're right and, at the same time, demonstrating that they
don't really know the grammatical function of commas, because that's the
least important thing a comma does -- because while it's a shorter pause,
it's still a pause like a period, exclamation point, question mark, colon,
semi-colon. What makes all these pauses different? What matters is how
these different punctuation marks establish different relationships among
parts of a sentence or between sentences -- their function.
The length of the pause matters when you're transcribing a speech and
sometimes in poetry.
Now the next step after this is learning the importance of knowing these
functions. That non-native English speaking Korean kid undoubtedly wrote
something at least moving. If he masters grammar (in addition to the tone
and meanings of words), he can create more complex effects more
deliberately. There will be a period in between where he feels wooden or
mechanical. That's just a stage along the way. The point is to not remain a
child in your writing your whole life. The point is to really know what
you're doing and why.
Jim R
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-12-04 12:18:12+00:00
From: Mcgann, Jerome (jjm2f) <jjm2f@virginia.edu>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.245: the parole machine
Just a brief and probably unnecessary reply to Willard’s email: yes, on both
counts — to the force of unlearned poetry/verse, and to poetry (affective
language) as the norm of human intercourse. It can be unlearned, as in
Willard’s examples, or VERY learned — Byron and Poe are excellent — procedurally
very different — instances. The key is that it preserve, somehow/anyhow, the
easential feature of human language: orality and everything that "oral poetry”
can involve (physical immediacy). The case of Byron is obvious, but Poe’s is
more recondite because his work operates with unheard harmonies that are
comically (so to speak) carried by his flagrant metrics, often wonderfully and
affectively meretricious .
Jerry
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