The Essential Message Blog

Never Assumme

Before you read any further, or start commenting on the title of this blog, check out this picture on flickr.

Now, what's scary about this is not that there was a spelling error. Perhaps I could even give the people behind this the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was a typo. And typos (and spelling errors) happen to us all. Yes, they even happen to those who have read and loved Eats, Shoots & Leaves (including me) and who are compelled to point out spelling and grammar mistakes everywhere they find them (me again).

The Right Way Vs The Real World.

I'm not one of those people whose sole mission is to break all the rules. (People who know me well would laugh at the idea of me lecturing others not to worry about doing things "right.")

At the same time, I'm consistently frustrated by people who stick too closely to the conventional rulebook. Take the cookie-cutter cover letters and resumes I recieved this morning, for example.

The Great Inner Pain

Like about a billion other people, I spent last night watching the Oscars. While we were cursing the many film montages and thank you speeches that, unsurprisingly, caused the program to run over-time, there was one cinematic collage that got me thinking.

To recognize screenwriters, this montage was full of clips of writers in film. Highlighted movies included Barton Fink, Adaptation, Capote, The Hours, Shakespeare in Love, something by Woody Allen (couldn't distinguish which one since they are, after all, pretty much the same), and other classics that I'm just not enough of a film buff to recognize. (Unfortunately, the montage focused mainly on male writers, and one of my all-time favourite writers, Anais Nin, who was portrayed in the film Henry and June, was left out.)

Sometimes comically, sometimes seriously, these film clips collectively demonstrated one distinct theme: the tormented writer.

Is writing so difficult that anxiety, frustration, depression, and failure follow writers where ever they go? Is this just a stereotype, or is writing really that hard?

Do you hit your keyboard?

"Please hit ENTER to continue." From a writing standpoint, it's terrible English, but I see it all the time. "Press", "tap", "touch", and even "key" are used to instruct people to make a keypress.

I used to think that asking people to hit a key would result in damage to the keyboard. Then I went to Cleveland last weekend.