To write or not to write

23 May 2010

291


R. Linda:


When asked a question about why one should go to school and learn to write instead of throwing caution to the wind and just writing with no educational experience, say a novel, or even (gulp) a newspaper article, I thought I'd put it out there for all the would be writers or reporters of the news. Uh huh. 


Now here is a fine example of how not to write a news story. Follow please and do contain the laughter:


Today or maybe it was yesterday, depending where you be, farmer McGoolick's cow Bessie or maybe it was Jessie got loose and ambled down to the village without her shoes. She was given a citation by Guarda O'Hogan for drinking in the town fountain and making a spectacle of herself. John said she usually has those stupid boots on and you can hear her shuffling. So Mc G is still out looking for his cow and the potatoes are doing really well this year.


Yup. Me very own Muse thought it was McGoolick's wife got loose, LMAO, but she has a point she does. Someone else wanted to know since when did they start putting horseshoes on cows, yes reserve your comments on this please, I had a hard time with that one too. Yet someone else was confused if 'John' was farmer McGoolick the husband or Bessie had a John she visited in boots only. Oi! And worse that same person thought that if she was shuffling to John the John, she must be a cougar. Ye--ah. And finally, what did potatoes have to do with anything, was Dan Quayle there and we missed it? Ugh!!!


And now the news reported by someone who has been whipped into writing shape by a professor or two, or three, or maybe four . . .


23 May 2010 - Dalkey, Ireland: Agriculturist Donald McGoolick's thriving dairy business was put on hold yesterday when his prize cow Bessie was let out of pasture by neighbourhood hooligans Johnny Daly and his brother Barney. The cow was egged on by the lads to shuffle without aid of her founder boots toward the village. Once there, the disoriented bovine headed for water and that water was in Dalkey's new fountain in the centre of the village. Bessie found her way in, bad legs and all, and was discovered mooing her distress on not being able to get out by the locals who lived around the area and were awakened by the noise. Guarda Alice O'Hogan was called to the scene as a crowd gathered. The bovine had to be lifted by crane which was provided by potato farmer Chris Devlin, who had been harvesting a bumper crop early that morning. All is well, Bessie is returned to the farm and the fountain is no worse for wear. Now if only Guarda O'Hogan can locate McGoolick who is suspected to be in the high fields still looking for Bessie, we would have a happy ending.


That clears that up.


So inspired I wrote this for me following of learned and non learned writers


To write or not to write -- THAT is the question
Whether 'tis far nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous penmanship
Or to take erasers up against a sea of verbs
And by dangling participles end it all. To create, to write --
No more -- and by a rule of salutation to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
of seeing comas put where they don't belong
Devoutly to be wished perfect punctuation
To write -- perchance to write well: ay, there's the rub,
For in that uncorrected paragraph of run on sentences
When words are shuffled off to be bashed together,
Must give us pause, PLEASE! Where's the respect
that makes a calamity of prose go awry
For who would beat the checks and crossing out of misspelled words,
Th' novices wrong, the proud writers contumely
The pangs of despised adjectives, the law of capitalisation,
The insolence of irregular verbs, and the spurns
That patient writers merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his rules make
With a red pen in hand? How would novice bear
To write a descriptive sentence with proper indentation
But that the dread of something sloppily written
The uncertain need for making nouns plural, from whose bourn
No writer returns, puzzles the will,
And makes the reader rather bear those ills he reads
Than fly to teachers that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast by descriptive verbs,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their current turn awry
And lose the name of fiction. -- Soft you now,
The would be writer! -- Writer non, in the textbooks
Be all thy writing sins remembered.

Gabe

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