The new Deco Crest features a stunning sterling silver overlay made in Florence, Italy.  Each pen is crafted [by the hands] [of the descendants] [of the artisans] that made Florence the artistic center [of the Renaissance].  Added to this design [of the filigree overlay] is the beveled edge and gravure workmanship carved [into the metal].

Even without my brackets, this writing is halting and flabby … not only because of the prepositional-phrase pile-up, but also because the second and third sentences are in passive voice.

Prepositional phrases are modifiers, which means that a good writer or editor can frequently render them as single-word adjectives or adverbs.  Following is a revision that corrects the passive voice and the pile-up problems of the original.  At the same time, I’ve eliminated four other issues that bug me: 1) in a description that references the Renaissance, do we really need to be told that Florence is in Italy?; 2) “features” and “stunning” are among the most overused words in promotional writing; 3) “crafted by the hands of” … really!; and 4) it took me 10 minutes to find out what “gravure” means … it’s a printing process unrelated to sterling silver overlays.  That said, here’s my revision:

Sterling silver, Renaissance-style overlays set the new Deco Crest apart from any other pen on the market.  Handcrafted by descendants of Florentine artisans, the Deco Crest evokes the fineness and workmanship of masterpiece engraving.

In fact, it’s a challenge I’ve worked on many times in my workshops.  At today’s IMRE workshop, we came up with a very nice solution, which I’d like to share.

A rainbow cuts an arc across the sky, shaped like the top side of an egg.  If you could touch a rainbow, though, it would feel like passing your hand though mist – not at all like the top side of an egg!  It could last two minutes or half an hour.  You never know how long it will remain.  That’s part of its mystery.

A rainbow has seven colors.  On the top side is red, and people say that’s the hottest color, like curry or red chilis or habaneros.  On the bottom is violet, the coolest color – like ice.  In between are the five other colors of the spectrum.  ROY. G. BIV!

If you try to give a taste to each of the colors, this is what you might have.

• Red – habaneros, curry and red chilis
• Orange – Cajun gumbo, andouille sausage
• Yellow – ginger ice cream, cheese grits with cayenne, turmeric
• Green – green peppers, cucumber, fresh spinach, pickles (??)
• Blue – iced coffee, rootbeer snow cones, oysters on the half-shell
• Indigo – snow
• Violet – ice

It was a pleasure working with the IMRE folks on this challenge!  Thank you!

Last night, I had occasion to invoke the name of Rembrandt in conversation with my smart, well-educated daughter, a sophomore at one of our fine universities.  At the mention of his name, I was greeted by an utterly blank stare.  A conversational deer-in-the-headlights moment.  I was stunned.  She had not heard of Rembrandt!

Was she daft? I wondered.  Was I?  I know we’ve seen rapid changes in recent years – but Rembrandt’s reputation survived The Reformation, The Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and even the advent of TV.  Was I insane to think he had not survived the Internet and texting?  That he had just not made it into my daughter’s generation?

“You don’t know who Rembrandt is?” I asked.

“Yes.  Of course I do.”

“Really?  Who is he.”

“Well … well … I’ve sort of heard of him but I don’t know exactly.”

“You’ve ‘sort of heard’ of Rembrandt?!  Sort of?  Why don’t you check him out right now on Wikipedia,” I said.

“Well, what’s his first name?”

“His first name?!  His FIRST name?  Baby, he’s sort of like Madonna.  Rembrandt doesn’t need a first name.”

She didn’t know where to go with this, so of course she turned to her cell phone – to a friend for support.  As she called, I asked if she had heard of Picasso or DaVinci.  She was affonted at the insult.

Then I heard my of of the phone call.

“My dad thinks I’m crazy because don’t know who Rembrandt is.  Yes: I said ‘Rembrandt.’  Do you know who he is?”

“Something like that.”

“Yeah, then he asked if I knew who Picasso and DaVinci are!”

“No.  Rembrandt is definitely not on their level.”

Then to me:  ”Dad, Anna says yes, she heard of Rembrandt but he’s definitely not, like, that important.”

Of course, there was no comeback.  Merely this post – which is not even about writing … merely an online aside about the state of things.

For example, as the recession took hold, one phrase were on everyone’s lips: “in these troubled [or difficult] times.”  I mean everyone’s.  I recall hearing it about 12 times one day in 2008, and I thought:  ”Yep.  This is the cliche-of-the-quarter.”  My bosses said it.  My friends said it.  Every headline, every anchor, and every commentator said it.  So I never said it.  I said something else … god knows what now!  But something to capture the idea more meaningfully or at least more originally.

For the past five years, I have been listening to the 1.0 / 2.0 discussion.  I think I get it.  In the 1.0 world, we were all liberated to find volumes of information online and begin building worldwide connections through the internet.  In the 2.0 world, we get to interact!  Through the endless conversations about what’s 1.0 vs. 2.0, I have kept a skeptical distance.  I hate to jump on bandwagons, and I aim to get through life without ever having been called “trendy.”

I knew it was only a matter of time until “3.0″ would enter the conversation – placed there by people who wanted to appear ahead of the curve we’re still caught in.  I heard it first about a year ago – undefined, speculative, meaningless.  The cliche was snowballing.  Then this winter, Kai Ryssdal, host of Marketplace on American Public Media, produced a series called “Marketing 4.0.”  I squeeled for joy!

There is was: proof positive that the “something-dot-0″ cliche is a pitfall of contemporary social language, business language and – I would argue – marketing thinking.  Keep you ears open and try not to step into the trap!

When cliches become hysterical

As if Mr. Ryssdal did not delight me enough with “4.0,” he came back just last week with a report on the emerging “dot-com bubble.”  Apparently a couple of tech start-ups fizzled out somewhere last quarter, and Kai was pronouncing the next bursting of the next bubble.  Why not?  We had a dot-com bubble a decade ago; it burst at the Millenium.  The bubble burst on the Stock Market in 2008.  That caused the bubble to burst on the real estate market shortly after.  I believe clusters of other bubbles have been bursting since, but I’ve lost track.  So surely, it’s about time for another bubble.

Surely – thank you Kai Ryssdal – we are now experiencing the “micro-dot-com-bubble-burst of 2011.”  We might even give it an acronym.  How’s about  MCOMBB2011?   Should we tack on 4.0?

• One means to “flush” unwanted things away … like lice from hair. Or uncivil discourse from U.S. politics, for example.
• The other means to “add meat to the bone”: to “flesh out” an idea means you’ll give it substance, heft and details.

Despite the obvious difference between these two phrases, THE INCHWORM HAS HAS NEVER HEARD A BUSINESS PERSON GET THIS CORRECT!  Let me know if you do!

She enters the living room – not quite tottering – on eight-inch-high, heal-less black leather boots. So much for comfort. The Gaga is encased in a skintight, black, gauzy turtleneck catsuit covered with rhinestones. Long blond wig. Face covered with black lace netting. With those boots on she’s close to six feet. Without, possibly closer to five two; she is tiny, this mega-star. And – sitting here, curled up on a sofa – it takes a only a matter of minutes for her to literally drop her veil.

Now that is writing!!  What reader could stop at this point without wondering what “the Gaga” revealed after dropping the veil!  Are we hooked yet?

There are many wonderful things about this passage. I suggest you read it a few more times and discover your own gems. Here are a few of mine.

• Normally, when writers pile up adjectives – especially business writers – they’re trying to inflate the meaning of something. Here, a string of precise adjectives merely describes the catsuit Lady Gaga was wearing (“skintight, black, gauzy … covered with rhinestones.”) – I can see it, can’t you?
• I love the use of sentence fragments (in purple, for your convenience).  Sentence fragments are indispensable for creating a conversational tone. That tone is one of the reasons this passage reads so crisply: we feel as if we’re listening to a friend. INCHWORM’s advice: Never use sentence fragments UNLESS you know that’s what you’re doing. Your boss or your CEO’s admin will catch you. If you can’t explain why you broke a cardinal grammatical rule (“No Sentence Fragments!”), you will be in trouble.
• Two great verbs open this passage.  Gaga “enters, … tottering” on those eight-inch heals. Those verbs set us up for drama.  I’m ready!

The Japanese Maple has an essence of grace, beauty, tastefulness, elegance, mood and feeling, with its horizontal branches and space.  These trees attract many people, not only for its brilliant fall color, but also for their leaf shape, texture, delicacy, and as a four season tree.  These trees sing seasonal songs through out the year. Their buds swell and anticipate new fresh leaves unfolding in spring.  They bring a cool feeling with bright green color in summer.  The Japanese Maple produces outstanding color in fall and in the winter, they become naked showing everything from old wounds to the beautiful movement of the tree along with a winter silhouette.

You know you’re in trouble when a writer hits you with a pile-up of six descriptive words in the first sentence, especially when a bunch of them are redundant: how does “grace” differ from “elegance” or “mood” from “feeling”? But the problem here goes deeper. The writer thinks that descriptive writing benefits from lots of descriptive words. Wrong. Too many descriptive words adds blubber to your writing. What you want is a powerful, descriptive verb and limited use of adjectives or adverbs.

How’s about: A Japanese maple can transform a garden into an elegant space that lifts the heart. Two nice verbs; one adjective.

We have another massive problem in the second sentence, what we call “faulty parallelism” – an everyday problem in every company where I’ve worked. “These trees attract people … for their leaf shape, texture, delicacy, and as a four season tree.” What we have here is a prepositional phrase beginning with the preposition “for.” It’s followed by three nouns – shape, texture, delicacy (the writer means delicateness) – and then an adverb clause (“as a four-season tree”; note the missing hyphen in the original). The parallelism is faulty here because the parts of speech following the preposition don’t match: three nouns and a clause.

I could go on in detail, but you’ve probably noticed a number of errors yourself. Among them:

• the pronoun “its” in the second sentence doesn’t agree with its antecedent, “trees”
• “throughout” is misspelled as two words
• do trees really “sing songs”? – not in my world
• the last sentence is a run-on sentence; we need a period after “fall”

With writing this bad, there’s no point in editing. It needs to be trashed and written anew.