Become a success by stacking your talents or skills

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a post by Bo Campbell at the Davidson Blog in 2018 titled Talent stacking – the key to standing out from the crowd. Bo explained that:

 

“The term ‘talent stack’ was coined by cartoonist Scott Adams – best known as the creator of the Dilbert Cartoon series – to describe developing a variety of skills which combine to make someone a sought-after commodity. Adams describes his own talent stack [as shown above] in the following terms:

 

‘I am a famous syndicated cartoonist who doesn’t have much artistic talent, and I’ve never taken a college-level writing class. But few people are good at both drawing and writing. When you add in my ordinary business skills, my strong work ethic, my risk tolerance, and my reasonably good sense of humour, I’m fairly unique.’ ”

 

Success may not continue unabated. The Wikipedia page about Scott Adams notes that in 2023 he was dropped by both his book publisher and his comic strip syndicator.

 

There is an article by Darius Foroux on November 6, 2018 titled Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy to Achieve Career Success. A second article by Thomas Oppong at The Ladders on January 15, 2020 is titled Skill stacking: Instead of mastering one skill, build a skill set. And there is a 2020 book by Steven West titled Skill Stacking: A practical approach to life, beat the competition and do what you love. And there is a post by Naressa Kahn at the Mindvalley Blog on February 16, 2025 titled How skill stacking can future-proof your career and make you indispensable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My stack of skills (shown above) includes writing magazine articles and reports, speaking in public, creating graphics for presentations, telling stories, and blogging. I had editing experience with reviewing magazine articles for both the materials science magazine Metallurgical Transactions and the corrosion engineering magazine Materials Performance.

 

There is a big difference between an anecdote and an antidote

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a post by Dr. John Livingston at the Gem State Patriot News blog on August 2, 2025 titled Factions and Bullies. His subject was the tenth Federalist Paper by James Madison, published in November 1787 and titled The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection (continued). John began the seventh paragraph by claiming (my italics):

 

“Madison asserted and I must paraphrase that the anecdote for factional violence is a large Union with diverse life experiences and a common moral ethic.”

 

But there is a big difference between an antidote and an anecdote. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, an anecdote is:

 

“A usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident.”

 

And an antidote instead is:

 

“A remedy to counteract the effects of poison”

                                         or

“Something that relieves, prevents, or counteracts“

 

As usual, Dr. Livingston didn’t bother to proofread what he wrote. Perhaps he just dictated it.  Rather ironically on July 27, 2025 he blogged about What’s in a Word. I last blogged about another mixup in a post on July 25, 2025 titled There are haves and have nots; but there are just two halves, and no halve nots.

 

An image of a story book came from OpenClipArt, and an image of a medicine bottle was adapted from the Library of Congress.

 

 

Editing as Excavating

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Editing may involve serious digging. There is a useful article by Yi Shun Lai in The Writer magazine on September 20, 2024 titled The editor, the excavator and subtitled Sometimes it takes another set of eyes to see what your story is REALLY about. She begins:

 

“The essay begins nicely. It’s fabulously written, ostensibly about the way a young man feels having his life chronicled each week in his mother’s newspaper column.

 

About three-quarters of the way through, the writer recounts an event that makes my ears prick up, something so significant that it gives the words and events in the pages before a new angle. And then he kind of just drops it. I can feel him physically dragging the essay back to what it was about before, trying to give due diligence to the narrative plan he’s laid out for himself.

 

The essay holds my attention all the way through, but by the end of it, I’m feeling hungover, literally, because hangovers are accompanied by the sense that you know you did something last night; you just can’t place exactly what it is. I read the writer’s cover letter, thinking there might be some hint as to whether or not I’ve misread the essay, but it doesn’t elucidate the issue for me, so I ping the writer an email asking for a phone conference.

Long story short, we published the writer, but what went into our literary magazine was a reasonably far cry from the submission I received. The lead-in had changed. The event that had gripped my attention was given more clout, and was recounted all the way through. The final touch was a new title for the piece, since the essay was no longer about what it used to be about.”

 

 

 

 

 

Dropping an event is known as Chekhov’s gun, which I blogged about on July 12, 2019 in a post titled Chekhov’s Gun – speechwriting advice from a cartoon. Both Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and the Yale Book of Quotations state it as:

 

“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”

 

An image of a Caterpillar 330 Excavator came from Wikimedia Commons, and a Winchester rifle came from OpenClipArt.

 

 

Using funhouse mirrors to evaluate your speechwriting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ada Community library branch closest to me is a couple miles away on Lake Hazel Road. But another branch is a couple miles north of it on Victory Road. Recently I visited that branch to look for new books and movie DVDs. I also looked on the shelves for books about public speaking, whose call number is 808.51. Just to the left under 808.02 I found an interesting 1999 paperback book by Eric Maisel titled Deep Writing: 7 Principles that bring ideas to life. There is a brief article by Heather Grove at Errant Dreams on June 20, 2006 about it titled “Deep Writing: 7 Principles that bring ideas to life,” Eric Maisel. I skimmed through the book, and was intrigued by the following section on pages 124 to 128:

 

“FUNNY MIRRORS

 

I recommend the following special way of evaluating your work. It can feel strange at first, because it involves a process that is intuitive and impressionistic, but once you master it you can learn what you need to know about your writing in almost an instant. I call this process funny mirrors.

 

Imagine that you’ve taken your work to a surrealist amusement park, and you discover a funhouse there. You go inside and encounter a long corridor lined with mirrors on both sides. On one side are mirrors with names: the mirror of the adjective, the mirror of the original idea, the mirror of the living thing, and so on. On the other side are mirrors that have a place on them for you to inscribe your own names: the mirror of Editor Jane, the mirror of the German-American reader, the mirror of the subplot, and so on.

 

When you hold up your work to one of these mirrors, you see only and exactly what that mirror reflects. In the first mirror you might encounter a talking head, in the second an image or a scene, in the third a phrase written out in script. Sometimes nothing will appear, a nothing full of information, as when you hold up your work to the marketplace mirror and the mirror can find nothing in your work with commercial appeal. Sometimes there are question marks, exclamation points, or strange squiggles in need of deciphering. This is a surrealistic funhouse, after all, and sometimes what you see will need interpreting.

 

The following are the named mirrors:

 

The Mirror of the Adjective

When you hold your work up to this mirror, you get back a single word: dark, confused, rushed, sentimental, stiff, clever, simplistic, elegant, unflinching, detached, depressing, deep, commercial. This is the mirror’s understanding – that is, your intuitive understanding – of your work’s current state, summed up in a single word.

 

The Mirror of the Original Idea

Your piece of writing started somewhere, with a feeling, an image, an idea. This mirror will reflect back to you insights about whether and to what extent the work is still harboring that original idea and is still guided by it. You might see a tiny dot: all that remains of your original idea. You might see an abstract painting: the idea gone wild, fragmented and mutated in the writing.

 

The Mirror of the Living Thing

In this mirror you get a sense of your work’s organic growth: whether it is growing tall and spidery, short and squat, spare and anemic. It may have nothing of the original idea left in it, but may still be a healthy, thriving organism, growing with its own fine logic.

 

The Mirror of Alternatives

In this mirror you get a snapshot of how your work might look if written differently. This mirror is invaluable: you get to see powerful alternatives that might have eluded your vision because of

 your focus on the work-as-it-is. Each time you hold up the work you see another alternative: how the book might look if narrated omnisciently, or if Sally told the story instead of Harry, or if Sally’s best friend did the telling.

 

The Mirror of Shape and Form

Every piece of writing has its own shape, its own architecture. In this mirror you might see reflected a skyscraper with the top fifty stories separated from the bottom fifty by a jarring gap of open air. Your book may be missing the middle chapter that connects the first half with the second. You might see a Calder mobile, which reminds you that the twittering bird chapter early on needs balancing with a meditation on the lightness of being.

    

The Mirror of the Ideal Reader

In this mirror a face appears and chats with you. He or she is serious, respectful, intimate, and understands your intentions but also has his or her own ideas about what is or isn’t working. If you hold your work up a second time, a different ideal reader may appear, one with a different history and different tastes but one still absolutely on your side and interested in seeing your work succeed.

 

Here are ten more mirrors:

 

The Mirror of the Typical Reader

The Mirror of Narrative Flow

The Mirror of Rhetorical Power

The Mirror of Intention

The Mirror of Voice

The Marketplace Mirror

The Mirror of Mystery

The Mirror of Grandeur

The Mirror of Truth

The Mirror of Goodness

 

Can you imagine how each of these mirrors works? What do you see reflected in each of them?

 

When you want to know something in addition to the information available in the named mirrors, walk down the other side of the corridor. There stand the mirrors waiting to be named by you. You might hold your work up to a mirror you call Mary and get a short, important answer about whether Mary is an effective character or a distraction. You might hold your work up to a mirror you call Dialogue and learn that your character John is making boring speeches and that Howard is barely grunting. You might hold the work up to a mirror you call Ending and learn whether your whisper of an ending is necessary, a problem, or both.

 

When you’re working with an editor, then naturally you will want to add an Editor mirror to your funhouse array. When you hold your work up to this mirror you get to hear your editor’s thoughts about the book. Editor Jane appears and says, ‘Darn it boy, didn’t we discuss this? I wanted much more action and much less philosophizing!’ With this mirror you foretell editorial objections and nip problems in the bud by engaging in dialogue with your intuition. This mirror alone is worth the price of admission.

 

Visit this funhouse when you want to evaluate your work. Use exactly as many mirrors as you need. Invent the ones that will help you the most, creating custom-tailored mirrors that answer your most pressing questions. Have you written several short stories and wonder if they amount to a collection? Invent a mirror. Is your self-help book helpful enough? Invent a mirror. See what there is to be seen.”

 

The mirrors at Science City in Calcutta came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Listen to the cadence of your speech

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary tells us that:

 

“A cadence is a rhythm, or a flow of words or music, in a sequence that is regular (or steady as it were). But lest we be mistaken, cadence also lends its meaning to the sounds of Mother Nature (such as birdsong) to be sure. Cadence comes from the Middle English borrowed from Medieval Latin’s own cadentia, a lovely word that means ‘rhythm in verse.’ “

 

There is an excellent discussion of it in the 2017 book by Sam Leith titled Write to the Point – A master class on the fundamentals of writing for any purpose. Beginning on page 151 he says:

 

“Even silent reading, both neuroscience and experience tell us, is an auditory experience. When we talk about cadence in prose we’re talking about the equivalent of meter in poetry; the sounds of the words. When we say something is ‘well written,’ a very large part of that will be to do with how it sounds. Cadence is prose rhythm. And it’s a hugely important aspect of writing, but it’s also one of the hardest ones to discuss in a formal way.

 

Prose doesn’t scan in the metronomic way that traditional verse does. The basic iambic beat of English verse is de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum and if you write like that in prose it would sound ridiculous. But prose does have its pauses and its rushes and its arpeggios. Punctuation, as I discussed in my chapters on the subject earlier, has its origin as a means of marking pauses in reading out loud – and that remains part of what it does.

 

So where you put the commas, where you break sentences, whether you use polysyllables or short words … all will have an effect on the ease and fluency of reading. A good writer doesn’t just have a brain; he or she has an ear. The more you read and the more you write, the better that ear will get. A good sentence will come to feel right.

 

But – as cannot be said too often – that ear needs training. Experienced composers can read music and ‘hear’ the sounds in their heads. Experienced writers, likewise. But many, many very experienced writers still use a simple technique for, as it were, double-checking. They read what they have written out loud. If you have time to do so once you’ve completed a draft, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

 

An awkward separation of subject and verb, for instance, becomes particularly stark when read aloud: you’ll find your voice holding off as your brain waits for the second shoe to drop. You may even find – if there are enough subordinate clauses getting in the way of the main event; if, as in this sentence, there’s a great long digression separating the word ‘find’ from the question of what it is that you’re eventually going to find – that you run out of breath trying to get through the wretched thing.

 

Peggy Noonan, who wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan, has said: ‘Once you’ve finished a first draft of your speech … stand up and read it aloud. Where you falter, alter.’ That applies especially to speeches of course: In that case you’re trying to produce something that’s hard to stumble over when spoken aloud. Tongue twisters such as ‘red lorry, yellow lorry’ are easier on the page than in the mouth. But its also good advice to the prose writer. There is a developmental connection between reading aloud and reading silently – and a neurological one, too.”

 

The image was adapted from one at Openclipart.

 

In 2020 Grant Snider published a profusely illustrated book - I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Via interlibrary loan, from the Meridian Library, I obtained and am enjoying reading a delightful 2020 book with comics by Grant Snider titled I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf.  Grant is an artist with a day job as an orthodontist and he has a web site called Incidental Comics.

 

On September 19, 2024 I blogged about his 2022 book in a post titled A manifesto on what you should pay attention to – from a book on The Art of Living profusely illustrated with comic strips.

 

I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf has 14 sections where he confesses the following titles about books, reading, and writing on the indicated pages: 

 

I’m in love with books [Page 6]

I read in social situations [Page 14]

I will use anything as a bookmark [Page 20]

I confuse fiction with reality [Page 26]

I am wanted for unpaid library fines [Page 34]

I steal books from my children [Page 40]

I like my realism with a little bit of magic [Page 48]

I like to sniff old books [Page 56]

I am searching for a miracle cure for writer’s block

 [Page 64]

I care about punctuation – a lot [Page 72]

I will read the classics (someday) [Page 80]

I am writing The Great American Novel [Page 90]

I carry a notebook with me at all times [Page 102]

I write because I must [Page 112]

And he concludes: I hope you don’t mind me asking…can I borrow a few books?

 

Here are links to fifteen comics appearing in the book, as presented on web pages at his Incidental Comics site:

 

Other people’s bookshelves [page 12 and page 13]

The story coaster [page 27]

Story lines [page 31]

The writer’s block [page 32]

The cannon of literature [page 46 and 47]

The three Rays [page 52]

Story structures [page 55]

The book fair [page 63]

Poetic Justice [page 70]

Proofreader’s marks [page 73]

The ingredients of Shakespeare [page 81]

Day jobs of the poets [page 88]

Character development [page 96 and 97]

Strunk and White’s writer’s style guide {page 100 and 101]

Writing exercises [page 116 and 117]

 

My image was created from a Miss Muffet poster and bookshelf at Openclipart.

 

If you don’t proofread the title of your article, then you may look very silly

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Editing matters. There is an article by Chauncey Devega at Salon on June 30, 2023 now titled “Far beyond simple narcissism”: Why Donald Trump can’t simply keep quiet – even when facing prison. 

 

But originally, as shown above, the word quiet was misspelled as quite, and also can be seen by looking at the URL.  

Advice on writing and editing from singer-songwriter Ben Folds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ben Folds is a singer-songwriter, who once fronted an alternative rock trio ironically named the Ben Folds Five. In 2019 he published a memoir titled A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A life of music and cheap lessons. I have just enjoyed reading that book, particularly his advice on songwriting and then editing in the chapter titled Follow the Brown that begins on page 254. Starting with the second paragraph, he says:

 

“….The most common question I’m asked about songwriting is whether the words or music come first. And that’s a reasonable question. Hell, I ask my songwriter friends the same thing. We all want to know what the spark was. What was the first syllable the writer uttered before the musical sentence was complete? What stuck to the page first? For me, it’s almost always music. I believe my subconscious clues me in to my feelings by expressing them abstractly through music – a few notes, a musical sentence, that I don’t yet understand. I will follow the music to the edge of my lyrical comfort zone, because I firmly believe the music is about something and that’s for me to decipher. Often, the music fools me into writing something I’d rather not have revealed lyrically.

 

The spark of a song can come at the oddest time. Maybe at a stoplight, a meeting, or in bed at 4 A.M. For me, there’s usually a subtle glow in the air just before the notes start to come. A sense that something is around the corner. Like the farm animals in a disaster movie right before an earthquake, who seem to know what’s coming before the humans do, It feels the way light often looks at ‘magic hour,’ before sunset, when suddenly it seems that anywhere you point the camera will make a good picture. That’s the kind of feeling that tells me to watch for some music. It’s coming soon.

 

If freestyling onstage teaches us that you can always turn on the faucet and that some kind of music will always flow, then songwriting in solitude confirms that the water can sometimes flow muddy brown. Non-potable melody. You have to let it run for a while, until it begins to run clear. Yes, it hurts to hear the brown ideas coming from the center of your soul, but you don’t have to show them to anybody. Don’t let brown get you down. Here’s a common bit of advice I’ve heard from every songwriter I’ve ever met: Just keep moving.

 

I personally do not believe there’s such a thing as writer’s block. It’s just that we don’t like everything that comes out. When our self-judgment takes over, it shames us into submission and we shut off the faucet. We say we have no ideas. No. We have ideas, but we aren’t willing to fess up to how bad they might be. But, really, who gives a damn? Own them. They suck, and they came from you. Fine. That’s not a crime, that’s normal. Take it easy on yourself. Remember that you can always write something, it’s just that sometimes it’s shitty. Let it be so! And then follow that brown until it runs clear.

 

A great musician and producer named Pat Leonard told me that it’s important to know when to send your inner editor away. His advice is another version of my faucet metaphor. Maybe it works better for you. When you’re creating, make a deal with your inner editor – that judgmental but necessary part of your psyche that keeps telling you what sucks. Tell this trigger-happy editor in your mind that you need them to step out of the room while you create. You need to be free to follow all ideas, bad and good. You need to create with impunity – alone. However! The other half of the deal is that the editor gets to come back the next day – with a chain saw. Your editor will get to go to town on what you’ve written. The editor may even throw the whole song in the trash. But not now. Now you must create.”  

 

His advice also applies to speechwriting. On March 23, 2015 I blogged about how Writer’s block is like getting your car stuck in mud up to the axles.

 

Careful editing will improve your presentation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At Inc. on December 16, 2022 there is an article by Carmine Gallo titled Jerry Seinfeld’s editing tip will make your presentations shorter and more concise. In it film editor Peter Holmes said:

 

“He’ll cull the best material and go to work on it, shaving it down until there’s not a wasted syllable … At times, he can be brutal about throwing things away in the edit, but I can’t argue with the results.”

 

Mr. Gallo’s three ways to edit are:

 

Recognize that editing is necessary but hard.

Resist information dumps.

Get help.

 

The scissors cartoon was adapted from one at Openclipart.

 

Joseph Gobbles and the Gazpacho Police

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you don’t proofread what you write, you can look very foolish – particularly when you bring up Nazis. Here in Boise the last sentence in the first paragraph of an article by Bob “Nugie” Neugebauer at the Gem State Patriot News on January 30, 2022 titled Will America Ever be Great Again? meant to bring up Joseph Goebbels but instead claimed:

 

“We have not seen propaganda like this since Joseph Gobbles in World War II.”

 

I commented:

 

“Learn to proofread. Joseph Gobbles is a name for a Thanksgiving turkey.”

 

Gestapo is an abbreviation for the notorious Gehime Staatpolozei (Secret State Police) of Nazi Germany. But recently U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene instead referred to gazpacho police. Annother article by Rick Rouan at USA Today on February 10, 2022 is titled ‘Gazpacho police’: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s word soup launches social media frenzy.  

 

The cartoon turkey was modified from an image at Wikimedia Commons.

   

Can you trust a blog post where two books it discusses have their authors incorrectly named?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course not! It only would take a few minutes to proofread, and check those references at Wikipedia, WorldCat or Amazon. Not doing so indicates a troubling lack of attention to detail (a willingness to instead trust your fallible memory).

 

At the Gem State Patriot News on October 1, 2021 there is an article (blog post) by Dr. John Livingston titled Why We Are Divided and who is To Blame? He claims that:

 

“Almost 20 years ago Hans Rosling and his wife Olga wrote and published the book FACTFULNESS. In the book they describe 10 reasons that people are either misled by others, or how they mislead themselves.”

 

The late Dr. Rosling’s wife was Agneta. His two co-authors for that 2018 book were his son Ola Rosling, and daughter-in law Anna Rosling Ronnlund (see article at Wikipedia). John confused his son with his wife, and left out his daughter-in law. I commented on that mistake and, of course, he said I was right.  

 

Dr. Livingston also claims:

 

“A very famous book written by Dr. Marshall McQuillan entitled THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE implanted in the minds of several generations of journalists and media practitioners the idea that an impression or a narrative was far more important than the actual reality.”

 

The Wikipedia article about that 1967 book instead lists the title as The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, and the authors as Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore.  

 

On September 11, 2020 I blogged about Editing tips for speechwriters and other writers. In that post I mentioned two previous articles by Dr. Livingston with spelling errors. He is also the medical policy adviser for the Idaho Freedom Foundation, whose advice cannot be trusted.   

  

The image was adapted from a 1949 Make Friends with Books poster at the Library of Congress.

 

A good writer edits drafts of his story, speech, or song

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A writer needs to edit his drafts both for grammar and spelling. The April 27, 2021 Pearls Before Swine cartoon has dialogue where Rat tells us what NOT to do:

 

Goat: Hey, Rat. What are you doing?

Rat: Just got to the end of a story I’m writing. I’m hoping to get it published.

Goat: That’s great. How much time will you need for the re-writing?

Rat: My writing’s perfect the first time.

Goat: I see.

Rat: Revisions are only for sad little losers.

 

Recently I was listening to the radio and heard a 2008 song Human by The Killers. Its chorus is shown above. Use of dancer rather than dancers makes me cringe, and my suggestions for five changes (adding s) are shown in red. Some who couldn’t understand the lyric had transcribed it as saying denser. Brandon Flowers refused to change it, but he claimed to have gotten the idea to use dancer from this quote from Hunter S. Thompson:

"We’re raising a generation of dancers, afraid to take one step out of line"

 

Other songwriters are not afraid to edit their lyrics. Josh Ritter has a song titled Harrisburg on his album The Golden Age of Radio. One version of its second verse says:

 

“Could have stayed somewhere, but train tracks kept going

It seems like they always left soon

And the people he ran with, they moaned low and painful

Sang sad misereres to the moon”

 

I had to look in the Merriam-Webster dictionary to find out the obscure word miserere means a vocal complaint or lament. The acoustic version on the Deluxe Edition and a live version have that verse changed to instead read:

 

“They could have stayed somewhere, train tracks kept going

It seems like they always left soon

And the wolves that he ran with, moaned low and painful

Sang their sad lullabys at the moon, at the moon”

 

Some lyrics are memorable because they contain an unusual phrase, like the title for the popular song Seven Nation Army by the duo The White Stripes. You can watch and listen to it in this YouTube video. I imagine a Seven-Nation-Army might have appeared somewhere in the J. R. R. Tolkien novel The Return of the King. But actually as a child Jack White misheard it as being what is the Salvation Army. There also is a YouTube video with Homer and Bart Simpson starting to play the song. But the murderous opening riff really isn’t played on a bass – it’s on a guitar lowered an octave.   

 

Watch out for misspellings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Incorrect spelling in visual aids is not good for a speaker’s credibility. Spelling errors often slip through proofreading.

 

I just saw a hilarious example in an article by Nomaan Merchant at the Associated Press on November 19, 2020 titled Trump’s election lawsuits plagued by elementary errors. It said where they should have referred to ‘poll watchers’ they instead said ‘pole watchers’ - perhaps thinking about customers at a strip club.

 

A second article by Benjamin G. Shatz in For the Defense on February 2007 titled Watch out for tricky typos mentioned lawyer mistakes of statue for statute, pubic for public, trail for trial, and untied for united.

 

A third article at Re:word titled The difference one missed letter makes says in those cases you would get asses for assess, pubic for public, and heroin for heroine.

 

Adding an extra letter also can be awful, as pointed out in a fourth article at The poke on October 14, 2017 titled ‘Best legal typo of all time. Do not stop looking til you find it’ where an extra f changed from ‘assisting’ into ‘assfisting.’ Another article by Stacy Zaretsky at Above the Law on January 10, 2018 called it The most embarrassing typo in a lawyer letter, ever.

 

The image of Miss Pellings was adapted from this photo at the Library of Congress.

 

UPDATE

 

An article at The Hill by Jordan Williams on November 26, 2020 titled Ex-Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell files lawsuits in Michigan, Georgia reported:

 

"Both of the cases filed by Powell were riddled with typographical issues. The case in Michigan had a number of formatting problems that removed spacing between words, Bloomberg reported. In the Georgia suit, the word district was misspelled twice on the first page of the document: There was an extra c for 'DISTRICCT,' and then it was spelled 'DISTRCOICT.' "

   

 

 

Editing tips for speechwriters and other writers

At Medium on September 5, 2020 there is a very useful article by Jay Krasnow titled 10 Editing Tips Writers Need to Know (one involves bean soup). They can be applied to speechwriting, PowerPoint, and blog posts. I have paraphrased them as follows:

Don’t leave out the main ingredient – be sure there are beans in the bean soup.

Look at your copy upside-down.

Check all the names (people and places).

Verify the pairs (parentheses, brackets).

Are all acronyms defined when they first are used?

Verify the phone numbers, addresses, and hyperlinks.

Do titles and section headings make sense?

Look for clusters of errors.

Make sure you read it out loud.

Check your formatting.

When you look at your printed copy upside-down, spacing errors and weird fonts will stand out. In Patrick Winston’s presentation on How to Speak (discussed in my previous post) at 31:48 he described looking at a printout of a presentation to see if the slides were too heavy – cursed with solid blocks of text.

The last thing I do with a blog post after I publish it is to go back and add all the hyperlinks. Then I view it, and click on the hyperlinks to see they all work. When reading through the post I may find errors not caught by the spell checker in Word – like accidentally leaving the h off of harm.

In Jeff Smith’s 1990 cookbook The Frugal Gourmet on Our Immigrant Ancestors the recipe for Beef Bulgogi lists ingredients for the marinade but it doesn’t say how much or what type of beef to use. The text just says to prepare the beef. A later web version at Good Food says it really is one pound of beef ribeye.

At the Gem State Patriot News there recently was a pair of articles by Dr. John Livingston with repeated misspellings. One on September 3, 2020 titled Lies and More Lies says flue instead of flu (as shown above). That’s a cluster of spelling errors. A second article on September 5, 2020 titled Do you believe in miracles? says Devine instead of Divine. (Andy Devine was a well-known character actor, but not divinely inspired). In between those two there is a third on September 4, 2020 titled What is an expert? Dr. Livingston says that:

“An expert is someone who knows a great amount about a small slice of the world, and most experts fail to see how their small sliver of the pie relates to the rest of the world.”

But we expect his small sliver to include getting all the spelling right - rather than depending on an editor to fix that detail. Another version of What is an expert? appears at the Idaho Freedom Foundation on September 8, 2020 titled Experts and the people. There the author is listed with his middle initial as Dr. John M. Livingston. That version was edited to have more paragraphs.

An article by Olivia Mitchell at Speaking About Presenting describes 9 ways to edit your presentation. Olivia says to have one focus (a core message), and no more than three main points. Cut anything that does not relate to the core message, like secondary examples or stories.

Another article by Andrew Dlugan at Six Minutes on March 4, 2008 is titled Speech Preparation #5: Six power principles for speech editing. He says to edit for focus, clarity, concision, continuity, variety, impact and beauty.

The image of beef bulgogi came from Debbie Tingzon at Wikimedia Commons.