How not to write

Is it better to say bad things to someone or behind their back? That's a good question, and like a lot of difficult questions, the answer is, "It depends."

Here at RJ Battles I've written some unkind things about the blog The Daily Guru. But every time I wrote one of those posts it crossed my mind that maybe I should send a message or a comment directly to TDG. Just friendly suggestions. But there's not much fun in that, plus, who knows how those suggestions might be recieved. It's been my experience that people don't want to hear anything about their work other than "It's awesome".

So I'm not going to write to TDG and point out what I think are some flaws in his writing style. Instead, I'm going to highlight them here at RJ Battles and let his mistakes serve as a lesson to other writers out there. Stephen King said that the only way to be a good writer was to write a lot and read a lot. And reading bad writing is as important as reading good writing because it shows you what not to do.

The problem with The Daily Guru is that his music reviews are locked into a basic magazine music review formula. As a result, sentences are bloated with cliches and pointless phrases.

I'm going to use two recent reviews as examples.

On October 26 he posted about The Ronettes's "Be My Baby". In the first sentence he uses the phrase "one can easily argue". Then in the third sentence he says, "and yet it can easily be argued". He also ends the second paragraph with "one can easily argue".

Like most of the TDG posts, the "Be My Baby" review is four paragraphs long, and in a piece of writing that size overused words and phrases start to jump out at the reader.

The first, third, and forth paragraphs all contain the phrase "there is no question".

In paragraph two, the phrase "completely unique" is used two sentences in a row.

In one sentence he writes, "nothing short of iconic" and in the very next sentence he writes "nothing short of legendary". In the next paragraph: "nothing short of hypnotizing".

That's bad, right? No, it's good compared to today's post, a review of Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water".

Four paragraphs containing a total of 28 sentences. Again, there are some cases that can be argued easily. But for the most part, there are no cases to be argued- there is, in fact, no question.

Paragraph One
"there is no question"

Paragraph Two
"it is without question"

Paragraph Three
"there is no question"
then, in the very next sentence-
"Yet there is no question"

Paragraph Four
"Yet there is no question"
"is without question"
"there is no question"

I saved my favorite thing for last. This is a sentence from Paragraph Four:

"Yet there is no question that the original stands far above the reach of any imitator, as the fragile beauty that Simon and Garfunkel created here is without question one of the most breathtaking moments to ever be captured on tape."

That sentence is pretty amazing on its own, but then when you think about how many times the phrase "no question" is used- 7- in a 28 paragraph review, you wonder how the writer could avoid noticing. It's crazy if you do the math- 1 out of every 4 sentences contains the phrase (except, as we know, that isn't exactly true; the phrase shows up twice in one sentence).

Anyway, (That's one of my own overused words; I'm no great writer myself. I know.) if you go to The Daily Guru and read these posts you can see that the phrases that he overuses are not needed. If they were erased his writing would be a lot cleaner. From Strunk and White's Elements of Style: "Omit needless words".

Play dead

I had Bjork's Debut on tape but not this version- mine ended with "The Anchor Song", not "Play Dead", which I've never heard. My sleeve was a lot like this one but the "Bjork" logo near the song titles was the other one. I think I like this one better.

This week

I've been inactive lately and a lot of my time has been spent in front of the computer. I like looking things up: music stuff, blogs, news, but mostly movie trivia. Last night I saw a half-hour special from around 1994 where Quentin Tarentino talks about Robert De Niro's movie career- especially his movies in the 70s.

He talks about how in 70s De Niro was the biggest name in acting and he worked with the strongest directors of that time: Coppola, Scorsece, Cisero. He has a lot of praise for his performances in Mean Streets, Godfather II, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull, but what's interesting is that Tarentino get's critical of De Niro's later work. He says that he and his friend used to run to see De Niro's movies the day they came out but after a while it wasn't such a big deal. De Niro stopped being choosy about his projects and did more movies. I think that's a very good point, especially if you look at the movies De Niro's done over the past 15 years. I don't even have to list them; you know what I'm talking about.

I never payed a lot of attention to John C. Reilly. He was good in Magnolia and Dolores Claibourne, but the movie that I really like him in is one that I never thought I'd watch, never mind like: Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (2009). Reilly is great in that movie, just like everyone else in it- except for the lead, some boring kid.

There's a book I wanna read called Portrait of a Monster. It's about Joran van der Sloot. He's creepy, creepy guy and I can't believe he's only 24. He liked Natalee Halloway on May 30, 2005, and then he killed another woman exactly 5 years later. Lifetime made a movie about Halloway and I don't know who played van der Sloot but it wasn't who it should've been: Nick Stahl.

Oh shit

I forgot my anniversary. Me and RJ Battles have been together for 3 years, 3 years this past Tuesday, but I didn't stop by and write anything that day.

I didn't realize this until late last night, and while it's not a big deal, I really did mean to do something. 3 years is kind of a big deal. That's a long time.

But really, I've been neglectful of the blog for the past 6 months anyway. I haven't been too busy; I've just been less ambitious than I usually (which isn't very).

I follow 3 blogs. Even though the writing comes off like a high school newspaper student trying to sound like a People Magazine music reviewer, I do usually learn something new about a song that I'm half-way interested in. The writer, Joel, is knowledgable, but "Guru" (a word I don't care for anyway) is a stretch. Also, you can see where a lot of the info comes from- read his post about Sonic Youth's "Teenage Riot" and then take a look at the song's Wiki page- seperated at birth.

For the past year or so I've been following the blog By Ken Levine. He's former writer for M*A*S*H and Cheers and he's a baseball announcer (so, as you'd probably guess, I skip any posts that show a picture of a baseball diamond). I came across his blog one day when I was on Wiki reading about Cheers. There was a story about Carla's husband Eddie and the whole backstory about why he left the show so abruptly and a link to Levine's blog where he tells everything in full detail. It's very interesting and his blog is full of posts like that. Levine also co-wrote the movie Volunteers starring Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, and John Candy. Remember when people made a big deal out of the characters drinking Coke in the movie while the movie company, Tri-Star, was owned by Coke? He gives the details behind that story too. Also, he was in a mini-feud with Aaron Sorkin a couple years ago and a mini-feud with Roseanne this year.

Both The Daily Guru and By Ken Levine feature new posts every single day. It's part of The Guru's "mission", and Levine's blog was voted one of the 25 Best Blogs of 2011 by Time Magazine so that makes for an eager audience. My favorite blogger isn't as productive, or, at least, hasn't been lately.

Last year, Final Girl put up 387 posts; so far, this year there have only been 92- for July, August, and September there were a total of 6 posts. She's written every day of October, but that's because it's October. I mean, I'm not complaining (but I am)- I'm just surprised that someone who ammassed such a large following would just let it all wither. Because I'm sure that a lot of people don't even bother checking in anymore. Final Girl might be on their Favorites list but they gave up on it and have found new blogs to read.

But I'm sure she's got a lot of other projects to work on, and maybe she just wants a break from constantly writing about horror movies. Maybe she's said just about everything she wanted to say about the subject.

What I know for sure (if I can say that, if it's OK with Oprah) is that if she decides to get back into Final Girl full-time, she's such a good writer that she'll attract just as many people to the site. It'll never be a ghost-town (NPI).

Pixies after "Trompe Le Monde"

I was just at the Frank Black Forum and one of the threads was about someone was wondering if the Pixies recorded any songs together after their last LP, Trompe Le Monde- there was a link to Youtube and a couple clips of Pixies demos.

One of them- "Hang On To Your Ego"- I'd heard before. Still, it was interesting to hear it again. The other was "Brackish Boy" which ended up being recorded for 1993's Frank Black. Youtube just has a clip but I'd love to hear the full song; it sounds really good.

Now I'm listening to other songs from a bootleg called The Purple Tape 2. It's got "I Can't Forget" from the Leonard Cohen tribute, I'm Your Fan, and "Born In Chicago" from Elektra's 40th anniversary collection.

"Born In Chicago" is a throwaway, but "I Can't Forget" is interesting. It sounds like it was recorded the same day as their other tribute album song from that era, Neil Young's "Winterlong".

It's great, though, hearing songs like these. I love the Pixies but I've played the shit out of all their songs- even their B-sides are worn out so it's good to hear something of their for the hundredth time instead of for the thousandths time.

Here's some news:

Stephen King has a new novel coming out this fall called 11/22/63 and I read yesterday that they're making it into a movie and Jonathon Demme is directing. So many great directors have done SK novels, I think the only one left is Scorsese.

Let's see, there's been DePalma, Kubrick, Cronenberg, Carpenter, Mary Lambert, George Romero, am I forgetting someone?

Also, King is working on a sequel to The Shining. It's going to be called Doctor Sleep. Interesting title.


I just realized tonight that tomorrow is a big day: it's going to be the 3 year anniversary of RJ Battles. I can't believe it's been that long.

I want to do something special but I'm not sure what would be "special". I'm going to have to sleep on that. I'm going to bed now, Good night.

Pixies after "Trompe Le Monde"

The computer

In general I'm not very ambitious, but today I was feeling super-lazy, so I spent almost the whole day on the computer looking up random shit. And for the past three hours I've been on Youtube, mostly watching Kevin Smith.

I don't care for his movies and I don't see why people make such a big deal about them but I like him a lot. He tells a great story- when he talks about Prince the whole story is probably longer than a half hour but it leaves you wanting more.

He also tells a funny story about a fued with Tim Burton. I love that kind of thing. He seems very truthful, a lot like Kathy Griffin. Some things are, I'm sure, exagerated for effect, but I feel like he's really trying to be as real to life as possible. I like that.