Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Resources: Print Resources

Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, 3rd ed. 1995.
Containing 35,000 synonyms in an easy-to-use format, this thesaurus features succinct word definitions.

Fowler, H. W. 1908. The King’s English, 2nd ed.
This reference work has remained a standard resource—serving generations of students and writers with commonsense rules of style and grammar.

Strunk, William, Jr. 1918. The Elements of Style.
Believing that one must first know the rules to break them, this classic reference book is a must-have for any student or writer.

The Canadian Press, 2003. The Canadian Press Stylebook and The Canadian Press, 2003. Caps and Spelling
Guides for all writers and editors

Diana Hacker, 2002. A Canadian Writer’s Reference
Complete reference for Canadian writers from initial conception to final proofing.

Margaret Shertzer, 1950. The Elements of Grammar
An indispensable guide from the publisher of The Elements of Style.

Oxford Canadian Dictionary, 2004. Edited by Katherine Barber. Oxford University Press.
The Canadian Oxford Dictionary has been the standard reference work on English as it is spoken and written in Canada since it was first published in 1998.

O’Connor, Patricia T., Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English Written by Patricia T. O'Conner, an editor at the New York Times Book Review, Woe Is I gives lighthearted, witty instruction on the subject most of us dreaded in school--grammar.

O’Connor, Patricia T., Words Fail Me: What Everyone Who Writes Should Know about Writing
Patricia T. O'Conner's Words Fail Me is written in the same lighthearted tone as her snappy grammar guide, Woe Is I. This time out, O'Conner tackles the writer's art. "Good writing," she says, "is writing that works."

Walsh, Bill, Lapsing Into a Comma
Who knew a stylebook could be so much fun? For lovers of language, Lapsing Into a Comma is a sensible and very funny guide to the technicalities of writing and copy editing.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Presentation Tip: Write Down Your Objective And Key Messages First

Adapted from Wilder’s Presentations

There are two scenarios when creating a presentation.

  1. Creating the talk from scratch when you are presenting at a conference, proposing a change, or being asked to explain a new product.
  2. Choosing slides from several talks to create a new presentation.

Save yourself time and aggravation. Don’t try either scenario without a plan. Your job is to influence and convince your audience, so write up a presentation overview before you make your slides.

Briefly, you need to provide the information below before you create a single slide. If you coach people to create presentations, then you need to ask for their Presentation Overview. If they haven’t done one, you are coaching them blindly. How can you tell them if their voice, slides, and content are effective if you don’t know their objective?

Presentation overview:

The key objective for my talk is:

My 2 (or 3) key messages are:
1.
2.
3.

The theme of my talk is:

When I’m done I want my audience to…
  • Do:
  • Feel:
  • Say to others:

Two ways I will engage my audience’s interest are:

1.
2.

Once you have a presentation overview, you are ready to move on to creating an outline of your content.

Friday, July 20, 2007

My Work: 100 Years of Herefords - Part 2

Just like Chester, we wanted Herefords for their gentleness and ability to thrive on poor to medium pastures, so I looked up the membership list of the Canadian Hereford Association and called everyone in our area. Finally I found Joseph Cutler, who had a bred cow and a six month-old female calf to sell. I did some research on what to look for in a good beef cow and Susan and I went to Joseph’s place to look at them. I was immediately impressed by his manner and character. He seemed honest and straightforward.

I was impressed with the cow, too. I asked him how much and my face fell when he named his price. Joseph might have noticed because he said, “That’s for both. And remember, the cow will have a calf this fall.”

“Well then,” said Susan, “I guess we should take both.”

We named the cow Alice and her calf Betsy. We were going to butcher Betsy but some friends who judge and show cattle suggested we keep her.

“It would be a shame to ship that heifer,” they said, “We’ve seen cows that don’t stack up to her in the show ring. She’s long and straight. You should think about keeping her.”

I was already thinking about it. And Susan agreed. So we went back to Joseph and bought T-Bone, a young cow that had never calved, for our fall beef. In the fall, just like Joseph said, Alice delivered Arthur, a Hereford-Blond Aquitane cross. That winter we borrowed a bull from Joseph and bred both Alice and Betsy.

The following fall, Betsy delivered a nice heifer calf with a patch on one eye and Alice gave us a bull calf in the middle of the year’s worst thunderstorm. Of course, he’s called Stormy.

With Alice and Betsy giving us calves for a few more years from bulls borrowed from Joseph, we are now self-sufficient. This is the first year we won’t have to buy cattle. With calves from Betsy and Alice every fall, we now have two grass-fed steers or heifers for ourselves and our beef customers every year. No hormones, no antibiotics, no pesticides. Just in time, too, with all the concern about bringing in BSE with new beef stock.

Most of the credit goes to Joseph who gave a green couple new to cattle a very good price on outstanding breeding stock to get them started.

We’re up to nine paddocks now and, as I dig more gatepost holes, I think of Chester McKeen. Everyone says he used to have the best Herefords in the county on this farm. I’d like to have him here to see our cattle grazing his pastures again, and maybe use some of his toughness to dig a few postholes past the Pre-Cambrian rocks that lurk everywhere in our ground.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

My Work: 100 Years of Herefords - Part 1

For the first few years here, spring always blew in a fresh batch of projects: pasture renovation, building fences, making garden plots, directing water away from the house, enlarging our solar power system, fixing barns, buying chickens, pigs, lambs, and cattle and wondering when we were ever going to find the time to do it all.

Raising cattle meant we had to build over a thousand feet of split-rail fence. So, for several weeks we dismantled old rail fence wherever we could buy the rails and scoured the countryside for more. I found a father/son team to build most of the fence while I hammered together 12 wooden gates, sunk gateposts, and tried to figure out the best arrangement of pastures.

Intensive rotational grazing is usually the most efficient use of space for small holdings. The animals are rotated through several small paddocks, grazing each in turn with enough paddocks to give the first a rest of 45 -60 days before the whole rotation starts again.

There were lots of details: what paddock sizes and shapes best fit the natural landscape and retained the airstrip the former owner used for his ultralight airplane; where the gates should be for the proper flow from one pasture to the next (in the corner is always best) without impeding our own movement around the farm; which way the gates should open; what kind of hinges and latch arrangements; how to get water to each paddock.

My neighbor Jack was over one day helping me dig gatepost holes. He started telling me a bit about the man who originally homesteaded our place.

“Chester McKeen settled all the land around here,” said Jack, “At one time he took care of hundreds of acres. He lived in a tarpaper shack right out in front of where your house stands now. It had a dirt floor and as the walls rotted away he just piled the dirt a little higher. When he finally moved to town, the dirt was up past the window sills.

“He had nice cattle here, two hundred head of Herefords, and a bull named Bigger. Well, Bigger used to push his nose against the windows of that shack, then Chester would say, “Bigger wants to take me for a ride.” He would climb aboard that bull and be carried all around this farm. I don’t know who liked it most – the bull or Chester.

“I used to come up and visit with him, sit on the stoop of his shack in the summer with the cattle and chickens in the front yard. It was nice here then, peaceful, no one else around. Still is. I think this is the nicest place on the road, and I always have a soft spot in my heart for it.

“The first time I came here, I was about eight or nine. My Dad was delivering a load of hay, and I expected to unload it and leave. Well, Chester didn’t get much company and he insisted on making us tea. Then he reached up on a top shelf and brought down a box of cookies and gave me two. They were so old and hard it was like trying to eat shingles. By the time we left four hours later, I had managed to break them up and hide them in my pocket. Good thing he only gave me two, but I guess it was the thought that counted.

“Chester lived mostly on beef, smoked pork, huckleberries, and game. Smoked pork was easy to keep and he was good at finding huckleberries and a first-class hunter. He used to shoot a single-shot .222, not much of a gun, but he always used to say, “It only takes one shot.”

“He was tough enough, too. One day, way out here, two young guys stopped by and thought they would have some fun and give him some trouble. Chester grabbed one of them and beat him up bad, dragged him down by the road and rubbed his face in the gravel for a while. The other one didn’t want any of that and loaded his friend in the truck and took off. And Chester wasn’t a young man, maybe 65 at the time.”

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Writing for Fun: Literature Abuse - Part 2

Revised from Michael McGrorty
Go to Original

Once a relatively rare disorder, Literature Abuse, or LA, has risen to new levels due to the accessibility of higher education and increased college enrollment. The number of literature abusers is currently at record levels.

SOCIAL COSTS OF LITERARY ABUSE

Abusers fantasize, creating alternative worlds to occupy, to the neglect of friends and family. In severe cases they develop bad posture from reading in awkward positions or carrying heavy book bags. In the worst instances, they become cranky reference librarians in small towns. Excessive reading during pregnancy is perhaps the number one cause of moral deformity among the children of English professors, teachers of English and creative writing. Known as Fetal Fiction Syndrome, this disease also leaves its victims prone to a lifetime of nearsightedness, daydreaming, and emotional instability.

HEREDITY

Recent studies have established that heredity plays a considerable role in determining whether a person will become an abuser of literature. Most abusers have at least one parent who abused literature, often beginning at an early age and progressing into adulthood. Many spouses of an abuser become abusers themselves.

OTHER PREDISPOSING FACTORS

Fathers or mothers who are English teachers, professors, or heavy fiction readers; parents who do not encourage children to play games, participate in healthy sports, or watch television in the evening. Worst of all: reading bedtime stories to a pre-literate child.

PREVENTION

Pre-marital screening and counseling plus referral to adoption agencies is recommended in order to break the chain of abuse. English teachers in particular should seek partners active in other fields. Children should be encouraged to seek physical activity and to avoid isolation and morbid introspection.

Within the sordid world of literature abuse, the lowest circle belongs to those sufferers who have thrown their lives and hopes away to study literature in our colleges. Parents should look for signs that their children are taking the wrong path--don't expect your teenager to approach you and say, "I can't stop reading Spenser."

By the time you visit her dorm room and find the secret stash of the Paris Review, it may already be too late.

Next time: Part 3 - What You Can Do

Monday, July 9, 2007

Writing for Fun: Literature Abuse - Part 1

Revised from Michael McGrorty
Go to Original

How many of these apply to you?

1. I have read fiction when I was depressed or to cheer myself up.
2. I have gone on reading binges of an entire book or more in a day.
3. I read rapidly, often “gulping”chapters.
4. I have sometimes read early in the morning or before work.
5. I have hidden books in different places to sneak a chapter without being seen.
6. Sometimes I avoid friends or family obligations in order to read novels.
7. Sometimes I re-write film or television dialog as the characters speak.
8. I am unable to enjoy myself with others unless there is a book nearby.
9. Reading has made me seek haunts and companions that I would otherwise avoid.
10. I have neglected personal hygiene or household chores until I have finished a novel.
11. I have spent money on books instead of necessities.
12. I have attempted to check out more library books than permitted.
13. Most of my friends are heavy fiction readers.
14. I have sometimes passed out from a night of heavy reading.
15. I have suffered “blackouts” or memory loss from a bout of reading.
16. I have wept, become angry or irrational because of something I read.
17. I have sometimes wished I did not read so much.
18. Sometimes I think my reading is out of control.

If you answered “yes” to three or more of these questions, you may be a literature abuser. Affirmative responses to five or more indicate a serious problem.

Now that you have admitted your weakness, next time we will look at predisposing factors.

Friday, July 6, 2007

My Work: Woodcutting - Part 2

Our woodcutting is not quite that dramatic. No horses, no ice. We like to cut in October and November – the days are cool and the bugs are gone.

We have lots of trees on our farm. Ash, elm, birch, maple, some ironwood that always seems to be bound up with thick vines. Every time we find an ironwood we have to spend the first few minutes cutting away those vines.

When I was in college, I worked on a survey crew in the summers in the Manistee river flats. We would go in by boat, then brush out straight lines for miles and survey the sections. It’s a wonder no one was killed with inexperienced kids running saws and dropping trees too big to get your arms around. Sawchains flying off the bars, trees splitting and falling the wrong way. Quite a time. Once I was walking down the line and the next thing I knew I was on the ground looking up at the sky. Someone felled a little four-inch tree but it was big enough to bonk me right on the head and knock me out for a bit. That was one of the first times I wore a hardhat and I had one on my head every day after that.

Our farm crew is a little more sedate. We are gradually cutting roads through the woods, so Conor and I pick the trees that are in the roadway. I notch and fell them with Conor sometimes giving them a little push to fall on the stretch of road we’d already opened up. I buzz them up into eight-foot logs or so, while Charlotte and Susan trim off the branches with big loppers and cut kindling. We all carry the logs by hand over to the truck or trailer and we cut them up into stove-sized chunks there. Some goes right into the truck for the woodpile and some gets dumped aside to split with the neighbor’s hydraulic log splitter.

It’s noisy, dirty work but when the saw’s off the air is clean and it’s nice being out in the woods. The best part, though is the satisfaction of working together as a family. Next best are the snacks and hot drinks Susan brings along. A few weekends and we’re done for another year.

We have two woodpiles, this year’s and last year’s, so we can burn year-old wood. It seems everyone has a different measurement for firewood, but a face cord is usually a pile of cut and stacked firewood 16" deep by 4 feet high and 8 feet long; one-third of a standard 128 cubic foot bush cord.

We burn a pile that’s about five feet high and twenty feet long containing two rows each 14 inches deep, so I guess that’s about one and three-quarters bush cords. At over $200 a bush cord on the market, it’s worth it plus we get the exercise. They say wood warms you twice; when it’s cut and when it’s burned. Ours goes even further because every piece is handled seven times. Logs hauled, logs cut and stacked outside on the woodpile, thrown in the truck to bring inside, off the truck and wheelbarrowed inside, stacked inside, brought upstairs, put in the stove.

I know how Ray’s dad felt. There’s nothing like wood heat. It’s nice to have a spot to warm your hands after coming inside from the chores. It’s just not the same bending over and putting your hands in front of a forced-air grate. Plus, it’s reassuring to sit in the kitchen with the woodstove murmuring. It feels like your link has been added to a chain that stretches back for generations.
When half my crew leaves for college, Susan and I might have to stop going to the woods. That will be one more reason to regret how fast the kids are growing up and how quickly the time goes before they’re gone.

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

My Work: Woodcutting - Part 1

“My dad liked to be warm when he ate,” my neighbor Ray told me one day. “He used to pull the kitchen table over so he could sit with his back up close to the cookstove.”

“Our stove was about two feet out from the wall. On some winter mornings there was a coating of frost on that wall an inch thick that you could scrape off with your hand. Our jobs in the morning were to build the fire, heat the water for washing, go out and feed the pigs, water and harness the team, and then, when the kitchen was warm, crack open the door to my folk’s room and get ready for school.

“I’d take my gun to school and shot quite a few rabbits on the way there and back. The teacher never seemed to mind as long as I made sure it was unloaded when I brought it in. She knew those rabbits made the difference in our family between hungry and full and she let me lean my gun against the back wall by my coat.

“In the winter we’d take the team and sleigh a mile or so into the bush to cut wood. One time in the swamp, with the sleigh full of logs, the team broke through the ice. I was the youngest, about ten, and I was chest deep in freezing water. I had to go in front of the horses and grab their bridles to try to calm them down because they were lunging and fighting to get out of the water and they might cut themselves on the ice. I was hanging on to them and they bobbed me in and out of the water like you’d dip a candle. Bize, I thought I’d perish right there. I’ve never been so cold. But we built a fire, dried out our clothes and kept on working.

“Another time, I got just my pants wet and they froze right quick. It worked out, though. If I kept moving, I didn’t get cold because that coating of ice acted like a windbreak on the outside.

“We’d haul the logs out first, all the time loading any brush bigger than a broom handle on the second sleigh for the next load. We used that for the cookstove. And it went on like that past dark, first logs, then brush. And you had to get all the brush and pack it down good to make sure it was a full load or you got the boots put to you.

“My dad would work all day out there without gloves and he never got cold. He used to chew on a chunk of pork fat he kept in his pocket, thick as a piece of pie. While the rest of us were freezing, he would be driving the team bare-handed, holding those icy reins. That’s for true.”

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Writing for Grammar: Who Versus Whom.

Although both pronouns, there is usually a clear distinction regarding the usage of who or whom.

Who is a subject; whom is an object.

Since both are pronouns, they take the place of people in a sentence. The subject of the sentence is the one doing, and the object of the sentence is the one having something done to him or her or them.

For example, if I tell Jake, then I am the subject and Jake is the object. If Jake tells me, Jake is the subject and me is the object.

Subjects are easy: Who said that? Who went with you? Who should chair the committee? Always use who as a subject of a sentence.

Some objects are also easy: The committee subpoenaed whom? Jake told whom? But with objects, sometimes the tricky part is turning the question (Q) back into a statement (S) to determine subject and object.

Q. Whom did you call?
S. You did call whom.

Q. Whom should we ask?
S. We should ask whom.

The weird part is that you have to turn the sentence inside out to determine what should be in the sentence in the first place.

So, it is, "Whom did you tell?" if you are asking about my tendency to gossip.

Here's a tip from Grammar Girl. Like whom, the pronoun him ends with m. When you're trying to decide whether to use who or whom, ask yourself if the answer to the question would be he or him. That's the trick: if you can answer the question being asked with him, then use whom, and it's easy to remember because they both end with m.

For example, if you trying to ask, "Who (or whom) do you love?" The answer would be "I love him." Him ends with an m, so you know to use whom.

But if you are trying to ask, "Who (or whom) called?" the answer would be, "He called." There's no m, so you know to use who.