Edit
Your Life became my theme song when I was in Journalism school. I decided to 'omit all unnecessary words' as directed by EB White and
Struck in Elements of Style,
the bible of good writing.
I come from a very wordy, Irish Catholic
family where stories were embellished until I firmly believed I had a
great aunt who perished on the Titanic, Frankenstein actor Peter Boyle
was a relative, and we were descended from tinkers, troubadours, and
coffin makers: well you get the picture. Just the facts, Ma'am, just the
facts!
Truth,
Justice, and the American Way! Or just the truth. Get to the point. Be
succinct. Don't use ten dollar words like succinct. Keep it simple,
stupid. So Edit your Life became a way of life as I entered the
social networking world although I'm decidedly anti social (I'm not
really here, just visiting, pretend you don't see me) and knew I would
excel at this since I was trained to write
HEADLINES
NEWS BLURBS
Sound bytes (sfx) ssssshhhhhh...
and
was web savvy and even forsake cable channels to pay for my internet.
(I still get all infomercials, though) but I digress.
Editing
is one of those sacred cows in the world of language where if we were
all good at it, there would be peace in the world. Kathy Griffin would
have said, "Suck it, God," instead of "Suck it, Jesus" and it would have
gotten more of a laugh, and twitter would be more about 'communiques'
instead of witless twitter.
This twitter began as
Guilty
as charged, I love the NJ Housewives/Guidos, as the others pale in
comparison. when Twitter Editor said 22 words OVER! Whoa? What ME
Wordy?
I'm wordy?
Guilty! Love NJ Guidos! others PALE... Real Housewives Husband Joe Giudice Arrested - omg! news on Yahoo!
just had to retweet this..
Language evolves.Today we change AP style from e-mail to email, no hyphen. Our editors will announce it at today. 10:30 AM Mar 18th via CoTweet
So, retweet this please, you twits.