In my technical writing circles, the name of Edward Bulwer-Lytton is well-known for a writing contest. The contest is to write a deliberately bad opening line for an awful novel, for example, something beginning with “It was a dark and stormy night…” Well, that’s the beginning of a line by Bulwer-Lytton. He may have been popular in his day, but now, we giggle at his style. Recently, I came across one of his books, The Last Days of Pompeii, and had to share. Without further ado, I present Chapter 1 from the 1926 edition published by Charles Scribner’s Sons for your reading pleasure. (Note the sentence that begins with “He wore no toga…” – it contains 149 words!) Chapter 1: The Two Gentlemen of Pompeii “Ho, Diomed, well met! Do you sup with Glaucus to-night?” said a young man of small stature, who wore his tunic in those loose and…
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Nic Steenhout‘s photo of fresh-baked bread sent me more than 30 years back in time. I’ve always loved baking bread. I know I learned to bake bread when I was a teenager, but I have few recollections of those breads. I know some were sweet and most were incredibly flat and heavy despite being baked in a form and using yeast. I may have been heart-broken, but my dad never complained. The bread disappeared completely when in his care. I wasn’t afraid to experiment, either. An uncle was coming over for dinner in my early bread-baking years, and I thought I’d make some special dinner rolls. I added blue food coloring, blue being my favorite color. To my great disappointment, no one wanted to eat them! Years later, I became more conscious of the beauty of the creation of bread. It wasn’t doing something fancy like adding blue coloring. It…
3 CommentsI feel so overwhelmed when I encounter websites that use the phrase “Read more” or “Click here”. The overwhelming feeling comes from realizing how many people need to get rid of this bad habit. It’s the wrong thing to do. This bad practice is so ubiquitous that most people probably concludes that it is OK. But it isn’t! My latest encounter was on the website for the museum of Copenhagen. The Danish version of the site is the same. Imagine that you had a list of only the links from a web page. I mean a list of the phrases displayed with a link, not the actual hyperlink. The list on a site that uses “Read more” would be as follows: Read more Read more Read more Read more I could continue. It’s meaningless, right? That is what anyone who reads a website with a screen reader encounters. Screen readers…
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