Here's how it works:
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open to page 56.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the next two to five sentences in your blog with these instructions.
- Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one - pick the CLOSEST.
- Tag five other people to do the same.
Easy for me. I love books and always have a book in progress, both reading and writing. I reached into my purse, thinking I had my book club book, but—alas, all I had was my new crossword book, Will Shortz Presents Crosswords for 365 Days. I didn’t think giving you the 5th clue would be any fun. I reached to the bookshelf over my head and grabbed Microsoft Office Word 2007 Bible. When I turned to page 56, I found only four sentences.
I moved one book to the left and pulled down Technical Editing: The Practical Guide for Editors and Writers, by Judith A Tarutz. Page 56 is in Chapter 5, Working with Writers: Ten Lessons I Had to Unlearn. Here’s sentence number five, and a few following sentences, which I thought were kinda fun:
In technical manuals we often say things like, “What you do depends on the number of frobnitzes in the framistam” or “The maximum number of frizzlechips you can have is 64.” I think that the word number in a technical manual should signal the reader to be ready to receive numerical data, so I reserve a number of for those contents. When I explained this reasoning to a writer who had been thinking, “Here goes another quirky editor,” she immediately agreed—and helped spread the word among the other writers that seemingly arbitrary changes weren’t necessarily arbitrary. Then she encouraged them to ask the editor, a radical idea at the time.
(You now totally want my job, don't you?!)
Now to tag five others:
1) Fivehusbands (Judy)
2) Jenn L.
3) PianoLady (Cheryl)
4) The Traveler (Lee)
5) The newest employee of KUAT/KUAZ (Jill)
Only Judy has a blog, so the others will have to add their book excerpts in comments here, and the tagging will end with them. I look forward to seeing what everyone has to add.
And keep reading!
3 comments:
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
"That was the thing about kite flying: your mind drifted with the kite. They were coming down all over the place now, the kites, and I was still flying....."
"The apartment may have belonged previously to the Hearsts, the billionaire publishing family. When later, my cousin Selig visited the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, he was struck by the familiar paneling and was told by a guard that it had come from the Hearsts' penthouse in New York..."
AUDITION, A MEMOIR by Barbara Walters.
Design Drawing - Francis Ching
"In doing this, we create an organized map of interlocking shapes that serves as a starting point for later refinement. Mapping requires reducing the many tonal variations that we see to just a few. We begin by sorting the range of tonal values into two groups-light and dark: or three-light, medium, and dark. Within each group, the tonal value can vary to articulate the nature of the surfaces, but the overall mapping of the values should remain clear. Squinting through half-closed eyes makes this task easier."
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