I’m fond of compound sentences, and I struggle to write without them.

Why do I feel no single sentence can stand alone, without being connected to yet another?

I sometimes read what others have written. Complex sentences often seem the exception, rather than the norm with my writing.

Years ago I started writing a non-fiction book. My editor remarked she was getting through the chapters, trying to simplify some of my prose. Sigh. A non-fiction book designed to make a complex subject easy to understand, and my writing itself was a barrier.

I don’t know. When I write, it all comes out in a rush. Perhaps I look ahead too much, so the jumble of thoughts all turn into these complicated sentences that even I can find hard to read later on.

When I have time (which is too rare), I review the things I’ve written on a seek and destroy mission to remove and, but and or. They’ll get you pretty far, as the Schoolhouse Rock song used to go — but I use them too much.

Clauses, dashes, even my favorite punctuation mark, the semicolon. My writing crutches. I try to let them go. Semicolon, able to connect two sentences together without the need for a conjunction; I miss using you the most.

Simply my writing. Breakdown the complex thoughts. Sentences can stand alone.

Fine, Barry. I’ll play the latest game. So why I blog?
1) Because I actually think about stuff other than search. Sometimes. Like when I can. And it’s nice to write about it. Because, you know, I’m a writer. Or I try.
2) Like Barry, it’s a handy way to keep track of stuff I want to remember later.
3) To help other people. If I’ve figured something out, say with with the computer and some odd problem, I like having content up that might be useful to others. When I finally get a Mac (I’m edging closer), I’ll no longer blog as I’ll no longer have computer problems. Or so I’m told.
4) An occasional rant is good for the soul.
5) You’ve heard me sing. It’s better that energy go into writing.
I tag no one. I’m too tired. If you haven’t been tagged, feel free to immediately declare that I secretly tagged you because you’re so awesome and wonderful.
Nice cat, Matt. If I had a cat, I’d blog more. Maybe someday I’ll post a picture of the dog. I mean our dog. I mean the dog I’m told I secretly love. Wearing a Google collar even. Seriously.

I never planned to be a writer. I wasn’t a big writer growing up. I didn’t
write fiction, never worked for the student newspaper, didn’t keep a journal. I
sort of stumbled into it by wanting to avoid any more math when I was deciding
on my college major. Math wasn’t my thing in high school.

I went through the list of majors, saw that English didn’t require math
courses and then checked out the potential jobs that English offered. Journalism
was on the list. Cool, I’ll be a journalist!

Pretty scary that I made a major life decision like that flipping through my
college catalog. It worked out OK. I make a living writing and have especially
enjoyed the past two weeks as I’ve gotten back into doing original content more
for Search Engine Land. But all that
writing has also made me reflect on the various types of writing I’ve done –
what I enjoy the most, don’t enjoy and so on.

I get a huge thrill out of deadline writing. It’s a rush. In my short
newspaper days, I did more of this. I sometimes do with blogging news, as well.
I particularly remember
writing
when the Google IPO documents were filed. I had the filing up on one of my
screens, and I just started going at it. What were the big topics? What charts
could I make quickly? How fast could I summarize AND through in observations and
references.

Deadline newspaper writing, when you’re being fed material from various
reporters, is even more a rush. I’ve done that a few times. Many more I’d watch
veteran journalists do it from the material I and others were feeding. Things
were flowing in from everywhere, and the writer would somehow make sense of it
all.

I love and hate the big issue piece. I love talking with a variety of people,
gathering up all the opinions and understanding a subject. But I hate sitting
down and trying to bring it all together. The talking is much more fun than the
work of that writing. But when I finally push through it, I’m happy.

Similarly, I love and hate big feature pieces. When I was in newspapers, I
did a number of these — topics such as the rise of Speed Racer, for example.
Again, the talking and research was fun. The crafting of a feature piece, trying
to paint a picture in words, was hard. But getting past it to a finished product
was wonderful.

I had one glorious summer of feature writing, when I was an intern for the
Anaheim Bulletin so many years ago. To that point, all my writing had been for
my college newspaper. That also meant all my writing was wedged between
coursework (often neglected) and real work (to pay for college). When I did my
internship (which paid nothing for three months), I’d saved enough to get
through the summer without working another job. That meant I could put my all
into my writing. I’d did these loving features about someone who grew a giant
tomato (mutant fruit articles are an intern’s specialty); on a blood drive; on a
church ushers’ convention. It was one of the best summers of my life, just
writing and not worrying about anything else.

In college, I did some fiction writing classes. I determined that I fairly
suck at fiction writing. I’m too logical a writer. I like to explain things. I
don’t have the mind to craft a story out of mid-air.

I used to think that fiction writing would be easy. With non-fiction writing,
there’s was always that quote you wished someone had said differently, or that
last bit of research you wished you could have found. Fiction would be a piece
of cake! Just make up whatever you need. But that blank canvas for me turned out
to be so much harder than painting within an outline.

Just some thoughts on writing. Anyone have their own thoughts on writing they
want to share?

I’ve had a Citibank credit card since I was in college. That’s nearly two decades of being with them, which means that little table they stuck up one day at UC Irvine has provided pretty good ROI for the company. Over the years, I’ve had various letters from Citibank, usually signed by the hard-working S. Larson.

I was thinking about S. today. I recently switched to electronic statements, and I got my first email from him or her telling me that my statement was ready. She or he ended the message with:

We hope you continue to enjoy the many benefits of the All-Electronic Program.

Sincerely,
S. Larson
Customer Service

S., of course, is not a real person.

I can’t recall when I figured that out, but it was many years ago. It annoyed me when that realization dawned on me, since like many others you can find on the web, I’d written on occasion to S. Larson as if they were a real person.

Why make up a pretend person? Either have someone real from customer service sign the messages or don’t use a name at all. I don’t need S. Larson to join (look away kids) the mythical characters of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.

Tonight, I decided to see what I could find out about S. I’m not the only one. Over at Yahoo Answers, someone asked about them:

For literally many years now, I’ve been getting various letters about my account from a certain “S. Larson” at Customer Service, Citibank in South Dakota. I have no problem whatsoever with this person or my account, but I have always had a certain suspicion that this is in fact a dummy name and that this person really does not exist. A Google search turns up nothing of relevance (hey, it CAN happen!)

Just curious to know if anyone knows anything more about this famous and elusive “S. Larson” (gender unknown), who must by now be one of the longest employees in Citibank history!

I love answer number two:

I thought it was just me. They could make up a new name every decade or so, don’t you think?

Like the original person asking the question, it’s amazing how there’s nothing definitive that’s easily found about S. Larson. A Google search for “s. larson” citibank just comes back with lots of people referencing the ambiguous, non-gendered, never-aging, never-retiring customer service rep.

Yahoo did a bit better. AT&T Universal Card, S. Larson, and Account “Upgrades” was in the first page of results for the same search and says:

But I was curious: does “S. Larson” really exist, or is he (she?) a phantom generic identity like so many other of these credit card company people. So I called AT&T and asked for Mr. Larson, just to find that, well, he exists, but I can’t talk to him. Uh huh. So I checked the Citigroup annual report and if S. Larson does exist, he’s not important enough to be listed as executive staff. There’s also no mention of “Larson” associated with Citibank, Citigroup or Citi in the Wall Street Journal.

FYI, Windows Live had that result not just on page one but also ranked first, compared to Google oddly listing this PDF file in the number one spot. OK, it’s a funny letter, saying in part:

Let me begin with an apology. Custom dictates that I address this letter to “Mr.” or “Ms.” Larson. Your own letter is signed with a simple and ambiguous “S.Larson/ Customer Service,” a subscription that evades my efforts at reading your gender….

….In reading the letter, one wonders: have they forced you to collapse your first name into the initial “S.,” thereby exploiting your material presence as a worker in (and therefore convenient human representative of) the enormous AT&T Universal Card structure? If this is the case (which the strangely printed script “signature” suggests, as well), then just what happens to you, the individual “S. Larson,” who both resists the corporate erosion of sentiment (as we see in the double valence of “regret,” which is both personal and impersonal, both literal and figurative) and who capitulates at every moment in the brief letter?

But come on, tops for all the things about S. Larson, on the basis of what seems to be one single link? Man, those .edu links from Harvard must be powerful.

At least S. Larson gives proof to the fact that Wikipedia is not all powerful over Google. You know how normally a search there has you stumbling over a Wikipedia link that always shows up in the top results? Well, S. Larson doesn’t trigger anything from Wikipedia. In fact, S. Larson doesn’t warrant an entry at all at Wikipedia, something I hope will change. Stay tuned by monitoring the Wikipedia page about all Larsons here.

Over at Citibank itself, you’d think a search might bring up something about good old S. Nope. Nothing using either the site’s own search engine or a Google search for site:www.citibank.com larson.

If the entire web has failed me in my quest for the origin of S. Larson, surely some newspaper has explored this over time. So I hit the Google News Archive, which supposedly goes back over 200 years of news material. I looked for “s. larson” citibank. Zilch. Well, one thing from 1994:

Worcester Telegram & Gazette : CONTACT
$1.95 – Worcester Telegram Gazette – NewsBank – Oct 13, 1994
JS, Millbury A Contact sent your questions to Citibank Cards, … charging fees or surcharges to customers who charge their purchases,” said S. Larson. …

Was the Worcester Telegram & Gazette actually quoting S. Larson as a real person?!!! I wanted to know, but not enough to pay the $1.95 to find out. So I did the time tested method of searching for the words around the last words I could see, to get the snippet description to expand.

This search got me an expanded description to the “front” of what I’d seen, the additional material in bold:

our bank does not condone the practice of merchants charging fees or surcharges to customers who charge their purchases,” said S. Larson.

This search got me more to the back:

charging fees or surcharges to customers who charge their purchases,” said S. Larson. As with all billing problems, Larson said, if you send a letter of

Working it more, I eventually got the rest of the question not shown here plus the answer. The person was charged $3 to call and verify her credit card was valid, causing her to write to the newspaper for help. That answer from the paper was:

Contact [the name of the newspaper column] sent your questions to Citibank Cards, Customer Service Center, PO Box 6500, Sioux Falls, SD 57117-6500

“As a member of MasterCard and VISA International, our bank does not condone the practice of merchants charging fees or surcharges to customers who charge their purchases,” said S. Larson. As with all billing problems, Larson said, if you send a letter of Citibank will assist you with this problem.

Yes, the local paper for Worchester, Massachusetts quoting a non-existent person from Citibank. I don’t blame the paper. I blame Citibank. It’s time for S. Larson to be retired. They have worked long enough.

Oh, wondering why I said “they” about S. Larson rather than he or she?

I’ve long used they, a plural pronoun, as a substitute for the singular neuter pronoun that the English language lacks. It’s very handy, and I hope more people do it. It’s an easy way to make any sentence not favoring either males or females. Consider:

• A student, if they work hard, can graduate with honor.

That’s better than saying:

• A student, if he works hard, can graduate with honor. (what, you hate women?)
• A student, if she works hard, can graduate with honor. (what, you hate men?)
• A student, if he or she works hard, can graduate with honor. (what, you like being awkward?)
• A student, if s/he works hard, can graduate with honor. (now you’re just in my face being politically correct!)

Of course, usually any sentence that references a single person — and thus may require you to use the singular pronouns of he or she later in the sentence as an antecedent — can usually be turned into a plural form. That allows you to use they and be grammatically correct:

• Students, if they work hard, can graduate with honor.

See my past post, Sneaked Versus Snuck & Past Tense Versus Past Participle, for more fun with grammar

Postscript (August 6, 2010): Barry Newman from the Wall Street Journal spent the past few weeks trying to track down if S. Larson is real. No luck getting any official confirmation. But it’s a great story to read:  Mystery Writer: Does Citibank’s S. Larson Really Exist?

Driving back from the airport this weekend after our vacation, I put on an audio CD for the kids, one of the Horrid Henry stories. In part of the story, he was said to have “sneaked” into a room. Sneaked? Surely he “snuck” into the room, I thought. But then I lost confidence. Have I been saying “snuck” all these years by mistake?

To reassure myself, I quickly tried to think of other irregular verbs ending in -eak where I would do this. I couldn’t think of any. Instead, I thought of examples where I don’t do this. For example, I wouldn’t say:

• cruck rather than creaked
• fruck rather than freaked
• wruck rather than wreaked

So how on earth did I come to believe that it was snuck rather than sneaked? AskOxford told me that I wasn’t alone and that it was an American form that has grown popular. Common Errors In English agreed but warned I’d be safer sticking with “sneaked.”

Random House’s The Mavens’ Word Of The Day left me most reassured about snuck. It wrote comprehensively about how usage had changed, how it is indeed unusual as a -eak verb to have a -uck form and why no one should feel “snuck” is non-standard for American English

Interestedly, Francesca Simon — who writes the Horrid Henry books — is an American who grew up in California (like me) who lives in the UK (like me). So why didn’t she use “snuck” rather than “sneaked?” No idea, but since her British books use British spellings, I’m guessing “sneaked” won out over here.

While discovering why I use “snuck,” I also learned it was both a past tense and past participle for sneak. And what was the difference between “past tense” and “past participle” again?

Yeah, here I am an English major asking about this. Cut me some slack. English majors don’t take lessons in grammar. You know how we relearn grammatical forms we’ve long forgotten since elementary school? We study a foreign language! That’s why I have on my shelf my trusty copy of English Grammar For Students Of German.

Rather than reach for that, however, I first did a little web searching. A lot of what I found explained how a past participle was formed but not what it was in terms of when you use it.

In other words, plenty of pages told me that a past participle is usually a verb with -ed added as a suffix, except for irregular verbs. Great, but what’s the difference between that and the past tense in terms of usage, not in terms of how you make the verb form?

OK, this page had a good definition of past tense: an action that was both started and finished in the past. The verb form to show this usually ends in -ed, so:

• The race ended.
• The car stalled.

What about the past participle? That same page indirectly explains this is a verb form usually ending in -ed and with a helper or auxiliary verb that is used to represent the various perfect tenses, such as:

• Present Perfect Tense: An action that happened in the past at an indefinite time or began in the past and continues into the present.
  • The race has ended.
• Past Perfect Tense: An action that happened in the past before another past action.
  • The race had ended, and the awards were given out.
• Future Perfect Tense: An action in the future that will happen before another future action.
  • The race will have ended before the awards will be given out.

So to bring it back to sneak, if you consider it to be a regular verb, you use -ed as the suffix for the past tense and the -ed suffix with a helper verb to make the past participle form used for the perfect tenses. Examples show it better:

• He sneaked into the room. (past tense)
• He has sneaked into the room. (present perfect tense)
• He had sneaked into the room, and then he was caught. (past perfect tense)
• He will have sneaked into the room, before stealing the money. (present perfect tense)

If you are like me and prefer to treat sneaked as a irregular verb, then forget that -ed suffix and use snuck:

• He snuck into the room. (past tense)
• He has snuck into the room. (present perfect tense)
• He had snuck into the room, and then he was caught. (past perfect tense)
• He will have snuck into the room, before stealing the money. (present perfect tense)

Isn’t grammar fun? No doubt, if I’ve got it wrong, folks will leave comments below.

Postscript: From below, a video of Conan O’Brien smacking Jennifer Garner down as she tries to correct him from saying snuck:

Postscript 2: Grammar Girl has a video up (sorry, it doesn’t allow embedding) that says it’s sneaked over snuck, if you want to be proper.