Personal Blogs

William Zinsser has some wise advice on writing sentences that apply well to discursive TMA answers.

There's not much to be said about the period¹ except that most writers don't reach it soon enough. If you find yourself hopelessly mired in a long sentence, it's probably because you're trying to make the sentence do more than it can reasonably do -- perhaps express two dissimilar thoughts. The quickest way out is to break the long sentence into two short sentences, or even three. There is no minimum length for a sentence that's acceptable in the eyes of God. Among good writers it is the short sentence that predominates, and don't tell me about Norman Mailer -- he's a genius. If you want to write long sentences, be a genius. Or at least make sure that the sentence is under control from beginning to end in syntax and punctuation, so that the reader knows where he is at every step of the winding trail.²

__________

1 full stop.

2 On Writing Well. 5/ed, New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, 1995, pp. 114-115.

There are a couple of recent reports on The Pirate Bay court case in Stockholm that are worth viewing in relation to the sections of the course on digital piracy. The BBC has a report from 17 April that has links to several other items. There is also a video report from Reuters on the Scientific American Web site.

One of my colleagues shared this cartoon which gives an amusing twist on computer security and cryptography. I'm certainly not recommending the tactic, but I hope you find it amusing, nonetheless.