Rules 4 Writers

Time-tested lessons for writers in English.

1. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid clichés like the plague. (They're old hat.)
6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.
7. Be more or less specific.
8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
9. Also, too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
10. No sentence fragments.
11. Contractions aren't necessary and shouldn't be used.
12. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
14. One should NEVER generalize.
15. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
16. Don't use no double negatives.
17. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be ignored.
21. Eliminate commas that are not necessary. Parenthetical words, however, should be enclosed in commas.
22. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice.
23. DO NOT use exclamation points and all caps to emphasize!!!
24. Use words correctly, regardless of how others use them.
25. Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth earth-shaking ideas.
26. Use the apostrophe in its proper place and omit it when it's not needed.
27. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
28. If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: Resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.
29. Puns are for children, not groan readers.
30. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
31. Even IF a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
32. Who needs rhetorical questions?
33. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
34. The passive voice should never be used.
35. Do not put statements in the negative form.
36. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
37. A writer must not shift their point of view.
38. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
39. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
40. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
41. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
42. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
43. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
44. Always pick the correct idiom.
45. The adverb always follows the verb.
46. Be careful to use the right homonym.
47. Proofread carefully to see if you missed any words out.

"Have Breakfast ...Or....Be Breakfast"!

An interesting way of asking, - 'Who is your competition?'

[This is written by Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He is an M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a post graduate in management from IIM, Bangalore]

Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?

Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones.

Reason being cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand alone cameras.
Now, what prevents the cellphone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sonys and Canons are taking note.

Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).

Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India. That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther From truth.

Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smartphone bus. They admit that Apple's Iphone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future.

But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?

The war is about "what is tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question - "who is my competitor?"

Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It Says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital."

In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn Between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both.
It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?" The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC.
The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.

In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India?
Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. (India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good.
But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no.

Remember, if there is one place where Newton's law of gravity is Applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India. PC's price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!

India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were Distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor.

On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex Owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India Are called 3 hour "tamasha"(entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.

Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.

One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake Them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker.

They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What Do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!

On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary!

The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the Animal called competition.

He said "Have breakfast ...or.... be breakfast"!
That sums it up rather neatly.

Before civilized society it was "Survival of fittest", then came civilized sense of the "right to survive for everyone".

Now it's like "what would not survive and who could be fittest" remains the question.

Zoozoo'z Talk Malayalam??

The Vodafone Zoozoo ads have long gone from our television but my son still seems to hold a fascination for the white rubber-bodied eggheads. He smiles and claps happily while they animatedly run about the screen. Feeding him gets easier while he watches the reruns of the 'Zuzu' (as he calls them) ad films from a DVD.

This ad called - "Wonders" was running while the supposedly gibberish zoozoo language suddenly seemed to make sense. Listen carefully to the ad on Zoozoo's on Roaming Services and it definetely sounds like the zoozoo's are mallus after all. One can hear distinctly - Parota, Puttum Kadalaem, Kappa-Meen (all kerala's popular dishes) :)) Hilarious indeed.

India: An Easy Target?

Am actually tired of seeing dozen's of such wannabe's seeking their 30-secs of fame by raking up some controversy or the other. But off late, worldover, the easiest route to fame seems to be to attack India and Indians. Seems like we are an easy target. Look at this one -

India's Healthcare is Cheaper than America's! - Fox News Investigation - Glenn Beck Reports

Glen Beck seems surprised that India could have better healthcare infrastructure and sniggers & pokes fun.

Should we take offense? Should we demand an apology?

I dont know. I think he hardly merits any importance for his shoddy reporting based on half baked 'research'. But it is really sad that Fox News could allow some irresponsible reporting like this get aired.

The Week That Was..

The last few days have been quite eventful. Lots of discussion, pondering over questions, and seeking an answer everywhere, but no decisions were made. It's funny how we strategize, agonize, and think we are making things happen while none of it is in our control. And what is even more strange is how perspectives alter in a matter of minutes. Actually, we are no different from little children, despite our pretenses of having all grown up and matured.

Am sure none of this is making sense, and it might seem like I have lost it. It's actually like this - over the last few months we have been on a rigorous house hunting spree, and despite walking through several of them, we took a liking to none of them. Then one fine day we saw this beautiful duplex, spacious, airy, never before occupied, and with a private terrace to boot. The apartment complex is also wonderfully serene, with little children dotting the play area and making a pretty pretty scene. We had zeroed in on our dream home!

Of course, life never goes smoothly, so the price played villain and I was in deep despair. However, a couple of negotiation sessions later, we had arrived at something both we & the builder could smile about. And just when we thought all was well at our paradise, we got to know of another apartment quite similar in most of the specifications, with better amenities and seriously being offered at a much, much lower price. There! We have lost our sleep, our peace, and that's our dilemma.

Dreadful Indian Television

Indian television seems to be going from bad to worse. Reality shows centering around dance & music was one thing but then the progressive decline into finding the perfect (sic) bride is completely another matter. Do the majority of Indian audience really enjoy these kind of shows? Why isn't there a single Quiz show or a science program like Turning Point in any of the popular channels? Even a Travel Show taking the audience through lesser known places would do wonders than the steady junk serials they are being fed.

Star Plus one of the most popular TV channels seems to have mastered the game and comes up with one mind-numbing story after another. Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai tells the story of a marwari family who arranges the marriage of their daughter with the scion of another marwari family. The serial shows the girl sacrificing her dreams of furthering her education, giving up any ideas of a career for the role of a subserviant wife. In the name of tradition it portrays the girl playing a submissive coy daugher-in-law who needs to take permission for everything from visiting her parents to taking a tour along with her husband. Incidentally all her such requests are squished down.

And there is ofcourse another fantastic serial - Sajan Ghar Jaana Hai where a girl who gets married to a rich landlord is shunned when it is learnt that one of her forefathers had married out-of-caste (or whatever) and she is reduced to being a maid servant while her husband is forced to remarry another girl of unquestionable lineage. The list of such mindless serials is unending.

Now are they trying to kid themselves that they are altering mindsets by showing such serials? Do they feel justified in earning their TRP's through such mindless shows in the name of entertainment? To top it all they have an annual award function where they get together and distribute awards which go something like - "Best Bahu" and "Most Loved Devar".

The funniest response evinced was when my father-in-law saw an episode of "Yeh Rishta.." where the lead protagonist gets ticked off by her mother-in-law for wanting to go for a movie with her husband. Gravely my father-in-law said, "The period of 1920's & 30's was very tough on the Indian middle-class woman." I didnt feel like breaking his wrong assumption that the serial was trying to very much portray 21st century women.

On second thoughts, considering the unbelievable money involved and the sea of aimless, gullible public ready to devour anything showcased under the garb of tradition & moral values, I realize that these serials are here to stay and possibly will be coming in 1000's of different avtaars.

Maybe all we can do is tune into other channels. Maybe one can acquire a taste if forced into watching them. Maybe these serials are the reason for every household acquiring their second & third television sets. These serials might after all be good for our economy.

[Book Review] The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown

Its few hours since I have completed reading the book and am still reeling under the after-effects of it. Its not about being overwhelmed by the book but every book I read usually lingers in the mind for some time, like how the taste of coffee (good or bad) remains. So I will try and be as objective as possible about it.

With Dan Brown for an author, the book is more or less expected to be a racy, entertaining best seller. 'The Lost Symbol' is definitely a nail-biting thriller and am sure is already topping the best-seller charts yet somehow it fails to impress the way the Da Vinci Code (DVC) did. One reason could be that Dan Brown seems to try too hard to meet up to it. 

The novel seems to follow the same plotline as DVC: Robert Langdon travels within the first few pages to a prominent location, faces a grotesque situation, is forced to run , gets lectured and lectures a lot on symbology & solve clues to save lives of many involved. While DVC was all about the Priory of Sions and Knights of Templar, this one is all about Freemasons and the Ancient Mysteries. But the similarities seem to end here. While Da Vinci Code broke new ground with its startling revealations and theories, The Lost Symbol thrives more on numerous twists in the plot.

Mr Brown weaves an interesting tale of science & religion. But this is nothing new for us Hindus who have long seen science in our faith. While he condescendingly talks about Kubera Kolam, the Upanishads & Vedas he hurries to add that the Bible talks more about science than that meets the eye.

If his Da Vinci Code had the churches fuming in anger, The Lost Symbol seems to be his feeble attempt in building bridges. Consider this : Our brains, if used correctly, can call forth powers that are quite literally superhuman. The Bible, like many ancient texts, is a detailed exposition of the most sophisticated machine ever created . . . the human mind

"The mind sits like a golden capstone atop the physical body. The Philosopher’s Stone. Through the staircase of the spine, energy ascends and descends, circulating, connecting the heavenly mind to the physical body"
This we Hindus have known since long as the Yogic Kundalini awakening. Our scriptures even detail the different kundalini chakras, the signs & symptoms accompanied with the rise of each chakra.

There is also mention of Noetic Science and the supposedly made advances in this field but nothing worthwhile is described. The experiment that proves that soul has mass and hence can be weighed has long been circulated in the internet. Brown might probably impress his western audiences with his lecture on the positive effects of meditation, mass prayers and Focussed Thought etc but offers nothing we didn't already know. But yes, we are not talking of "Autobiography of A Yogi"

A well-known trait of Brown's books has been to showcase latest technology. This he does amply in The Lost Symbol and does a fantastic job of it. He talks from EMP guns that can effectively fry the electronics of any device it targets - used to stop car chases from a safe distance to Silly Strings (a nonlethal "incapacitant" that when shot sends a thread of gooey polyurethane that turns rock hard on contact, creating a rigid web of plastic across the back of the fugitive’s knees). Heat Signatures: Thermal-imaging equipment which are so sensitive to heat differentials that it can detect not only a person’s location but also their previous locations. But what takes the cake is his description of the extreme experience labs and specifically the "Total Liquid Ventilation tanks or Meditation machines".

In conclusion, The Lost Symbol is an extremely entertaining 'Bisibele bath' containing a mix of spiritual new-age mantra's, cliffhanger twists and references to the most famous of secret societies - the Freemasons. Enjoy Maadi