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01/17/2004: "House of Style"

Every day, I sit down here to write and, as I write, I become uncomfortably aware of the patterns that characterize my prose. Evrey rhetorical device, used too often, threatens to become a flaw, and I suspect I have a handful of tools I go to over again. Among them: the use of a colon as a fulcrum on which to balance a sentence.I can't say I'm happy with my use of the semicolon either; too often it takes what is already an overly complex sentence and makes it a string of endless verbiage ready to collapse under its own weight. Do strings collapse? wouldn't a more attentive writer come up with metaphors which are both coherent and imaginative? What's with the rhetorical questions? I like lists; short lists, long lists lists with three items. On the one hand I might introduce them with a colon; on the other hand I might use a semi-colon. Or I use the see-saw list: on the one side is one item; on the other a contrasting item. These are all technical tics and they may well bother me more than anyone else -- there aren't many readers out there to offend anyway, he dashed -- but too often the technique is the content. When the technique is the content you end up with porn instead of romance, and not very good porn, either.