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Text Made New

About

At Text Made New (through Barley-Benincasa Lab & Studio), I write for others, both individuals and businesses, i.e., I am a ghost writer, telling clients’ stories and conveying a company’s message, internal or public.

Type varies but tends towards two:

  • speeches (anything from board presentations to wedding blessings) and
  • business documents, the latter often with a legal or technical consideration (anything from correspondence to regulatory filings and RFPs)

I help those who want to write or say something but cannot find the phrases, see the whole, construct the argument, or develop the idea - at least not to their satisfaction.

Here, however, I put down my own thoughts, apart from those of clients. My background is varied, hence are my interests.

I was an attorney, but I have either worked, or been trained, in other disciplines. Those include life sciences, technology, and cybersecurity.

As to what I write (here and elsewhere), I follow some not-so-stringent guidelines, more or less recommendations from my sometimes-obeyed conscience:

Rule 1. Avoid politics when possible

Even when attempting the least innocuous line of thought, politicians may provide the very example of the point you make.

But sooner than the page can leave its high-speed printer, you’ve lost half an audience because you aimed the faintest criticism towards some East Widgeterian officeholder (and you don’t even know where East Widgeteria is).

A fine argument gets rejected and an opportunity to engage an issue forever lost. You wish Prime Minister Hufflepuffle well, but all too late.

Still, altogether avoiding politics is justly barely practicable. Nearly every aspect of life, well beyond the doings and happenings of government, is made political.

You may think that just fine. At times it is inevitable, in the best of social circumstances. But now even language becomes a stumbling stone. What I mean is that, to avoid losing an audience, you couch your words in phrases bereft of meaning, or at least your meaning.

Perhaps too far to the sardonic, George Orwell, in his essay on ‘Politics and the English Language,’ describes the extreme but common opinion of political ‘messaging’:

Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

I won't argue. So I’ll try – try – to avoid politics. True, Orwell says in another essay:

It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such [political things]. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another.

Still, as I remark above, politics, as important as it is, has become caustic. These days I see such things as "code is poltical." It isn't.

Politics is how we govern ourselves. Among a people so diverse in opinion, we cannot turn everything into a matter of government or public policy.

Rule 2. Emphasize the human story behind the science, technology, and law

These gargantuan topics give me wide berth. Still I attempt to find the human interest side, the story, the case study. That is, I find that, by way of background, we remember and understand some facet of our life better.

That makes writing worth the effort.

Rule 3. Give pride of place to (somewhat) tight reasoning, good writing, and re-writing

Unfairly English is diminished, criticized as lacking the richness of some other languages.

In some contexts, English may be wanting. But some critics overlook its flexibility, its hidden inflections, moods, reach, and many words and expressions descending from the mongrel tongues that breached that island of origin.

I find the language a rich storehouse.

My purpose here is to avoid commonplace language, platitudes, and arguments so lazy that they barely make good fallacies.


Tim Kane
Writer, Editor, and Chief of Everything Else