The FIRST Rule of Editing

In promulgating your esoteric cogitations or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications demonstrate a clarified conciseness, a compact comprehensibleness, no coalescent conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune bafflement and asinine affectations. Let your extemporaneous verbal evaporations and expatriations have lucidity, intelligibility and veracious vivacity without rodomontade or Thespian bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous propensity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity and vaniloquent vapidity. Shun double-entendres, obnoxious jocosity and pestiferous profanity, observable or apparent.

In other words:

Say what you mean and DON'T USE BIG WORDS!

This is the first-ever rule of editing I got, from my father, years ago, before I knew I would be a writer.

It actually comes from the pages of his little black book. In the days before smart phones and such, heck, before transistor radios, men had little black books. Most used them to keep phone numbers for the gals they knew.

Not my dad.

He had jokes, lots of them. An occasional photo of an Air Force bud. Things like that.

And the above rule of editing.

Throughout my career, it has been a problem with most of the writers with whom I have worked.

Shared credit

In his latest column, which is carried by the Morning News of Florence, Michael Reagan, adopted son of the former president, tries to make the point that it is President Barack Obama's self-aggrandizing style and share-no-credit attitude that has kept him from, in his words, failing to accomplish anything in his entire life, not just his first term.

He asks;

Did you hear how many times the president said “I” or “me” during the last debate? Did anyone hear a single “we”?

Yes. I heard President Obama say the word “we” in the debate. So I checked a transcript. He used the word we.

19 times, actually. 

In answering the FIRST question. 

Some were the “royal” we, but all Presidential candidates do that. In fact, Gov. Romney did the same thing in his response to the President. Some were the collective we. Some it could truly function as an I or an us.

But there was one definitive, non-royal use of the word We by the president in that first response.

We stand with them, he said. The Libyan people are the “them.” The We? Not him.

The American people.

It is safe to say the president believes in sharing credit.

Mr. Reagan, too, is someone who definitely believes in the concept of shared credit. He’s built a career on it. That is, on him sharing credit with his father for the things his father did and he had no part in.

Football front