A Living Text

Usually I live a sedentary life and don’t like going places, other than the daily hour each way commute. I do love going to Annapolis and D.C., and other locales around here, but I generally need to do other things, and don’t get out all the time like when we first moved here. But this week, we went to King’s Dominon, an amusement park, for all of one day. Then tonight we are going to see the Nationals play, and I’m excited to see their new ballpark.  I’ve become a Nats fan since our move here coincided with their first season, and it’s hard to root for the Twins from a distance eternally. Yes, the Nats are bad, but they’ll get better.

Finally, we are going to the snooty and pretentious Gold Cup on Saturday. My company gets a tent there, so it will be fun to get out and see the horses, and the 60,000 people in hats. I do have a seersucker suit that I purchased for the occasion, so I should fit right in.

Some time ago, I was asked a few questions about what would be valuable to learn about business writing. These were my thoughts:

Think about what types of business writing are needed and frequently encountered in the workplace. What are expectations or standards of quality that most companies expect?  

The most obvious and ubiquitous form of communication now is e-mail. It is crucial to internal and external presentation that thought is given to font choice, color choice, length, and tone. Using fonts like Comic Sans or pink type in business communication can communicate an unprofessional demeanor.
I belive that almost every American buisness today uses PowerPoint and Excel heavily. It is very helpful for writers to understand how to effectively construct charts and PowerPoint presentations that are not cluttered and communicate effectively. I would refer learners to the works of Edward Tufte, particularly on avoiding ‘chart junk’ and on some of the potential pitfalls of PowerPoint.

What writing skills would businesses like people to acquire?  

Essential grammar skills remain foundational to all communication. Beyond that the way we write is changing from long, linear documents to ‘chunks’ of information that can be swapped in and out of different documents. Writing in this type of module fashion vs. a linear fashion can be difficult to excel at. Blogs are catching on in some sectors of the marketing world, and I think viewing examples of corporate blogs that communiate well - and how to author such blogs - would be beneficial.

What types of documents would you classify under business writing? Resumes? Press Releases? Letters/Memos? Reports? Announcements? Advertisements?, etc  

All of the above, and I would add: marketing datasheets, user manuals, online help files, corporate blogs, and web page content.

The Russian Orthodox Church seems to be actively intimidating Protestants in Russia. News here, video here. This is perhaps the result of misplaced fear and insecurity. I think that it will also be counter-productive in the long run. The Orthodox in the west have to compete in the open market of religion, if you will, whilst the Russians are using the iron hand to impose Orthodoxy. In the end I think that a more creative theology that engages with modernity will emerge from the West, and that the Church in Russia will stultify and wither if it is identified so closely with the State.

Writing about Richard Hooker and his conception of the Church of England, C.S. Lewis says:

The prince as ‘Supreme Head’ of the Church is, in fact, the bottle-neck through which the decisions of the local Church-Nation pass in order to become law. And that Nation-Church owes an allegiance to the universal Church: yet the universal Church might swerve from scripture and we should then have to disobey her. (That is, all parts of her, except ourselves, might conceivably become ‘unsound’.) Where then does ultimate sovereignty lie? I think Hooker would answer, ‘Nowhere except in Heaven’. He allows no unambiguous sovereignty on earth either civil or ecclesiastical. Judged by the standards of Austin and of modern Catholicism, the church and state which Hooker welds together are both headless. And I do not think this is an oversight. Hooker felt no need either for omnicompetent prince or for infallible Pope. He was much more afraid of tyrannies and idolatries than of ambiguities and deadlocks.

We just returned from Ocean City, MD and points north. It was a wonderful time, as any time by the beach usually is. We were in traffic next to two buses of Brad Paisley near the Wilson Bridge on our way out there. The hotel that we were at, the Princess Royale, had two women’s retreats going on while we were there. One was Calvary Chapel, I think from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The other was Christ Community Church of somewhere (see this link).

Ocean City is a massive conglomeration of mess, with huge buildings and tourist trap places hawking food, candy and t-shirts all over the place. The beach is the best thing about the place, other than that, it’s sort of a spring break, Las Vegas type location. But as you drive north on the strip, you move from Maryland to Delaware, and suddenly things are nice, clean, and attractive. Delaware must have good zoning laws. The buildings are short, the signage is better, and things are more clean and appealing. This was our first time in Delaware. Today we drove up to Rehoboth Beach on our way home. There were lots of really nice developments on the way, with great town-homes and condos. It looks like a good place to live. The Atlantic is a wonderful body of water. This is the view from our deck:

We took our time getting out there, and ate at my favorite place by the water, Hemingway’s in Stevensville, across the bridge from Annapolis. Get the fish and chips if you go, it is fantastic. 

Spending two days alone with my wife is a rare experience, and one that is always superb. Adding the beach to that time is icing on the cake.

To the one I love.

In William F. Buckley’s book, Inveighing We Will Go, there is a column from 1971 where Buckley quotes a letter sent to him regarding John Lennon’s Rollling Stone interview of that year. The writer of the letter to Buckley says:

These sheep-witted Beatles, fawned on and reverently looked up to by most of the young across the earth, although their dispositions are as mean as their intelligence and their morals are as base as their lineage, I make so bold as to suggest to you, started it all, and have dealt Western Society such heavy blows that it will be a century in recovering, if, in fact, it ever does.

These men are not innocents - they are sophisticated scoundrels capable of the most swinish behavior and their influence poisoned the headwaters of the Sixties and we now see that trickling stream of history as it gathers and deepens and broadens and rolls its mighty tides of drugs and antinomian attitudes, now already engulfing what remains of civilization in a few walled towns. 

Writing about the loss of status in the transition from settled communities to post-industrial transient sprawl, Thomas Fleming says:

Living in a village of a few hundred, everyone can expect to be something - the best poet, the best cook, the worst liar, the laziest worker. In a country of three hundred million strangers, no one can be anything, unless his picture is on the cover of People. This partly explains the importance of celebrity in modern society. More than money, more than power, more even than sex, celebrity is the ticket, so we imagine, to becoming a real human being. The rest of us are so many ants in a global hive, and at best we can hope to be somebody in the tiny niche of the local Rotary Club or a society of comic-book collectors.

Last night Bishop Thad Barnum preached at our church, and it was one of those knock your socks off, challenging sermons. All it did was reiterate the Gospel, and the fact that we are called to serve, but it did so with intensity and clarity, in such a fashion that it made you think “oh yeah, that’s what it’s all about.” We’ve had several of these sermons lately, that are on core issues and serve as sharp reminders to wake up and renew what we have. In the middle of the weekly scrum, the preaching has served to re-focus me on what is important, and I think that is what good preaching should do. 

Mankind is all too frail, and we forget quickly. I usually can’t remember what a sermon was about two weeks after it was preached, and I think that is normal. That is why sermons have to recur every week, and why they have to cycle back to the core things over and over again. If not, we lose sight of what we thought and felt when we first started walking with Jesus, we forget. It is perhaps daunting to the preacher to cast his words upon the waters, knowing that they will be mostly forgotten. But the affect is what matters, and the affect over the course of a lifetime, is enormous. 

So, thank you Bishop Barnum for brining it yesterday, and casting clarity on the main thing - Jesus Christ, crucified and resurrected.

I just heard about this church:

http://epiphanycville.org

I don’t know how long it has been in Charlottesville, but it’s good to see another option down there.