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Babies and Bathwater
Wednesday February 22, 2006
I've spent the last two weeks traveling
the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal circuit, leading a series of my Eight-Step Editing
workshops. These workshops help writers and editors identify factors that cause
readers to lose interest, and then teaches techniques for fixing those problems.
(Relax – the rest of this column is not about grammar!)
To my surprise, long-time colleague Chris Blackburn showed up for a
Toronto session with the original handout materials I had supplied way back in
1986, for the second Eight-Step Editing workshop I ever did.
It must have been the second, because it included eight different steps.
The first time I did one of these workshops, I still didn't know what the last
three steps would be.
Looking over those old notes, I was astonished at how much had changed
in 20 years, and yet how much remained the same.
The length had certainly changed. That early handout was little more
than a dozen pages – covering both principles and exercises – churned out on a
dot-matrix printer that could produce only one typeface. Today's handout booklet
is coil-bound, 80 pages, and will probably grow soon to 100 pages.
Several of the steps have changed. I've replaced one step completely, as
irrelevant to modern English usage. I've modified two more quite extensively, as
I've learned more about how language works.
But the basics remain. The program that I teach today clearly is
directly descended from the one I taught 20 years ago.
Keeping the best
I find that reassuring.
It reminds me that even in the tsunami of change flooding over our world, we're
retaining much more than we're discarding.
A friend worries that in the current religious ferment, for example –
where we are painfully learning to be aware of, and sensitive to, other world
faiths, and where radicals and progressives often challenge long-held tenets of
our own faith – we may be “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
In fact, we're keeping a lot more than we're challenging. We just find
it harder to name the important things we're keeping.
In my youth, for example, I was taught to speak to my elders using terms
of respect. I could call my parents' friend “Uncle Bob” or “Mr. Clark.” But
never just “Bob.” Today, an airline attendant one-third my age flips my boarding
pass under a bar-code reader, glances at the name that pops up on her screen,
and says, “Thanks, Jim, have a good flight.”
Part of me resents that easy, unearned, familiarity.
But I also need to remember that it preserves something more important –
the fact that I am a person, not a confirmation number. I am an individual. I
have a name.
So at the same time that we're questioning some historic doctrines,
we're regaining the importance of belief in God.
Sometimes, it's too easy to focus on what we think we're losing at times
of social stress and upheaval. It might be a more useful exercise to identify
what we're keeping – even what we're enhancing and emphasizing.
Copyright © by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study
groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
To send comments on this column, email
Jim Taylor
directly. You can also receive Jim's column by email. Contact him at
jimt@quixotic.ca
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