TRIO Eight: Robin Miller

G21 Contributing Editor

THIS IS NOT A RANT!

I'm tired of the word "rant." It's been overused the last couple of years. I was perfectly happy with its predecessor, "commentary," a fine and dignified word that has been around for many centuries, and is likely to be in use long after "rant" goes wherever fad words go after they get used up.

TRIO: ROBIN MILLER on Words You Can't Trust G21 ASIA KIM CARTER learns to relax. BARE KNUCKLES JEFF WINBUSH asks, "Clinton's Biggest Boner?" PREMIERE: VOX POPULI too slow for you, Geekazoid? Then maybe you need to use The Message Board CARLENE 's Misanthropic Bitch 2 looks at the "Crisis" on Pennsylvania Avenue.. SILVER SURF INTERVIEW: ROD goes inside the Lee Atwater Invitational Dead Pool! VOX POPULI, The Reader Response Page RAHEEM's HOT LINKS(Not from Louisiana returns! BLKNBLU's TREND BENDS on "Good Will Hunting". POWERSBOOKS on Toni Morrison's *Paradise*! CYNDI RUSSELL's SEA OF DREAMS. JENNIFER BLUE's PLANETARY MADNESS looks at YOUR influences! G21 EUROPE: FLISS USSHER HOUSE OF CARDS!"

Another word that has been bothering me lately is "venue." It is vague. Instead of saying, "a performing arts venue," why not tell readers what kind of venue? What is wrong with saying, "Performing artist Suckya Dong opened her new one-woman show today at The Pink Pussy Palace, a world-renowned nightclub specializing in adult entertainment," instead of calling the place -- which is obviously a titty bar -- a "performing arts venue" in hopes of making it sound like something it's not?

To make the above made-up quote even more pretentious, add a gratutitous "The" like this: "The famous performing artist Suckya..."

I've seen a lot of this going around lately. "The author Blair Horne." "The Congressman Noton DaTake." "The graphic designer Eros Pornlover." What's going on? Are we supposed to think the people writing this sort of dreck want to replace Russell Baker as host of Masterpiece Theater when he retires?

I'm talking, of course, about the writer Russell Baker, who started out as a reporter in Baltimore back when H.L. Mencken was still alive. Baker has never, to my knowldege, used an extra "the" to make himself sound more erudite than he really is.

And another thing that's starting to make me sick is "and" at the beginning of paragraphs. I used to do this back when hardly anyone else did. Now it has become common so I've got to stop -- except when I'm doing an obvious parody of someone else's writing style.

Which leads us to a game I like to play, called "writing for editors." Every publication has its quirks. A half-assed writer who can figure out how a particular publication likes to have its material written -- and learns to write that way -- can almost always sell a story to that publication sooner or later. The story may be trvivial and badly researched, but as long it isn't on a topic that publication has covered recently and is written in the style that publication's editor uses in his or her own writing, the story is almost sure to run -- or at least generate a dialogue with the editor that will lead to future sales.

Now you know how to become a money-earing free-lance writer. Really. This is all it takes. The only problem is that if the editors at the publication for which you want to write use a lot of crappy words and phrases you'd better use them too. If they like to rant, give them rants. They want venues, give them venues. If they want the bomb to be all that and everything else to suck, give it to them. They approve the checks.

Want to be a TV weatherperson? The secret word is "precip."

Watch The Weather Channel on cable or any local TV news weather announcer and it's obvious that the ability to say the word"precip" without a visible wave of self-loathing crossing your face has become an essential qualification for the job. It would be nice if weathe people could say "rain" or "snow" or "a mix of hail and freezing rain" or something else specific, or at least use the entire word "precipitation," but they don't And if you want to be one of them you'd better not, either.

For real money in the writing game, though, business stuff is where it's at. No rants here, and nothing sucks.

Indeed, there are only two keys to modern business writing:

1) Use "indeed" to open a sentence or paragraphs at least once in every story.

2) Never say "layoff" or "fired" when you can use a lengthy euphemism instead.

Aspiring free-lancers should paste these two rules to their bathroom mirrors and look at them every morning while they shave. Business writing is easy and pays well. While I have no figures to back this up, I believe more money is paid to writers of corporate brochures every year than to all the newspaper, magazine, and book writers in the world, combined. There is hardly any better way to break into freelancing than business writing if you're more interested in earning money than in seeing your byline in print (or on the Internet).

Do I sound cynical?

I don't mean to, really. I don't mean to imply that, IMHO (in my hog-fucking opinion), most modern American non-fiction writing has no soul to it or that most of it is produced by people with so little talent that I wouldn't hire them to write the ingredient list for a can of frozen orange juice. It's not easy to turn out fresh, original work day after day, and after five or six years of writing on deadline it's a very human thing to laze out and start using trite phrases like "inside the beltway" and words like "arguably" instead of coming up with new stuff.

Writing is a rough game. Millions of people do it every day, and staying ahead of a pack that large takes constant work. Develop a leading edge style, start using it, decide you're a KEWL d00d for using it, and a few months later you're reading similar phrasings in US News and World Report and it's time to move on. The Internet has made the problem worse. Without it, I'd think "rant" was only used as a section title by one local editor and I wouldn't know that it is being used everywhere, by all kinds of editors who all seem to have come out of a top-secret Trite Journalism training camp (probably run by the CIA) in the basement of the Pioneer Press building in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Some days I'm glad I own my own limousine company (advertisement) and don't have to rely on my writing skills for all of my living. This is one of those days.

But I'm not ranting about crappy writing here, or how I am often forced to do it if I want to make money sitting around and typing instead of driving. Complaining, whining, commenting, bitching and screaming, yes. Ranting, no.

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