Next Noble Pen Meeting

Oct 11th, 2018 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Mark Twain gave a young writer some advice in a letter that is up for auction.  If you have a spare $50K you might buy that letter, but fortunately the article tells us some of its contents.

Victories

Aime finished the second book in her quest to read all of Vonnegut’s works.

Several of us wrote drabbles this week.

Nick wrote on his trilogy.

Education

Nominalization (wikipedia) means taking a verb or adjective and adding a suffix to make a noun.  An example would be the adjective global.  It can be made a verb by adding to get globalize.  It can become a noun by further adding to make globalization.  It is sometimes a helpful process to create a word that succinctly expresses a meaning not easily conveyed by other simpler words. We get such useful words as difficulty,  investigation, failure, and reaction by nominalization of the base words difficult, investigate, fail, and react.

Taken to excess, nominalization makes writing obscure and pompous.  Clarity suffers.  Or to put it another way, a preponderance of nominalization incurs a tendency to the proliferation of obscurification and pomposity.

Ciuin has been suffering under academic writing styles and suggests this five-minute video as good advice about nominalization.  A short pdf file has good points about passive voice and nominalization.

Upcoming Schedule

Oct 11
Ciuin
Nick
Bill

Oct 18
Aime
Jesse
Open slots

Oct 25
Open slots

Nov 1
Open slots

Nov 8
Nick
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill