One of the things I have been taught about writing is that it is necessary to orient your readers to the meaning of any quotations you may choose to include in your text. The meaning of and the reason for the quotation may seem obvious to you, but is not necessarily as obvious to your reader.
Okay, I accept that. But I am not very good at doing it.
Just now, I spent a good bit of time attempting to explain what Chesterton says about "the balance of apparent contradictions." I would type a fragment of a sentence, contemplate it's meaning, and then erase it because it is difficult to speak for someone like Chesterton.
My Dad has occasionally said that when it comes to quotations, most statments are not so well made that they cannot be stated in another way, so quotations should be chosen wisely. I keep that in mind as I write, but too often in the sort of work I prefer, it is the cadence and the rhythym of the sentence I am trying to convey, not just the meaning, because the cadence and the rhythym inform the meaning in some way. In those cases paraphrase or explanation is inadequate, yet my understanding of the meaning is probably unclear.
This is just another one of the problems of writing I am not sure how to solve.
By the way, I just about give up on formatting anything properly in blogger (see below).
4 comments:
I have noticed that sometimes you type in regular font, and sometimes you type in italics. Is this significant?
I use italics when I'm taking a step away from the actual blog writing to comment on the blog writing, if that makes any sense. In other words, italics means I'm writing about the blog instead of simply writing on the blog. I may be a bit inconsistent with this. I typically label such posts "metanarrative."
I thought there might be something like that going on. Is there a difference in typeface between metablogging in particular and metanarrative in general? You seem to do both, although I haven't noticed whether you use italics for one or the other or both.
Oh, and for whatever it's worth, I felt like you gave sufficient set-up for the Chesterton quotes in the preceding post.
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