Читать книгу Script Tease - Eric Nicol - Страница 10

REFERENCE MATERIAL

It may come as a shock to the novice writer to learn that his computer doesn’t know everything. Even that god almighty, the Internet, may lack verbal skills acquired only by Webster or Oxford. Yes, you need a dictionary. If you have no other book on your shelf, this is the first to replace the framed photo of your lover. Your computer may catch misspellings, regardless of whether you want it to or not, but is hapless when it comes to the shades of meaning you need to set your work apart from an ordinary ferry schedule.

There is a world of difference between denotation and connotation, and you will need a dictionary to find out what it is.

Other vital material:

1. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. If you suspect that you aren’t the first playwright to pen “To be, or not to be, that is the question,” Bartlett will confirm your suspicion and identify the author who took the unfair advantage of being anterior.

2. Roget’s Thesaurus. A cornucopia of synonyms. Essential for the writer searching for le mot juste (i.e., a French phrase that sounds sexy). Very often the word you want is on the tip of your tongue but won’t get off. In the course of writing a long work, words can build up on the tip of your tongue, creating a condition called lingual overload. The remedy, too often, is alcohol administered internally. Better far to be able to resort to your thesaurus where you will find so many engaging synonyms that you may just abandon your novel to concentrate on crossword puzzles.

3. Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Fowler, who seems to have had no first name but overcame this handicap with typical British pluck, is to writing style what Alfred Kinsey is to sexual intercourse. He had very strong views about the conjunctive. As for italics, which imply emotional gestures and involuntary lip movement, his reservations are to be respected even as they are widely ignored by twenty-first-century authors. In short, for safer intercourse with the Muse, every writer should have a Fowler on his bookshelf, if only for its benign censure.