Reports comprise indiscriminate detail without any purposeful meaning.

Whereas stories are select details that intentionally influence how you respond.

Here’s a report:

Gifted writers make each sentence propel readers to the next.

Another strategy is to just finish before readers have time to quit.

I don’t want to become that writer who expects people to be familiar with his work before he’ll interact about his ideas.

If a writer specifically references publicly available material without a citation, the audience is left to wonder what he might be hiding.

Technical language is fine.

Just beware of this likely reaction: “I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m not curious.”

Update: This video proves my point:

I have no idea if it’s a joke. I hope so. Although, it’s funnier if it’s not.

(via CommonCraft)

Should we interpret worship songs according to the Bible passages the songs are based on or according to what the songwriters meant?

In 1762, Robert Lowth invented the no-prepositions-at-the-end-of-sentences rule. It has no basis other than his ethnocentric notion that English should simulate Latin.

I enjoy it.

Sometimes people don’t take enjoyment seriously enough.

It’s not an ambitious reason, but it’s worthwhile.

Why do you blog?

With few exceptions, I give authors one page to draw me in and motivate me to continue.

I give blogs one sentence.

Redemption is certain eternally, but now hopelessness really exists.

That’s warrant enough for stories to be as unredemptive as life sometimes is.

To say something worthwhile this short, you have to pay attention to little things.

Then these add up to big things.

Hopefully.

(See the other 6 reasons.)

Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.

-Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 84

More ink is not always more meaning. Sometimes the blank space where you didn’t write says more than if you’d filled it.

(Read the other 5 reasons, if you want to.)