Intel's Ronler Acres Plant

Silicon Forest
If the type is too small, Ctrl+ is your friend

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Style+

I spend some time on the internet most everyday and my two favorite sites to visit are Dustbury and View From The Porch, but I don't really know why they are my favorites. I could say they are well written, topical, interesting, or demonstrate a dry sense of humor, which are all true, but I'm not sure that's why.

Sometimes I write things and it flows directly from my mind onto the screen, but then I go back and look at it a day or a week or a month later and I trip over the sentence because it doesn't go as I expected. It's like . . . I'm trying to think of an analogy and I'm not getting one. Let's try this: roller chains get used to drive the  rear wheels on bicycles and motorcycles. Bicycles use thin, light chains, Harley's use big heavy thick chains, and all those mopeds and motorcycles in between use in between sizes. So I'm reading along and everything is going smoothly, like a bicycle chain going around the sprocket, and then there is a hiccup and all of sudden everything is different. It's like somebody has just spliced a motorcycle chain onto the bicycle chain and the sprocket doesn't know what to do with it.

So I'm wondering if my two heroes are perhaps just consistently smoother writers than all the other pundits floating around out there in the blogosphere.


1 comment:

CGHill said...

I have generally argued that Tam can write rings around me, and she's certainly shown up more often in my Quote of the Week than I ever have.

She has two advantages, I think: a finely-tuned worldview - pretty much any topic she tackles, she's thought through - and a gift for the unexpected simile. (Which can occasionally backfire, since sooner or later you start to expect them.)

And there's that whole beautiful-woman-of-indeterminate-age thing she's got going on. Which doesn't necessarily make her a better writer, but it never hurts.