Your Own Sentences Have A Tell

Empire of One — Twenty-seven pages on running a business of one. Twelve years in the Air Force, then a decade fixing broken systems at Google, GoDaddy and CBRE until they cut the job out from under me, which is a hell of a way to get handed your own calendar. What is in there is the operations: the first weeks, a blog post that earns its length, honest affiliate money without the performance, what to do with it once there is some. Four bucks, PDF and EPUB, for anybody building this alone and sick of advice written for a team of nine.

A Mile-Long Roman Bridge Just Resurfaced from the Danube — Europe’s drought pulled the Danube down far enough this month to expose the stone footings of the bridge Constantine put up in AD 328, Bulgaria to Romania, the longest thing Rome ever threw across a river. It stood thirty-nine years before something knocked it down and the mud took it for the next seventeen centuries. They struck a gold medallion for the opening. Two of those are left anywhere on earth.

THE TIP. Count the nominalizations before you trust a paragraph. Those are the nouns built out of verbs. Decision instead of decide. Utilization, which is a perfectly good word wearing a suit it stole from use. Each one marks the spot where a sentence quit working and started posing. Helen Sword named them zombie nouns in 2012. Nobody listened. Machine prose is lousy with them, two or three stacked in a line, because a model trained to sound sure of itself will walk right past the plain verb standing there in the open and reach for the noun every damn time. You don’t need software for this. Read a paragraph out loud and count the words ending in -tion, -ment, -ance, -ity, or -ness. One’s normal. Four in the same breath and something in there needs its verb back. Try it on the last inspirational post you scrolled past on your way somewhere else. Then try it on a real letter from someone who actually loves you, the kind with a coffee ring on it. Nothing in the first one’s wrong. That’s why you’ll never win that argument with the poor bastard who wrote it.

Run that count on one of my old newsletters, ya’ll, and tell me what you find. I already know and I’m not saying. ~ J.D.