“Tommy” by Rudyard Kipling (read by Tom O’Bedlam)
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My rockhounding site: https://southwestrockhounding.com (external link)
My writing website: https://thomasfarleywriting.com (external link)
“Tommy” by Rudyard Kipling (read by Tom O’Bedlam)
—
My rockhounding site: https://southwestrockhounding.com (external link)
My writing website: https://thomasfarleywriting.com (external link)
Rockhounding site here: https://southwestrockhounding.com
Assessment Tests
From my writing website: https://thomasfarleywriting.com
Assessment tests are often required but results depend on the writing style and preferences of the test writer. Or the guide they use. CMOS? AP? MLA? Importantly, will the tester tell you the guide used for developing the answers? Or is it, again, the writer’s own preferences?
I stand on my published writing before any assessment test. Do you like my writing or not? That’s fair, isn’t it? No problem if you don’t. Yet, I recently had to take an assessment test.
This was a timed test on grammar problems. Eleven minutes. This lack of time kept me from looking up solutions to these difficult, unusual thought experiments.
Editors like myself rarely spend time researching usage, we just recast a sentence. That’s far quicker than musing over conflicting opinions and guides. In this test, however, we were supposed to dawdle on things like whether “womens” or “women’s” was correct in a particular sentence. Good grief. Just revise. And get on with the rest of your work.
Their first question probably revolved around a semi-colon. I don’t use them in business writing since they slow things down and make things less direct. Although I admire how Melville and Tolstoi used them to string together 150 word sentences with six tangents. Want to hear something shocking?
I sometimes substitute a comma when a semi-colon is called for.
That’s when one of our writers pens an otherwise well-crafted or intriguing sentence which only needs to move faster. Jazz would have never developed if musicians always stuck to playing the correct notes. More eccentricities? I don’t use dashes, parentheses, or italics. I let our writers use them but only to a certain extent.
Did you notice my comma after the word parentheses? Most people don’t add a comma after the last list item. I do. I want every item in a list clearly delineated from each other. That’s how I punctuate. Unless a boss, editor, or client prefers otherwise. They know their publication best and how they want it presented. Their call. But back to the test.
The test writer consistently used “of been” instead of “have been.” That’s a style question, not a grammar problem.
Question seven moved me on before I was done. Technical problem.
Question eight referred to Catalan. Odd. I thought the area Catalonia, like in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. The test writer then called the people catalans, not capitalizing the “c”. That’s like calling a Californian a californian. Yet there was no way to point out this mistake, instead, the grammar problem in this question was about something else. I’m being graded by a writer who can’t capitalize?
Question ten had problems in the text underlined and noted as “A” through “K.” “Select which ones have a problem.” “K” had a problem but there was no “K “radio button to click. The button list only ran through “J.” Another technical problem.
Five professional editors would grade differently with this test. Does CMOS, MLA, or AP agree on everything? Of course not. And if you are working for a publication that has its own style sheet, well, it may not agree with any of these guides.
For comparison, the writing test I took five years ago for InFocus required twelve hours to complete. They paid me for my time and I wrote a number of papers on subjects they chose. An extended essay test. I’m still working for this honest and professional company.
An eleven minute assessment test is better suited to math or other fields whose problems have definite answers. In writing there are grammar mistakes that all can agree on but there are also thousands of instances in which writers or editors will disagree. There’s an art to English that an assessment test cannot assess.
This is issue No. 9 of private line magazine, which ran from 1994 to 1995.
Click here for the OCR enabled .pdf.
It’s all black and white and I think I did a good job with the design, considering the Technology of The Time.
I did most of the writing and all of the layout. In Word. Incredibly tedious and nothing ever lined up. Each page was a separate Word doc file. Argh.
The magazine was a critical success and commercial failure. My biggest distributor went bankrupt on me, taking down my magazine and at least a hundred other small titles.
The $5,000 dollars Fine Print owed me was an unrecoverable loss. I refunded money to every subscriber who asked for money back.
After proceedings, Fine Print never paid a penny back to anyone.
My rockhounding site is here: https://southwestrockhounding.com
My new writing site is here: https://thomasfarleywriting.com
Things In General
My rockhounding website is here: https://southwestrockhounding.com
My New Writing Website
I’m building a website just for my published writing and for some of the posts found at this site on writing. This site will remain my personal website.
This website is indeed a work in progress:
https://thomasfarleywriting.com
It will take me at least a week to get this website fleshed out.
I’m sad to report that the happy group of lizards that played around my back door have disappeared.
Their vanishing coincides exactly with the departure from my house of a licensed pest control firm on Thursday.
As I showed on Instagram at the time, I found a dead lizard only two hours at my back door after pest control left. They had sprayed the interior of the house as well as the perimeter.
I told the landlord well in advance that there was a pack of lizards at the back door. The landlord assured me that he conveyed my concern to the pest control people and that they told him that none of what they used was poisonous.
It may be coincidence that a lizard died immediately after pest control left and perhaps the pack decided to move to other quarters. Perhaps. But they were consistently around, day after day, for the last month and a half.
They seemed curious about the different projects I was building on the back porch and I left a large piece of cardboard out when I found they were using it for cover.
I particularly miss the Big Guy, he was about five or six inches long and sped about in the way that only lizards do.
I’d pursue the matter with my landlord and the company but I am so angry that I am going to let the matter go. Nothing is provable and the company has not come out to inspect the dead lizard, nor do I expect them to. In the end, like too many things, nobody gives a damn.
My rockhounding site is here: https://southwestrockhounding.com
Live Performance of The Girl From Ipanema
We’ve all heard the song but have you seen this performance? Haunting vocals by Astrud Gilberto.
English lyrics from the Portuguese by Norman Gimbel.
Tall and tanned and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes
Each man she passes goes Aaah!
When she moves it’s like a samba
That swings so cool and sways so gently
That when she passes
Each man she passes goes Aaah!
Oh — but he watches so sadly
How — can he tell her he loves her
He — would just give his heart gladly
But each day when she walks to the sea
She looks straight ahead not at he
Tall and tanned and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes He smiles
But she doesn’t see
No she doesn’t see
She just doesn’t see…