Chris Calabrese – My Blog

I was perusing Barnes and Noble’s shelves the other day and found an interesting book entitled Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. The format was almost like a children’s book—it was illustrated, there was only a line or two of large-size text on each page, and the pages were heavy card stock. The content of the book was short but powerful; I’m not qualified to comment on the rules themselves, but let me just say that Mr. Leonard cites John Steinbeck several times and that’s good enough for me.

When I returned home I researched this book and found out it was originally an article in The New York Times. Apparently the article was so lauded that Mr. Leonard’s publisher decided to illustrate it and put it into book form. The illustrations, by artist Joe Ciardiello, are spartan yet thought-provoking and the perfect compliment for the written content of the book.

Despite the fact that you can read the original online for free, the book itself is a piece of art in every respect and worth the modest price.

I wasn’t sure about the usage of the words “disc” and “disk,” so I did a quick Google search and found a great little writer’s resource here: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/. Read the intro then check out the list of errors.

The other day I had a need for a list of 3-letter English words (don’t we all). After a little Web searching I found a few lists but not really in the format I was looking for (plain text with one word per line), so I wrote a little utility to print these out the way I wanted them. I added the ability to specify minimum and maximum word length, and posted it to my blog here. For the raw word list I used the public domain ENABLE word list.