You know, I got out of the habit of actually writing here despite that being one of the objectives for this project. My main focus was to create a repository for 100% original work. Because of this, I’ve been leaning on my photos…which is fine. But I totally forgot to post the 1990 video!

Huh?

Like all passionate skaters, we practiced self-documentation in ritualistic fashion. We filmed and we shot. We developed, edited, and screened. Guys were forever making sponsorship videos, and we analyzed contest films like fiendish hoops coaches. It was all part of the life.

Every year, my friend Todd and I would boil down a years worth of footage into “The Video.” We had two VCRs, one of which miraculously had an audio overdub feature, and we would spend hours getting our dub-on. After the segments were compiled and the hand drawn/written graphics were added, we slapped some tunes over the top.

I’ve been digitizing and posting these on YouTube for the crew…you can see the 1988 video here (Almost 20 years ago…gulp.) I had some flexibility when I worked on the 1990 video, because we hadn’t yet added the audio. I was able to mix the sounds of the skating with a the music, and this gave it a production quality that was unavailable back in the day.

So in writing this painfully long intro and posting a twenty-year-old video testament to skateboarding’s timelessness, I have pushed myself a little farther along. You poor soul. Here’s the video.

And for the record, the slams video gets watched the most on YouTube.

For my second installment of key takeaways from Jan Venolia’s Write Right!, I want to focus on her notes for style. This section of the book is full of useful nuggets, so it would be next to impossible not to learn something from her writerly wisdom.

Here are some notes I jotted down in my Moleskine. Many may seem routine to you, but to me they were eye-opening.

• An acronym is pronounced as a word. “NASA, OPEC, OSHA”
• An initialism is pronounced letter by letter. “NBA, YMCA, NSA”
• Choosing the correct article (a or an) before an acronym is determined phonetically.  Use ‘an’ if it proceeds an F, H, L, M, N, R, S, or X.
• Abbreviate social titles only when the full name is used. “Rev. Jesse Jackson. Reverend Jackson.”
• Abbreviate country names, such as United States and United Kingdom, only when they are used as an adjective. “U.S. Ambassador, U.S. Foreign Policy.”
• Use italics for foreign words when they are not normal.

Here are a few notes on capitalization:

• Capitalize the first word after a colon if it’s a complete sentence; lower if not.
• Do not capitalize the word city in “city of Toronto”.
• Seasons are not capitalized.
• Capitalize African Americans and Caucasians, not blacks and whites.

And finally some notes on using numbers:

• Write the words (1-9) when using them for journalism, science, or business. “Two, nine”
• Write the words (1-99) for literary writing. “Seven, fifty, sixty-one”
• Write the words if they begin a sentence. “Four score and seven years ago…”
• Write the words for decades. “The twenties”
• Write the numbers larger than nine for journalism, science, or business. “29, 88″
• Write the numbers larger than ninety-nine for literary writing. “102, 1054″
• Write the numbers when it’s a mix of these rules, such as “8 to 30 employees.”
• Write the numbers when referring to a part of a book, such as “Chapter 9, page 71.”
• Write the numbers for all dates and times. “21st Century or 10 P.M.”

You can check out other key takeaways here.

Writing is hard. There are rules. There are exceptions to the rules. Sometimes the exception is the rule. Throw-in perspective, irregular verbs, punctuation, and style and you’ve created alphabet soup with a side of insanity.

I’ve been sifting through books on writing, and have finally found a useful one. Jan Venolia’s Write Right! is the first writing book I couldn’t put down, despite what would seem like the most boring content in the world to a fiction aficionado. It’s straight up talk about grammar, words, style, and punctuation – just the facts ma’am. I’ve learned a lot, and I plan to dedicate three or four posts to my key takeaways.

The first thing I would like to share with you will not be that helpful, other than shedding light on why English is such a frustrating language. Check out these three classifications of similar words…it’s amazing we ever learn to speak at all.

Homonyms – Words that are spelled and pronounced the same but have different definitions. Beet (noun) and beat (verb). Blue (adjective) and blew (verb). I bet this is a huge problem when people learn English as a second language. Check out Alan Cooper’s huge list of homonyms.

Homographs – Words that are spelled the same but have different definitions and sometimes pronunciations. Fair (noun) and fair (adjective). Wound (noun) and wound (verb). Subject (noun) and subject (verb). More information on homographs, and their conservative cousins heteronyms, can be found here.

Homophones – Words that are pronounced the same but have different spellings and definitions. Their (pronoun), there (adjective), and they’re (contraction). Pair (noun), pare (verb), and pear (noun). Write (verb) and right (adjective). You can check out this extensive list for more English homophones.

As I mentioned, I’m not sure how this information can help you in any way, other than arming you with the vocabulary to verbally thrash the English language. Enjoy!