Monday Required Reading. Maybe you're like me and have spent every free second of the past too-many-days-to-count reading things you would really rather not be reading. Maybe you're like me and those things you would rather not have been reading are your own writing. Maybe you're like me and in the midst of editing a thesis, a process which you are quite certain is actually making you less intelligent and hampering your ability to use language in any meaningful way. Maybe you really want to stop looking at your own strangely constructed sentences. Maybe every time you try to read anything else your brain just goes into speed reading mode and you can't seem to do more than give things a cursory scan. Maybe you need a reminder of the power of language and the importance of the (seemingly endless) editing process. Maybe you need that reminder to be something you don't have to read. Well, you are in luck. I present to you Taylor Mali's "Like Totally Whatever"(with a cool typography video by Ronnie Bruce) and "The The Impotence of Proofreading." You're welcome.

I love sentences. This is why I am a writer. I love to make sentences. I even love punctuation. I love all this stuff that we are given, this little handful of equipment and raw materials. So, it is a joyous expression when you see something come together at last. Then the next day you look at it and you realize that you haven't done it at all. Then you do it again. It is in the rewriting where I find the exhilarating part of the whole enterprise. The writing itself, the first draft, the sort of hacking at the stone wall, seems to me such a difficult piece of work that it is hard to see where pleasure comes in this process. But once it is on the page and you start moving it around, changing words, moving sentences - so you get closer and closer to what you really want to say, to what you really mean. You never get it right, and I think you have to accept that as writer, that what we call “the golden book in our head” is not going to make it to the page completely. But we keep getting closer, and I find this exhilarating.

-- Carol Shields, in an interview for The Academy of Achievement in 1998