IWSG - Insecure Writer's Support Group for 6th may 2015

Anna Nordeman


IWSG - Insecure Writer's Support Group for 6th May 2015

This is my twenty-third post for IWSG. 

Looking for my A-to-Z-REFELCTIONS-post? Click here.

 

Writing by hand, longhand, handwriting

I don't know where March and April have gone. I did the A to Z, but I may never do it again, as I have a hard time committing to blogging every single day. I think I only have time for the IWSG once a month, as I think I may have found a part time job. So what am I going to write about for IWSG for the beautiful month of May? Handwriting. 

For several months now I have been trying to go back to writing by hand on paper. I used to write in longhand every single day. But so far, I have not succeeded very well. 

The idea of this post was to be the importance of writing notes by hand and not just dashing things down at the keyboard. But I have spent so much time doing other things, such as helping my daughter and making repairs at home, that I have not written much at all, neither at the keyboard or by hand in a notebook. My mind is full of ideas and first sentences, that have not been recorded in any way or form. This makes me feel  frustrated and worried. I may have let many good ideas and observations just slip away forever.

 

source

 
Of course, being historically-minded, I often think about the development of documentation,

source

that is, how people have been able to write down their thoughts with pencil, quill and ink ink, ballpoint pen, typewriter and now a full array of electronic devices.

source

I first thought of posting about handwriting when reading K.M. Weiland's book, Outlining your novel, and found the keywords 'longhand, writing' in her index. 


In no other how-to-write manual have I found handwriting as a topic for discussion in any book for writer-hopefuls. It is as if the younger generation seems to have forgotten how to write in longhand. But there is was, a chapter about the good qualities and usefulness of using a pencil on paper for recording thoughts.

For more information

K.M. Weiland's arguments (see page 38) for writing longhand in the beginning of the outlining process are that writing longhand:

¤ Discourages the tendency to censor or edit.
¤ Brings writing down to a primal level.
¤ Provides a change of pace.
¤ Frees imagination by allowing sloppiness.
¤ Frees us from distractions.
¤ Allows a critical editing during transcription.
¤ Gives us an instant hard copy.

I think I'll break out my pens and pencils and start writing on paper again!


Best wishes,

Anna

First Commenter:

XXX

Reflections on the 2015 A to Z Blogging Challenge (4th to 8th May)

Reflections on the 2015 A to Z Blogging Challenge

Anna Nordeman

For those who missed my post for 'S' is for Solros-Sunflower, here is one of my sunflower pictures of my daughter, Elisabet, for Tina Downey, that I could not find in time for the 'A Sunflower for Tina'-post: 

Click here to see more

Whew! 

The April Challenge was almost too much for me. Sometimes, I regretted signing on. Not because of all of you wonderful people participating, no, because of me. I just did not have enough time to do it as well as all of the things that I should and must do. I needed and need to get my off-line-life in better order. 

Being the promise-keeper that I am, I did actually complete the challenge, but it cost me time that I should have used to do other things. So, as I mentioned on my IWSG-post for May, I will restrict my postings to my monthly rants for the Insecure Writer's Support Group. I like writing about one thing, once a month. I am sorry to say that that will be all the blogging I will be able to muster for the foreseeable future.

Having said all of this, I don't want anyone to interpret my comment as a criticism of the A to Z Challenge. It's wonderful! I don't want you to change it. I just cannot keep up with it; at least not right now. I have an ex-husband who will sue me for sole child-custody at the drop of a hat. He has tried to do so twice.  And happily for me, he has failed twice. (The latest time that I was in court about this was on 31st March -- the day before the April Challenge!) I let my son move to live with his father last fall, but I am still my son's guardian. My daughter still lives with me thanks to a very good lawyer and a fair judge.

I don't like being divorced. I goes against my grain. I still believe in love, marriage and fidelity. But after 19 years with a tyrant, I just could not take any more. I felt like a prisoner in my own home. No matter what I tried, nothing worked. 

So the last four years I have been picking up the pieces of my former life. I know now that I need to focus on fewer tasks and do them better. My children still need me. They are growing up all too quickly.

I don't know about next year's A to Z. I don't want to make promises I may not be able to keep.

But I have no complaints about the A to Z Challenge-team. I am happy for the friends and  acquaintances that I have made through this challenge. I'll try to keep in touch.

Best wishes,

Anna

First Commenter:

Taanya Walton
of
Allotments4you

Blogging from A to Z in April - The Letter Z - Thursday 30th April 2015

Thursday 30th April 2015 - The Letter Z

 Z is for 'ZEST', which is IVER in Swedish.

Yes, Z is a part of the Swedish alphabet, but it is not a well-used letter because the z-sound that we say in English does not exist in the Swedish sound system. If you are going to learn how to speak proper Swedish, you will just have to leave your buzzing Z:s at home!

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As Tina Downey pointed out in her Postcards from Sweden, the Swedish alphabet does not end with the letter Z. There are three more letters tagged on at the end: Å, Ä and Ö.

One fun thing about these letters is that two of them are a word in itself. Ö is an island in Swedish and Å is a creek or small river.

There is a Swedish proverb using the word å*: Gå inte över ån efter vatten, 'Don’t cross the stream to get water', meaning 'Don't do things needlessly complicated; settle with a simpler solution when there exists one.' "Carry coals to Newcastle."' (Source.)

Another fun fact about these characters is how they became what they are: letters you have seen before, but with extra dots or accent marks. But they are letters in their own right. You cannot remove the dots or the circle without changing the meaning of the words that are spelled with them. How did this start?

The Å, which looks like an A with a tiny ring on top, was originally spelled as two A:s (aa). But after a time, writers or scribes wanted to save space and wrote a tiny A over the one A. It became a circle over the A.

Both Ä and Ö have a similar history. They were first spelled with an extra 'E' afterwards, as 'ae' and 'oe'. The 'E' was later placed over the 'A' or the 'O' in order to save space. Then the tiny raised 'E' became just a squiggly line and then finally just two dots.

You can see this development if you look at very old handwritten documents or very old printed texts. These tiny letters became diacritical marks**.

Thank you for visiting my blog posts for A to Z in April 2015, which were dedicated to the memory of Tina Downey, who did so much to make the A to Z in April Challenge work.

Best wishes,
Anna

First Commenter:
XXX


P.S.

(Source)

* Watercourses in Sweden and the other Nordic countries are in Swedish usually referred to as bäck, å or älv. An å is usually larger than a bäck (brook, creek) but smaller than an älv (large river). A certain large bäck may however be larger than a certain small å, and a certain large å may be larger than a certain small älv. The word to use about a certain watercourse is often included as part of its name: Göta älv, Stångån. There are regional differences in whether watercourses of a certain size tend to have å or älv in their names. All älvar are found north of Göteborg, but that is also where the largest rivers in Scandinavia are found. For some rivers in southern Sweden the word ström is used, since that is the watercourse word included in their names. Rivers in other parts of the world are usually referred to with the word flod, which is a more neutral word for any watercourse larger than a bäck.

**Diacritic Marks (Source)

A diacritic /daɪ.əˈkrɪtɨk/ – also diacritical mark, diacritical point, or diacritical sign – is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός (diakritikós, "distinguishing"), which is composed of the ancient Greek διά (diá, through) and κρίνω (krínein or kríno, to separate). Diacritic is primarily an adjective, though sometimes used as a noun, whereas diacritical is only ever an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute ( ´ ) and grave ( ` ), are often called accents. Diacritical marks may appear above or below a letter, or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.
The main use of diacritical marks in the Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. Examples from English are the diaereses in naïve and Noël, which show that the vowel with the diaeresis mark is pronounced separately from the preceding vowel; the acute and grave accents, which can indicate that a final vowel is to be pronounced, as in saké and poetic breathèd; and the cedilla under the "c" in the borrowed French word façade, which shows it is pronounced /s/ rather than /k/. In other Latin alphabets, they may distinguish between homonyms, such as the French là ("there") versus la ("the"), which are both pronounced [la]. In Gaelic type, a dot over a consonant indicates lenition of the consonant in question.
In other alphabetic systems, diacritical marks may perform other functions. Vowel pointing systems, namely the Arabic harakat ( ـَ, ـُ, ـُ, etc.) and the Hebrew niqqud ( ַ, ֶ, ִ, ֹ , ֻ, etc.) systems, indicate sounds (vowels and tones) that are not conveyed by the basic alphabet. The Indic virama ( ् etc.) and the Arabic sukūn ( ـْـ ) mark the absence of a vowel. Cantillation marks indicate prosody. Other uses include the Early Cyrillic titlo ( ◌҃ ) and the Hebrew gershayim ( ״ ), which, respectively, mark abbreviations or acronyms, and Greek diacritical marks, which showed that letters of the alphabet were being used as numerals. In the Hanyu Pinyin official romanization system for Chinese, diacritics are used to mark the tones of the syllables in which the marked vowels occur.
In orthography and collation, a letter modified by a diacritic may be treated either as a new, distinct letter or as a letter–diacritic combination. This varies from language to language, and may vary from case to case within a language.
In some cases, letters are used as "in-line diacritics" in place of ancillary glyphs, because they modify the sound of the letter preceding them, as in the case of the "h" in English "sh" and "th".^[1]