Is the postscript obsolete?

I was reading the Letters to the Editor in a magazine this morning (The Rotarian, if you must know), and one of them included a P.S. That got me to thinking, not for the first time, about the logic of postscripts in today’s world of electronic communication.

A postscript (P.S. = post scriptum) is something added as an afterthought after you’ve written and signed a letter. In a handwritten letter, it is easy to understand. Even in a typed letter, it is not unreasonable: an executive might dictate a letter, which his secretary laboriously typed (perhaps more than once to get it letter-perfect), and when he read it over before signing, he thought of something else he wanted to add. He might write it in by hand, or he might ask the secretary to run it back through her typewriter and tack it onto the end.

In dealing with word processors, however, where additional material can easily be added to the body of the letter and a new copy printed (and it would actually be a challenge to run an existing letter back through the printer to tack on a postscript), do postscripts make any sense?

Well, no, they don’t. Not in terms of logic and logistics, anyway. So why do we still see them?

Because material added as a postscript invariably catches the reader’s eye. Marketing materials (“junk mail” letters printed in the tens or hundreds of thousands) frequently make use of them. And while we may not be deceived by the use of Courier New to give the impression of typed material (is any office still using Courier for letters, anyway?), we can’t help being drawn to that P.S. It seems to say, “But wait! There’s more!” And even if we didn’t read the rest of the letter, there’s that one last chance that we’ll be drawn in by the clincher reserved for the last possible minute.

Another use is to add a handwritten personal note to a form letter sent to multiple recipients. But does that really dull the blow of realizing that you didn’t rate a personal letter?

It could therefore be argued that a postscript has no place in a sensible business letter. When you have received (or thought of) new or additional information, it may color or change what you have already written, and you owe it to your reader to incorporate that new information in what you have already presented, so as not to waste the reader’s time.

So save that “P.S. I love you” for your handwritten note, where it will certainly be appreciated.

A Million Little Pieces

Although I haven’t read James Frey’s book, I am aware that the “million little pieces” of his title have to do with the fragmentation or splintering of his life. In my case, what is fragmented is the record of my life.

As I was writing in my (paper) diary the other morning, it struck me how little is really recorded there. The day-to-day details of my life are more often found in my emails, newsgroup posts, blog entries, Web pages, and the like. To add to the fragmentation, I recently joined Twitter, mostly just to see what it’s all about. If this keeps up, before you know it I’ll have a Facebook page, too!

If I were to die today, my survivors would find a couple of file cabinets full of mostly outdated paper, a dozen or so file boxes of old letters, and many years’ worth of Day-Timers (in which I keep my diary), but unless they looked at my hard drive, they would have very few documents from my current life.

In a way this is a good thing: while there would be plenty of other stuff to dig through (I inherited my parents’ packrat tendencies, not to mention their accumulations of paper), my heirs would not be faced with the quantity of memorabilia I inherited from my parents. All the documents I have created since 1992 can still fit quite comfortably on a relatively small and portable removable drive. And they would already be reasonably well organized.

But would they provide the same sense of discovery, excitement, and satisfaction I have derived from reading letters and diaries written, some of them nearly a century ago, by my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, in their own (sometimes indecipherable) handwriting? Somehow I doubt it.

Worse still, would anyone care? Would anyone really wade through the overwhelming volume of material to find the few documents that really matter? One of my “customers” at my monthly Word Q&A sessions at our public library wanted to learn how to set up a folder of documents for her son to find easily in such an event. We created a Word folder for these documents and put a shortcut to it on her desktop labeled “ATTN: RICHARD,” in hopes that her son would spot it if, in his grief, he fired up her computer (presumably she will alert him to this while she’s still this side of the grass).

Still, this reflection reinforces my sense of the need to organize my own memoirs (by writing a coherent autobiography) before I kick the bucket. Certainly I have a wealth of source material!

I’ve Been Thinking…

Really I have. Unfortunately, none of the things I’ve been thinking have been worth writing about. Or at least I can’t seem to make them “jell” into a reasonable blog post. Since no one is reading this blog, anyway, I guess it doesn’t really matter.

The Elephant in My Head

I’ve been thinking about elephants a lot lately.

Elephants are so massive (one might even say “mammoth,” but I’ll resist the temptation) that it’s not surprising that they make a memorable impression on anyone who has seen one. Not only have they left their mark on history (Hannibal crossing the Alps) and entertainment (what would a circus—or a circus parade—be without elephants?), but they have entered the English language in several colorful idioms. An unwanted and unusable gift is a “white elephant,” and we supposedly see pink elephants when we’re tipsy. The unpleasant fact that is staring everyone in the face but no one wants to talk about is “the elephant in the room.” And we tackle an overwhelming task by “eating the elephant,” one bite at a time.

At the moment I’m facing a lot of elephants that have to be eaten, but the elephant that has captured my thoughts lately is the one the blind men visited. Until I googled the subject, I wasn’t aware that this tale is an ancient Asian fable or parable, the moral or point of which, as expressed by Wikipedia, is that “reality may be viewed differently depending upon one’s perspective, suggesting that what seems an absolute truth may be relative due to the deceptive nature of half-truths.” My familiarity with the story, however, came from the nineteenth-century poem by John Godfrey Saxe, which begins:

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

Each of the six men explores a different part of the elephant and comes to a different conclusion, pronouncing that the elephant “is very like” a wall (its side), a spear (its tusk), a snake (its trunk), a tree (its leg), a fan (its ear), or a rope (its tail). Although each of the men grasped a part of the truth of the elephant, none of them saw the big picture.

What has brought this to mind lately is reflecting on the nature of personality, personal history, and autobiography. Throughout our lives we have many experiences and meet many people. We share certain experiences—and certain types of experiences—with certain people. If we have siblings, we share a large body of family history with them, experiences that no one outside the family can truly appreciate. If we are married, we have another tremendous body of shared experience in common with our spouses. Our work colleagues may be very familiar with our work projects but know nothing about our personal life. Some acquaintances we see only in church or on the soccer field or at PTA meetings. Our neighbors we may know only enough to wave to, perhaps to exchange pleasantries with. Each relative, friend, or acquaintance may know a great deal about us (our family, our history, our accomplishments), but no single person knows us as we know ourselves, and by the time most of us start thinking about writing an autobiography, those few people who may know things about us that we don’t personally remember (our parents and other elders) are usually past being consulted.

It’s probably a good thing that no one knows everything about us, but as we start to write an autobiography, we have to think about what things we want people to know and remember, what sort of historical legacy we want to leave for our heirs.

In many ways autobiography is harder than biography. The biographer, especially of a long-dead subject, has a finite amount of source material to work from. Interpreting it may be problematic, especially if the subject is a controversial figure, but the problem is primarily one of collecting data. If the subject is still living, or recently dead, the writer may interview people who knew him or her, but, like the blind men, each of these relatives, friends, or acquaintances will have known the subject in only a given context, and the writer’s job is to put all these details together. The task of the autobiographer, on the other hand, who theoretically knows everything about himself, is to winnow out the superfluous details and present a consistent picture.

It is practically a given that I will eventually write an autobiography. Both my grandmothers wrote them; they also wrote biographies of my grandfathers. Both my grandmothers also wrote about their fathers-in-law and one about her father and grandfather. My mother wrote her autobiography and would very likely, if she had lived long enough, have written a biography of my father as well. I’ve already written several short autobiographical essays, thinking perhaps to collect them at some point. It’s a family tradition, and the desire to preserve our memories is evidently in our genes.

I definitely have ample source material. I am in the dubiously enviable (and I think relatively rare) position of having not only every single letter I ever wrote my parents (mostly from 1962 when I went off to college, but a few scattered earlier ones from summer vacations spent away from them) but also every single letter my mother wrote to her parents, in which she describes me and my younger brothers and recounts our activities (sadly, these letters don’t cover my first year, when my mother was living at home; the equally detailed letters she wrote to my father, who was with the Fifth Army in Italy, went to the bottom of the China Sea in a typhoon; luckily Dad was on a different ship!). Although my letters to my mother ended when she and Dad moved to Fairhope in the spring of 1991, in the fall of 1992 my son went off to college, and I have copies of my letters to him and later to my daughter, through 1999. Obviously a wealth, perhaps a surfeit, of raw data to supplement my own memories.

“Eating the elephant” in this case requires deciding what picture of myself I want to present and selecting the details that will help to portray this. To get to that point I will have to figure out what my life was “about,” and I don’t think I’m at that point yet, but from time to time I read books on writing autobiography and continue to collect ideas for presentation. One influential book I read several years ago was Tristine Rainer’s Your Life as Story: Writing the New Autobiography, which helps writers find the “story” their lives have to tell, making the autobiography read like a novel. Currently I’m reading Writing from Life: Telling Your Soul’s Story, by Susan Wittig Albert (one of my favorite mystery writers), which takes a topical approach, suggesting a number of broad themes to explore, and I find that quite appealing, as it is not entirely unlike the way I had begun.

Meanwhile, I’ve been enjoying exploring and transcribing the original material my parents (and grandparents) left in the form of letters and diaries, which give a vivid picture of their lives, their thoughts, and the world around them. But that is a subject for another post.

How Not to Read a Book

It would be absurd to say that I was born a copy editor, but the genes certainly seem to run in the family. My mother was an English teacher before she married and always wrote and spoke very carefully, my daughter is a gifted proofreader, and even my son, though lackadaisical in his own writing, notices errors in published works.

This ability is a mixed blessing, of course. When the one error on a written or printed page is the first thing that jumps out at you, especially if you can’t resist correcting it, you don’t always have a lot of friends, and “reading for pleasure” can sometimes be downright painful. But copy editors perform a useful service (though there seem to be fewer and fewer of them doing it, judging from the published books I read), and every writer should be grateful for the help they can provide.

I was reminded of this (as I often am) this morning by seeing the moon, a few days shy of its last quarter, high in the sky as I was walking. According to the moonrise/moonset table for my location available from the U.S. Naval Observatory, the moon rose last night at 10:56 and will set this morning at 10:13. Anyone who wrote a book and set a scene on the evening of June 22, 2008, under a full moon would obviously be mistaken. Although a copy editor is supposed to check on such things and alert the author, both of them know that few readers will notice or care. But if you make the moon full tonight and then make it full again two weeks from tonight, some reader probably will notice that anomaly.

Protecting authors from that sort of blunder is part of what a good copy editor should do, which is why it’s often difficult for a copy editor to render an opinion on the book in general. “Well, what did you think of it?” is a question I dread, for I often have no overall impression, just a collection of “things that need to be fixed.”

Errors in chronology can be among the most difficult to deal with. If the author has been vague about dates, these will not usually be an issue, but if there are even a few specific dates to hang events on, then every other event in the book must be evaluated in relation to those set points. I think perhaps the worst problem I ever encountered was with two children whose ages, it was clear from later context, were supposed to be separated by a year or two. Yet careful reading and calculating the timing of events showed that they had to have been born about three months apart—to the same woman!

Errors of fact should be easier to avoid. The Internet has made research so easy that there is no excuse for misspelling a brand name, attributing a quotation to the wrong person, or introducing anachronisms. The same writer who created the prodigiously fecund mother also had one of his characters flying a company Learjet—in 1960. Unfortunately, according to Wikipedia, “The original Learjet 23 [the first model] was a six- to eight-seater and first flew on October 7, 1963, with the first production model being delivered in October 1964.” I suggested the Grumman Gulfstream I, a turboprop model that was a popular corporate aircraft during the required period.

The hardest part of being a proofreader/copy editor, however, is the knowledge that all your friends will gleefully gloat over any mistake you make—and these are inevitable. Because an immutable fact—and the reason even the best writer needs a proofreader—is that it is impossible to proofread your own work (because you know what you intended to say, and so that’s what you read, regardless of what’s on the page). I say this in advance, knowing that, according to whatever corollary of Murphy’s Law governs such things, any piece of writing that points out others’ errors is bound to contain an error of its own.