Reading Recommendations -- 8/13/2006

• Roy Peter Clark has a fun piece on writing, posted on Poynter Online, titled "Find the syncopation -- and the funk."
  
  While looking around on Clark's section of the Poynter site, I came across his announcement that he has written a book called Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. Apparently, Clark had been working at the Poynter Institute for 25 years, as of 2004, and decided to celebrate by writing a series of essays. He then collected them into a book which was just published. He'll be doling out these tools for free, three per week, on his blog.
  
  Bonus: here's a list of all his Poynter Online articles.
  
  
• Patricia Marx takes a light-hearted look at the junior senator from NY. A good antidote to the usual political analyses.
  
  
• Thomas Frank, whose last book was What's the Matter with Kansas?, is a guest NYTimes OpEd columnist for August. His 12 August piece, "The Spoils of Victimhood," is quite good. Teaser:

  "[T]o hear conservatives tell it, every election is still a referendum on the monster liberalism, which continues to loom like a colossus over the land."

  This piece lives behind the TimesSelect wall. Email me if you want a copy. Or, you know, don't pay your cable bill for a month, and get TS for a year.
  
  
• Steve Yegge, who used to work at Amazon and now works at Google, has made available some of the essays that he posted on what was an internal blog at Amazon. One of particular note begins this way:

  This is certainly the most important thing I'll ever say in my blogs: YOU should write blogs.
  
  Even if nobody reads them, you should write them. It's become pretty clear to me that blogging is a source of both innovation and clarity. I have many of my best ideas and insights while blogging. Struggling to express things that you're thinking or feeling helps you understand them better.

  (Admittedly, readers of this blog may quibble at the universality of Stevey's last line.)
  
  More essays from the Amazon days are listed here, and the new stuff appears here. Lots of it is focused on software engineering ... WAIT, COME BACK ... but the boy can write, and it's not all geekery.