[ExI] commentary by one of ours

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty
Subject: Re: [ExI] commentary by one of ours

On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 10:07 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>> ... Sentence fragments, jumpy subject, nothing that holds together well
as 
>> a paragraph.  So work on it!  Work hard!  Get rid of all fillers such 
>> as the plethora of likes and you knows...

>...I think I would write more tersely than I speak...What about so-called
talking with your hands?  ...

It helped me to have a role model, someone I wanted to sound like.  I grew
up in the south, so I had that in my voice, sounded a bit like Jimmy Carter,
who was a dismal failure, but about that time like a lightning bolt from the
clear sky, Carl Sagan.  I saw Cosmos and knew immediately that there was
intelligent life on this planet.  I was new at college so I had the
opportunity to reinvent myself completely, with a new voice.  It took work,
but eventually I sounded and even felt like a different and better person,
more the true me.  My old friends from before didn't like it, still don't.
Even my own family think I am putting on a mask of some sort, because I
don't sound like them anymore.  So be it, I am not going back. 

I found other role models since then, Asimov, Feynman, Steven Jay Gould, AC
Clarke, more recently Richard Dawkins, Sagan never let me down with all the
cool stuff he wrote and said,  Max More was an influence, plenty of others,
but a common characteristic of all those is that they are all effective
users of the spoken word.  They practiced.

spike