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The Monday Morning Memo

Daniel Denny at work on the campus of Wizard Academy in 2008.
The wizard and his brother-in-law in 2005, following the completion of Chapel Dulcinea.
Danniel and Pennie’s sister Pattie moved into a travel trailer on the land that would become the campus in 2004, and then on November 15, 2013, he packed up his stuff and drove away like The Cat in the Hat at the end of a bookful of adventures. The Crowded Barrel Distillery, the Cantilevered Gym, and the Village of the Lost Boys are the only buildings he did not build. The reason is that we didn’t think of them until after he was gone. The Tower, Engelbrecht House, Spence Manor, Tuscan Hall, Chapel Dulcinea, the Enchanted Emporium Welcome Center, Sunpop Studios, the Williams Marketing building, the Bride’s Room, the Groom’s room, the well house, the Alamo shed, the barrel storage building and the machine shop are the gifts he left behind. Everyone should have a brother-in-law like Daniel Denny.

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Download the PDF "Dictionary of the Cognoscenti of Wizard Academy"

Random Quote:

“

  1. Reverse-engineer what you read. If it feels like good writing, what makes it good? If it’s awful, why?

  2. Prose is a window onto the world. Let your readers see what you are seeing by using visual, concrete language.

  3. Don’t go meta. Minimize concepts about concepts, like “approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, perspective, process, range, role, strategy, tendency,” and “variable.”

  4. Let verbs be verbs. “Appear,” not “make an appearance.”

  5. Beware of the Curse of Knowledge: when you know something, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like not to know it. Minimize acronyms & technical terms. Use “for example” liberally. Show a draft around, & prepare to learn that what’s obvious to you may not be obvious to anyone else.

  6. Omit needless words (Will Strunk was right about this).

  7. Avoid clichés like the plague (thanks, William Safire).

  8. Old information at the beginning of the sentence, new information at the end.

  9. Save the heaviest for last: a complex phrase should go at the end of the sentence.

  10. Prose must cohere: readers must know how each sentence is related to the preceding one. If it’s not obvious, use “that is, for example, in general, on the other hand, nevertheless, as a result, because, nonetheless,” or “despite.”

  11. Revise several times with the single goal of improving the prose.

  12. Read it aloud.

  13. Find the best word, which is not always the fanciest word. Consult a dictionary with usage notes, and a thesaurus.

“

- Steven Pinker

The Wizard Trilogy

The Wizard Trilogy

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