Louise Bennett had a programme called “Miss Lou’s Views” on Jamaican JBC Radio in the 1970s. One correspondent wrote in a daily newspaper that such a programme should be scrapped because it tended to perpetuate ignorance in Jamaicans. Though Louise Bennett has sought to foster love and respect for the Jamaican dialect, she has never advocated that Standard English be abandoned. She argued that for far too long it was considered not respectable to use the dialect, because there was a social stigma attached to the kind of person who used it. She added that many people still did not accept that for many Caribbean people, there were many things best said in the language of the folk. (“Bennett on Bennett” 101).

Louise Bennett, Caribbean cultural icon, linguist and poet, has been writing and performing using the Jamaican Creole since the 1950s. For a long time, despite the fact that her work gained limited favour among the working class and some intellectuals, her writings did not appear in the important Jamaican anthology Focus in the 1940s to the 1960s, and the Jamaica Poetry League ignored her. In 1962, she was included in the Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature, but not in the section for poetry. It took the social and political upheaval of the 1970s for academics and others to accept Louise Bennett as a guru of the Jamaican Creole. She received the Order of Jamaica in 1974.

Miss Lou, the Honourable Louise Bennett-Coverley O.M., O.J., finally has her day! September 7 has officially been declared, by Governor-General Sir Howard Cooke, to be ‘Miss Lou Day’. The day marks the works of the esteemed first lady of comedy in promoting, celebrating, and exploring Jamaican culture. It also marks the day of her birth.

This is the dead land this is cactus land 40 Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man's hand Under the twinkle of a fading star. Is it like this 45 In death's other kingdom Waking alone At the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness Lips that would kiss 50 Form prayers to broken stone

Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear 70 At five o'clock in the morning. Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act 75 Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion 80 And the response Falls the Shadow Life is very long Between the desire And the spasm 85 Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow 90 For Thine is the Kingdom For Thine is Life is For thine is the This is the way the way the world ends 95 This is the way the way the world ends This is the way the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

The eyes are not here There are no eye here In this valley of dying stars In this hollow valley 55 This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms. In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river. 60 Sightless, unless The eyes reappear As the perpetual star Multifoliate rose Of death's twilight kingdom 65 The hope only Of empty men.

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams In death's dream kingdom 20 These do not appear: There the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There is a tree swinging

Those who have crossed With direct eyes to death's other Kingdom Remember us--if at all-- not as lost 15 Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when 5 We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless

THE HOLLOW MEN

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves Waited for rain, while the black clouds Gathered far distant, over Himavant. The jungle crouched, humped in silence. Then spoke the thunder

V. What the Thunder Said

IV. Death by Water

burning

Tiresias

Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter noon Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants C.i.f. London: documents at sight, Asked me in demotic French To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

III. The Fire Sermon

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight. Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

II. A Game of Chess

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: 'Stetson! ‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden, ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? ‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

Unreal City,

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards.

‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; ‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’ —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Oed’ und leer das Meer.

I. The Burial of the Dead

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

Sailing to Byzantium

I

That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium.

That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.

By William Butler Yeats

The steps that were taken began with an internet search to find English learning material tailored to the sixth grade level, after which the core mission became finding lesson plans on the subject, verb, and object constituencies used in the lesson. In preparing the lesson plan,

The research and planning of the course material became integral to the teaching. In the first stages of planning, there was an awareness that, as a participant in the teaching role, research needed to be done to locate material and rehash it to fit in the lesson plan

W. E. B. DU BOIS The Niagara Movement Address to the Country t [Although in existence for only five years, the Niagara Movement was well known for its uncompromising, confrontational civil rights agenda

Kuleshov's early accounts demonstrate that the essence of the experiment resides neither in the order or quantity of shots, nor in the direction that the actor is looking (although it is sensitive to this). As Roberta Pearson and Philip Simpson note, the explanatory power of the Kuleshov effect lies in its facilitation of both Eisensteinian, abstract meaning and linear continuity editing.65 In addition, it is not limited to the audience's failure to perceive sameness in the actor's face. Rather, the essence of the early accounts is that the editor shapes what is seen or not seen by the spectator, which Martine Joly and Marc Nicolas refer to as the "hallucina-tory effect" of the Kuleshov effect.66 In Kuleshov's letter and prison versions, the actor is not asked to reduce his performance to an expressionless ground zero; the actor actually acts, and this performance is then transposed into another sequence within a distinct and rich situational context. However, for this to [End Page 74] work, the actor's facial expression must be "expressively indistinct," to borrow Riis's term. on a human face, both overwhelming and underwhelming feelings can produce immobilized, mask-like facial expressions,67 and the Kuleshov effect operates within this range of emotional ambiguity. The narrative situations employed by Kuleshov—prison, freedom, bankruptcy, and betrayal—are nuanced, complex phenomenological states, which are essential in order to justify the indistinct expressiveness of the actor.

Semion Rayburt: lev Vladimorivich, what is the story of the discovery that is now called the Kuleshov effect? Lev Kuleshov: Well, that is the result of long sittings at the editing table … and … various experiments that I conducted, editing together that which is different … different combined with different. And so I realized that if you combine one shot with another [End Page 66] shot, or one shot with two other shots, then you get not only that which is … depicted … in each of those shots, but something new … that, which is not in those shots … that, which does not exist. Today, this is known to any young filmmaker, at the very least, to every good director. Today, all of cinema works in this way. What is this? Is this my invention? Well, you know, in philosophy, there is a concept known as necessity and chance. The fact that it is called the Kuleshov effect is chance. But it being an effect is a necessity. Because by that time, cinema culture had matured to the point that it required new means of expression. It could no longer remain a non-art … it had to at all costs become an art.40

Aristarco's portrayal of Kuleshov is that of a skillful pedagogue and a "formal revolutionary" whose primary contribution was passing his theoretical knowledge to the more brilliant and politically conscious Pudovkin. Indeed, Aristarco finds fault with Kuleshov's focus on organizational problems at the expense of a more ideological commitment.31 Echoing Hans Richter's claim that Pudovkin's Film Technique and Film Acting for cinema was the equivalent of leonardo da Vinci's drawings,32 Aristarco credits to Pudovkin his "epic principle": the notion that editing is the "fragmentation of an idea" through the "disparate elements that arose from the connection between individual shots."33 leyda, who witnessed firsthand the breakthroughs of Soviet cinema, portrays Kuleshov not as a mere technical mentor but as the foundation from which theoretical and technical achievements in Soviet cinema emerged. According to leyda, Pudovkin's Shahmatnaia goriachka (Chess fever, 1925) "cannot be imagined split from Kuleshov's ingenious montage method" or distinguished from "Kuleshov's etudes and films."34

Taking an (especially inexpressive) close-up of Mozzhukhin from an old film, he juxtaposed it with successive shots from other films, namely a plate of soup, a coffin and a child. He projected the sequences to unknowing spectators who, according to Pudovkin, were amazed at the artistry with which Mozzhukhin expressed hunger, sadness or paternal tenderness."28 [End Page 63]

she sang.   

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,    Why, when the singing ended and we turned    Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,    The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,    As the night descended, tilting in the air,    Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,    Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,    Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

   It was her voice that made    The sky acutest at its vanishing.    She measured to the hour its solitude.    She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,    Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,    As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her    Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.    The song and water were not medleyed sound    Even if what she sang was what she heard,    Since what she sang was uttered word by word. It may be that in all her phrases stirred    The grinding water and the gasping wind;    But it was she and not the sea we heard.

constant cry, caused constantly a cry,  

mimic motion    Made

water-walled

One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Their boisterous devotion to the sun, Not as a god, but as a god might be, Naked among them, like a savage source. Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, Out of their blood, returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, The windy lake wherein their lord delights, The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, That choir among themselves long afterward. They shall know well the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn. And whence they came and whither they shall go The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

VIII

They shall know well the heavenly fellowship

  VII

Not as a god, but as a god might be,

  IV

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Sunday Morning

It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.

The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air.

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.

Although the relationships of wave driven erosion derived here can be used to inform coastal retreat models, further research is needed to quantify how the combined wave and rainfall processes and feedbacks may influence overall longer term cliff retreat rates.

High temporal and spatial resolution of both cliffs and the fronting beach are needed to quantify the wave driven erosion processes, understand coastal cliff morphology, and improve cliff retreat modeling and prediction.

found evidence that rainfall was a primary driver of cliff erosion because the low temporal frequency of the observations did not resolve separate time periods with elevated wave impacts and no rainfall. In addition, the volume of material eroded on the lower cliff, related to wave erosion, is smaller compared to the larger eroded volumes on the upper cliff, which are better correlated with rainfall

Good correlation exists between wave metrics and cliff erosion at elevations that exceed the potential wave runup and impact elevation by several meters, suggesting that waves indirectly influence upper cliff erosion by eroding lower levels. For example, as a lower cliff elevation waves erode the cliff base, cliff stability decreases leading to higher elevation failures

Of the three tested wave metrics, wave impact height squared explained more of the observed erosion. The result is consistent with several empirical and theoretical wave impact metrics

Cliff face erosion rates, incident waves, wave-cliff impact metrics, and rainfall were all elevated during winters when fronting beaches were most eroded

The effects of complex bathymetry and beach orientation were simulated with a spectral refraction wave model initialized with offshore buoy data

A cliff top railroad, critical to the regional economy, is currently situated within a few meters of the cliff edge. Historical episodic cliff failures have resulted in several train derailments (Kuhn and Shepard, 1984) and landslides during the study period triggered several temporary rail closures and emergency repairs.

The cliff face is weakened by chemical, physical, and biological weathering, including desiccation and root wedging, and subject to sheet erosion and rilling from rainfall, while the cliff base is also subject to marine erosion processes (e.g. wave action).

The studied 2.5 km reach of coastal cliffs in Del Mar, California and northern Torrey Pines State Beach

A truck-mounted lidar resolved the fronting beach and convoluted surface of the ~10–25 m high cliffs.

Improving the management of wet-year supplies is a critical climate change adaptation strategy. This will require identifying cost-effective investment options and adapting operations and regulatory approaches to facilitate capturing more water in wet times.

Modernize and simplify regulations to provide water for the environment. The current mix of state and federal regulations is unnecessarily rigid, not well coordinated, and not always logical. Two efforts now underway—the State Water Board’s comprehensive revision of its water quality control plan for the Delta, and endangered species consultations governing CVP and SWP operations (e.g., Biological Opinions, Incidental Take Permits)—provide an opportunity to coordinate and simplify regulations, and to increase flexibility to help both environmental water managers and water users respond to rapidly changing hydrologic conditions. One central change needed is to pivot from a system based on water year types—where regulatory requirements can change abruptly with subtle changes in conditions—to a system that operates on a continuum based on month-to-month hydrology.

Wet years are increasingly important for supply. Even in extended dry periods, wet years still occur and are vital for supply. During very wet years, a large volume of water is uncapturable, and insufficient capacity to store water south of the Delta becomes a limitation on export pumping. Expanding above- and below-ground storage capacity could increase Delta exports without changing current regulations. In such years, more water could also be captured and stored upstream. Managers also need to adapt how they manage water storage in the watershed in a warming climate, where the snowpack is storing less water than it has historically.

Environmental regulations have also increased Delta outflow. During much of the last century, outflow was declining as water use grew. In the mid–1990s and 2000s, regulations on water flow and quality were expanded—and export pumping limits were set—to improve ecosystem health and protect endangered species. These changes have reduced exports in most years and increased outflow in dry years. In combination, increased outflow to meet salinity standards and protect the ecosystem has broken the long-term decline in the portion of runoff that becomes Delta outflow. Despite these changes, populations of many native species and the health of Delta ecosystems continue to decline.

Maintaining salinity is requiring more outflow. During the early 1990s, conditions seem to have changed in the Delta, requiring greater system outflow to meet salinity standards. The reasons are not well-documented, and research is underway to improve the understanding of trends, including estimates of in-Delta use and outflow and how they relate to salinity control. When system water needs increase, this puts increased pressure on upstream reservoirs, which must release more water to meet this higher outflow demand. Looking ahead, studies indicate that changes such as sea level rise, the creation of new tidal habitat in the western Delta, and other factors may lead to the need for more system outflow.

Upstream use is rising—and Delta inflow falling. Upstream uses appear to be rising as a share of runoff in the Delta watershed in dry and critically dry years. In 2021, upstream uses accounted for a record 84 percent of runoff from the watershed. This shift is reducing inflows to the Delta, making it harder to meet other management objectives. While it is likely that increased evaporative demand is playing a role, it is not possible to determine the causes of increased upstream water use under the current monitoring system

The watershed is experiencing important changes in runoff and water use The climate of the Delta watershed is changing, with a significant rise in temperatures over the past few decades. California also has been in a relatively dry spell, following a spate of wet years in the late 1990s (first figure). Warming is increasing “evaporative demand”—or what can be thought of as the “thirst of the atmosphere”—making droughts more intense. Warming is also causing significant declines in snowpack, historically a key part of the watershed’s seasonal water storage. These changes are impacting water sources, uses, and outflow—and posing major challenges for water supply managers, fish and wildlife managers, and state and federal regulators. Five key trends have emerged:

Regulations ensure additional outflow to protect the ecosystem and several species of endangered fish. During dry periods, this “ecosystem outflow” is small compared to the outflow needed to maintain salinity, but during wetter years, outflow for the environment increases. Finally, during most years, there are periods when runoff exceeds the capacity of infrastructure to divert and store it. This “uncaptured outflow” becomes quite large during wet years (see second figure).

Delta outflow. A significant portion of runoff in the watershed becomes outflow into San Francisco Bay: Some outflow, referred to here as “system outflow,” is needed to repel seawater from the Delta at all times. Without it, Delta water would be unusable by cities and farms. In dry periods, reservoir releases are needed to keep salinity low enough. System outflow also supports the Delta ecosystem, but this outflow would be needed to keep water usable, even if there were no ecosystem management objectives in the Delta

Water sources. Rain and snow in the headwaters, along with rainfall in the valley and the Delta, generate runoff. The volume of runoff varies dramatically between wet and dry years, with frequent droughts and occasional floods (see first figure). Upstream reservoirs change the runoff available in any given year by storing water in wet years and releasing it in dry years

The Delta is important to all Californians The Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta lies at the confluence of two of the state’s largest rivers and at the head of the San Francisco Estuary. Forty percent of California’s runoff comes from the Delta watershed. It supplies water to roughly 30 million residents and more than 6 million acres of farmland upstream of and within the Delta, as well as in other watersheds including the Bay Area, the southern San Joaquin Valley, the Central Coast, and Southern California. The ecological health of the Delta and the reliability of its water supplies are in decline. Given the challenges facing the watershed and the competing uses for scarce supplies, Delta water management issues are a source of conflict and many misunderstandings about water use. Weak water accounting systems make this worse.

The Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta and its watershed supply water to cities and farms across much of California; they also support commercial and recreational fisheries and provide vital habitat for many endangered native fishes and other aquatic species. During dry periods, most of the outflow from the Delta into San Francisco Bay is required to keep the Delta fresh enough for agricultural and urban uses, while during wet periods, most outflow is runoff that is too great to be captured and used. The climate in the watershed is changing: the past two decades have seen record warmth, making droughts more intense, with higher evaporation and declining snowpack. Water use upstream of the Delta appears to be rising, resulting in less inflow to the Delta. To address declining ecosystem health, regulations have also been changing, leading to higher outflows and lower water exports to other regions. These changes have not stopped the decline in native species. To better cope with more intense droughts, management of the Delta and its watershed would benefit from a suite of improvements in water use tracking and oversight, updates in water flow and quality regulations, and cost-effective investments to store more water in wet years.

the structural and sedimentary geology at Moss Beach and James Fitzgerald Marine Reserve.

Many of the homes with spectacular ocean vistas are perched precariously above cliffs adjacent to the San Andreas Fault and were constructed on poorly consolidated sediments. Landslides, slumping, and erosion have caused rapid retreat of the cliff line, which has caused numerous perimeter homes to be condemned and abandoned. Ray also provided insights into a little known report about damage assessments to new homes following the local 1957 M5.3 earthquake.

erosion rates in coastal bluffs

About 300,000 yd.³ of sediment was dredged from the main ship channel and disposed of in a target area immediately offshore of the erosion hotspot at Ocean Beach. California State University at Monterey Bay and the USGS are currently monitoring and modeling the fate of the dredge sediments to determine if this new practice should be permanently implemented. This very progressive, low-impact form of shore line protection and beach nourishment has been successfully conducted in Holland for many years. For more information about the USGS studies at the mouth of San Francisco Bay, see:

Monty Hampton and colleagues provided an introduction to the sediment dynamics of the San Francisco Bay-Ocean Beach system as well as the history of the 1.5-km long O’Shaughnessy seawall built between 1915 and 1929 to protect the Great Highway.

The 1997-98 El Niño exposed the 12-foot diameter transport box that carries approximately one third of the city’s sewage out to the sea. A multibeam survey conducted by the USGS in the fall of 2004 indicated that the San Francisco Bar has been contracting since the 1950s. Retreat of the laterally extensive San Francisco Bar has resulted in erosion of shoals that once protected the Sloat region from direct wave attack. In June 2005, the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers implemented a new dredge disposal program to address this problem.

Historically, the shore line South of Sloat Blvd. was situated several hundred feet landward of its current location. The shore line was extended seaward with fill during the late 1800s and early 1900s to promote urban development in the Western areas of the city.

Ocean Beach is a high-energy system with classic offshore bars and troughs that are scoured by powerful rip currents.

Both of these geomorphic features are fed by sediment flushed out of San Francisco Bay and shaped by the strong tidal currents and storm waves originating in the Pacific Ocean. An understanding of these large-scale features is very important because Ocean Beach is strongly affected by tidal currents emanating through the Golden Gate as well as wave refraction around the San Francisco Bar

Ocean Beach and the extensive dune fields that covered many areas of San Francisco formed during the post 20,000 year rise in sea level. West of the Golden Gate Bridge, the seafloor is covered by one of the largest sand wave fields in the world as well as the seaward San Francisco Bar, an ebb-tidal delta covering over 100 km²

Coastal Cliffs-Landslides and Urban Developments Reported by John Karachewski Photos by Phil Garbutt

Course materials will either be the four books listed below, material in “Files” on Canvas, or material on the Poetry Foundation web site (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/). I heartily recommend this site as a resource for learning about poets, poetic movements, etc.

In the intro lecture, accessible via “Modules” on your sidebar, I introduce you to modernism in the arts (c. 1900-1930). That's the only time all semester that I’ll do a lot of talking or deliver asynchronous instruction. After that, the class will center on large- and small-group discussions. Our readings and viewings fall into four main categories: theoretical backgrounds (in the intro lecture and during the first two weeks), poetry, fiction, and film. Together, these texts aim to give you a sense of how modernism’s legacies continue to unfold up to the present day.  

The Dadist

The Dadist

The kind you can’t recover from You sent a half-written email to a potential employer. You forwarded an annoying customer email but forgot to remove them from the send list. Perhaps you sent an insulting email to a manager. Or maybe you went on a rampage about an editor you didn’t like and sent it to your publisher by accident.  Is it serious? There are some email mistakes you can’t recover from. At this point, it’s best to let the potential job go, apologize to your manager for unprofessional behavior, and let the chips fall where they may.  Everyone makes mistakes Everyone’s made an email mistake, from CEOs to administrative assistants. It’s part of working life. But mistakes come in a range of seriousness. Plus, what may strike fear in a sender often turns out to be a relatively innocuous mistake to the recipient.  How do you recover from email mistakes? Typically, by addressing them and clearing up any issues before they have a chance to arise. 

The reply-all  That awkward moment when you put someone on blast in a massive email chain when you were just trying to vent to your work bestie. There’s nothing worse than everyone on your team seeing your bad behavior on display.  Is it serious?  The seriousness of the email depends on what your reply was. If it was a snarky or rude message, this could lead to action from your manager. It might result in only a meeting, but it could reduce future opportunities or harm your reputation.  How to recover An immediate apology is the best way to recover from an accidental reply-all. Whether you share this apology with the whole email chain or just the person you called out is up to you. But you might also need to speak with your teammates, boss, or other people you work with regularly to maintain those relationships. 

The unfinished draft Before you could finish your email, you accidentally hit send. Oops! Maybe your draft email was half-written, unedited, or full of emotions you didn’t intend to share.  Is it serious?  It depends on which type of unfinished draft you sent. If it was incomplete or unedited, you might be fine! However, if it was an angry email you didn’t mean to send, brace yourself.  How to recover If you simply sent an incomplete email, don’t panic. Send the complete email with an explanation at the top—“Oops, here’s the rest of that email”—and you should be OK. If it was an emotion-filled email, though, you might not be able to recover as easily. You should apologize, and you might even want to take your apology offline and do it in person or over the phone. 

Have you ever hit send on an email and immediately regretted it? Were you frustrated that your chance to “undo” came and went before you could react? We’ve all been there.  According to Loom.com, the average office worker sends dozens of emails a day—excluding personal emails. When you’re relying on email that much, you’re bound to make a mistake once in a while.  If you’re anything like the many workers who overthink the emails and messages they send, read on to ease your mind. We’re exploring the most common email mistakes and how you can recover from them. 

The typo-filled email Spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes are among the most common mistakes in emails. Mistakes like these can diminish trust in your professionalism and knowledge. The good news is that these are easily prevented. Is it serious? This issue isn’t severe. Sure, it’s not great for your reputation, but you probably didn’t offend anyone with errors like these.  How to recover You can’t take back the email. The best thing to do is hope your recipient didn’t notice and prevent mistakes like these in the future. You can avoid grammatical mistakes by giving your email a thorough read before sending it. You can even read it aloud to catch issues your eyes skip over. Another way to prevent mistakes is by using software such as Grammarly to automatically check all your emails before sending them. 

2 The wrong person We all love autosuggest—that is, until it suggests the wrong person, and you don’t notice until after you’ve hit send. You think you’re sending an email to Joe Schmo, but it went to Joe DiMaggio instead! OK, you’re probably not emailing Joe DiMaggio, but you get the idea.  Is it serious?  Well, the seriousness of the issue depends on what you’ve sent. Sending your email to the wrong person is typically an innocuous mistake, as long as the email wasn’t confidential or didn’t involve personal or private information.  How to recover Simply send a follow-up email to let the recipient know the email wasn’t meant for them. If it was a harmless email or irrelevant to them, the recipient will probably be confused and either delete the email or respond to let you know they’re confused. If the email was confidential, you might want to speak to the relevant parties to let them know about your mistake.

7 Common email mistakes 1 The misspelled name Is it Rachel or Rachael? Jonathan, Jon, or John? We all have spelling biases based on the people we grew up around. Misspelling a name will happen from time to time! This is a prevalent mistake with last names.  Is it serious? Misspelling a name might offend some people, but it’s one of the less intense mistakes you could make.  How to recover Send a quick email acknowledging your mistake and spelling their name correctly. Let them know you respect them and want to ensure you get it right. Try using this guide to start your email off on the right foot. 

7 Common Email Mistakes (and How to Recover)

A Grammarly spokeswoman said that its team is constantly working to improve the user experience. “We humbly recognize that the product is far from perfect and that the linguistic challenges are plentiful.”

Audio producer and podcast host Ronald Young Jr., 38, echoes that sentiment: “Being a good writer takes practice. Autocorrecting software keeps you from making common mistakes [but] you still have to know how to communicate effectively outside of the basics of grammar.

Though the company promises to help people become better writers, Ms. Burke questions that claim, especially if users don’t already have a firm grasp of the laws of language. “These folks trust the program to be right, and…the program isn’t always right,” she said. “You’re not going to learn from Grammarly, but your writing can become more polished if you use it.”

Zoe Burke first encountered Grammarly as an English major in college through targeted Google ads. That it not only helped fix typos and missing punctuation, but also improved style and tone made it stand out from other built-in proofreading tools. But as she continued her studies, eventually earning her master’s degree in English from the University of Dayton and joining its faculty as an instructor, she noticed the software missing errors and overcorrecting. When she ran her Master’s Thesis, about a composition course she was teaching, through the program, she said, “Grammarly kept wanting to change ‘composing’ to ‘composting.’”

No, Grammarly doesn’t live up to its promises to catch errors and improve your writing

Even professional writers and editors, particularly journalists, have adopted the tool. As their industry has gone digital, people like Gabrielle Healy, 26, a digital editor, are being asked to write and edit faster than ever before. Without the time to proofread herself, Ms. Healy started to notice that typos were slipping through the cracks. After she downloaded Grammarly, she was able to get them under control. “I’m constantly catching errors with it…. I [needed] the hand,” she said.

Having that second line of defense against typos has made Grammarly invaluable for some professionals. “I trust it more than I trust my…own checking,” said Ms. Pickett, who describes her work pace as “harried and chaotic.” She maintains that good grammar is paramount if one wants to be taken seriously. “While a wrinkled shirt or some misspellings may not matter to other generations, those in leadership still care, as do many people at the heads of their industry,” executives with whom she needs to work and negotiate. “Proper grammar just starts you off on the right foot.”

The strategy might have brought the company downloads, but it hasn’t always made it well-liked. On Urban Dictionary, a website that can serve as a helpful glossary of internet slang and opinion, Grammarly is defined as “the reason ad blockers exist.” The service is also regularly maligned on social media sites for misguided or annoying edits. So, for all the companies’ advertising bluster, is the service actually making us clearer and more concise writers? Here, we present both sides.

Since the company was founded in 2009, its software has ballooned in popularity. In 2020, the company boasted 30 million active users. It’s likely that many of these people found out about the service through the company’s digital advertising—according to a report from Winmo, a cloud-based sales prospecting tool, Grammarly spent over $100 million in the first quarter of 2019 alone, and was the highest spending YouTube advertiser in the period by far.

The free version of the software functions like a more sophisticated version of the spell-check tool in Google Docs or Microsoft Word, except it works anywhere you type. Writing an email? Grammarly will notice that you’ve misspelled “synergy.” Filling out a job application? Grammarly will notice that you’ve used “effect” when you meant “affect.” Firing off a spicy Tweet? Grammarly might tell you that your tone is a bit accusatory. (Unfortunately, it cannot prevent you from sending it off anyway.) If you’re willing to spend $30 a month (or $144 for a year) for Grammarly Premium, you’ll unlock more kinds of suggested edits, including ones that tackle your formatting and repetitive language.

IN JOANNAH PICKETT’S line of work, communication and first impressions are vital. And as that work has increasingly moved online, the associate vice president of the department of Alumni Relations & Development at Trinity University in San Antonio and her team are often making those first impressions via emails. When Ms. Pickett, 47, noticed her colleagues sending messages with sloppy text—including misspelled words and incorrectly used prepositions—she asked them to download the free version of Grammarly, a free-to-download typing and proofreading assistant.

For the recurring series, That’s Debatable, we take on a contentious issue of the day and present two spirited arguments—one in favor and the other emphatically opposed.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond any experience,your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,  or which i cannot touch because they are too near

But Cummings’ supporters acclaimed his achievement. In a 1959 essay reprinted in his collection Babel to Byzantium, James Dickey proclaimed: “I think that Cummings is a daringly original poet, with more vitality and more sheer, uncompromising talent than any other living American writer.” Although admitting that Cummings’ work was not faultless, Dickey stated that he felt “ashamed and even a little guilty in picking out flaws” in the poems, a process he likened to calling attention to “the aesthetic defects in a rose. It is better to say what must finally be said about Cummings: that he has helped to give life to the language.” In similar terms, Rosenthal explained that “Cummings’s great forte is the manipulation of traditional forms and attitudes in an original way. In his best work he has the swift sureness of ear and idiom of a Catullus, and the same way of bringing together a racy colloquialism and the richer tones of high poetic style.” Maurer believed that Cummings’ best work exhibited “a new and delightful sense of linguistic invention, precise and vigorous.” Penberthy concluded that “Cummings’s achievement deserves acclaim. He established the poem as a visual object… he revealed, by his x-ray probings, the faceted possibilities of the single word; and like such prose writers as Vladimir Nabokov and Tom Stoppard, he promoted sheer playfulness with language. Despite a growing abundance of second-rate imitations, his poems continue to amuse, delight, and provoke.”

Critics of Cummings’ work were divided into two camps as to the importance of his career. His detractors called his failure to develop as a writer a major weakness; Cummings’ work changed little from the 1920s to the 1950s. Others saw him as merely clever but with little lasting value beyond a few technical innovations. Still others questioned the ideas in his poetry, or seeming lack of them. George Stade in the New York Times Book Review claimed that “intellectually speaking, Cummings was a case of arrested development. He was a brilliant 20-year-old, but he remained merely precocious to the end of his life. That may be one source of his appeal.” James G. Southworth, writing in Some Modern American Poets, argued that Cummings “is too much out of the stream of life for his work to have significance.” Southworth went on to say that “the reader must not mistake Mr. Cummings for an intellectual poet.”

“I am someone who proudly and humbly affirms that love is the mystery-of-mysteries, and that nothing measurable matters ‘a very good God damn’; that ‘an artist, a man, a failure’ is no mere whenfully accreting mechanism, but a givingly eternal complexity—neither some soulless and heartless ultrapredatory infra-animal nor any understandingly knowing and believing and thinking automaton, but a naturally and miraculously whole human being—a feelingly illimitable individual; whose only happiness is to transcend himself, whose every agony is to grow.”

“Now he knows there is but one freedom..., the freedom of the will, responsive and responsible, and that from it all other freedoms take their course.” Kidder called Eimi “a report of the grim inhumanities of the Soviet system, of repression, apathy, priggishness, kitsch, and enervating suspicion.” For some time after publication of Eimi, Kidder reported, Cummings had a difficult time getting his poetry published. The overwhelmingly left-wing publishers of the time refused to accept his work. Cummings had to resort to self-publishing several volumes of his work during the later 1930s.

Cummings’ early love poems were frankly erotic and were meant to shock the Puritanical sensibilities of the 1920s. Penberthy noted that the poet’s first wife, Elaine, inspired “scores of Cummings’s best erotic poems.” But, as Wegner wrote, “In time he came to see love and the dignity of the human being as inseparable.” Maurer also commented on this change in Cummings’ outlook; there was, Maurer wrote, a “fundamental change of attitude which manifested itself in his growing reverence and dedication to lasting love.”

Robert E. Wegner in The Poetry and Prose of E. E. Cummings, “in Cummings’ experience as a child; he grew up in an aura of love.... Love is the propelling force behind a great body of his poetry.” Friedman noted that Cummings was “in the habit of associating love, as a subject, with the landscape, the seasons, the times of day, and with time and death—as poets have always done in the past.”

“Love always was ... Cummings’ chief subject of interest,”

This satirical aspect to Cummings’ work drew both praise and criticism. His attacks on the mass mind, conventional patterns of thought, and society’s restrictions on free expression, were born of his strong commitment to the individual. In the “nonlectures” he delivered at Harvard University Cummings explained his position: “So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was, is, and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality.” As Penberthy noted, Cummings’ consistent attitude in all of his work was “condemning mankind while idealizing the individual.” “Cummings’ lifelong belief,” Bernard Dekle stated in Profiles of Modern American Authors, “was a simple faith in the miracle of man’s individuality. Much of his literary effort was directed against what he considered the principal enemies of this individuality—mass thought, group conformity, and commercialism.” For this reason, Cummings satirized what he called “mostpeople,” that is, the herd mentality found in modern society. “At heart,” Logan explained, “the quarrels of Cummings are a resistance to the small minds of every kind, political, scientific, philosophical, and literary, who insist on limiting the real and the true to what they think they know or can respond to. As a preventive to this kind of limitation, Cummings is directly opposed to letting us rest in what we believe we know; and this is the key to the rhetorical function of his famous language.”

His exalted vision of life and love is served well by his linguistic agility. He was an unabashed lyricist, a modern cavalier love poet. But alongside his lyrical celebrations of nature, love, and the imagination are his satirical denouncements of tawdry, defiling, flat-footed, urban and political life—open terrain for invective and verbal inventiveness.”

Norman Friedman explained in his E. E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer that Cummings’ innovations “are best understood as various ways of stripping the film of familiarity from language in order to strip the film of familiarity from the world. Transform the word, he seems to have felt, and you are on the way to transforming the world.”

S. I. Hayakawa also remarked on this quality in Cummings’ poetry. “No modern poet to my knowledge,” Hayakawa wrote in Poetry, “has such a clear, childlike perception as E. E. Cummings—a way of coming smack against things with unaffected delight and wonder. This candor ... results in breath-takingly clean vision.”

Bethany K. Dumas wrote in her E. E. Cummings: A Remembrance of Miracles that “more important than the specific devices used by Cummings is the use to which he puts the devices. That is a complex matter; irregular spacing ... allows both amplification and retardation. Further, spacing of key words allows puns which would otherwise be impossible. Some devices, such as the use of lowercase letters at the beginnings of lines ... allow a kind of distortion that often re-enforces that of the syntax.... All these devices have the effect of jarring the reader, of forcing him to examine experience with fresh eyes.

Richard P. Blackmur wrote in The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation, “has a fine talent for using familiar, even almost dead words, in such a context as to make them suddenly impervious to every ordinary sense; they become unable to speak, but with a great air of being bursting with something very important and precise to say.”

M. L. Rosenthal wrote in The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction: “The chief effect of Cummings’ jugglery with syntax, grammar, and diction was to blow open otherwise trite and bathetic motifs through a dynamic rediscovery of the energies sealed up in conventional usage.... He succeeded masterfully in splitting the atom of the cute commonplace.”

In a review of XLI Poems for Nation, Mark Van Doren defined Cummings as a poet with “a richly sensuous mind; his verse is distinguished by fluidity and weight; he is equipped to range lustily and long among the major passions.” At the end of 1925 Dial magazine chose Cummings for their annual award of $2,000, a sum equaling a full year’s income for the writer. The following year a new collection, Is 5, was published, for which Cummings wrote an introduction meant to explain his approach to poetry. In the introduction he argued forcefully for poetry as a “process” rather than a “product.”

The early 1920s were an extremely productive time for Cummings. In 1922 he published his first book, The Enormous Room, a fictionalized account of his French captivity.

Cummings decided to become a poet when he was still a child. Between the ages of eight and twenty-two, he wrote a poem a day, exploring many traditional poetic forms. By the time he was in Harvard in 1916, modern poetry had caught his interest. He began to write avant-garde poems in which conventional punctuation and syntax were ignored in favor of a dynamic use of language. Cummings also experimented with poems as visual objects on the page.

Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote in Standards: A Chronicle of Books for Our Time: “Cummings has written at least a dozen poems that seem to me matchless.

As one of the most innovative poets of his time, Cummings experimented with poetic form and language to create a distinct personal style. A typical Cummings poem is spare and precise, employing a few key words eccentrically placed on the page. Some of these words were invented by Cummings, often by combining two common words into a new synthesis. He also revised grammatical and linguistic rules to suit his own purposes, using such words as “if,” “am,” and “because” as nouns, for example, or assigning his own private meanings to words.

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