Pee-wee's Big Career

I'm at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference this week—Monster.com (my employer) has a big presence at the event; we're the official Hiring Hub, we're showcasing a lot of our digital and mobile products, we're getting in front of influential bloggers, and we're covering news of interest to job seekers.

It's going to be a busy few days, and my schedule is packed. But of course when I saw that Paul Reubens was speaking, I made time for that in my schedule.

Paul Reubens (also—if not better—known as Pee-wee Herman) presented a funny, enlightening, and encouraging discussion of his long career.

One of the more encouraging elements was his discussion of writing the screenplay for his film Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. Reubens says that he dislikes writing and felt, then, that he didn't know how. So when it came time to write the screenplay, he read—and then followed the instructions in—a how-to-write-a-screenplay book. The result is (I believe) a timeless and very entertaining movie, and, Reubens says, the screenplay is now taught in some film-theory classes as a perfect example of a well-paced and classic sort of hero's-journey plot, with all the right elements in the right places.

Reubens says, "The film is 90 minutes long, and 90 pages. On page 30, the bike gets stolen—a classic MacGuffin—and on page 60, Pee-wee finds it again."

Here are that story's encouraging takeaways, for me: First, not knowing how to do something doesn't mean you can't learn how to do it (and then do it well). Reubens followed the rules and learned as he went. Second, you don't need to start from scratch when you create something. Putting your own spin on, or bringing your own viewpoint to, a well-tested formula can be a great place to start and can perhaps even help you spur your creativity.

I thought this was interesting, too: Reubens says he originally started by trying to write an unauthorized remake of the classic film Pollyanna—in part because he was obsessed with Hayley Mills, and in part because he loved the idea of Pee-wee in the Pollyanna role. And don't you love that idea? If you're not sure, view these clips and then answer the question.

Another good Hollywood tidbit from this era of his career: Reubens was introduced to the director of Pee-wee's Big Adventure by a mutual friend, the actress Shelley Duvall, whom I adore. Reubens says that after watching the first seconds of Burton's Frankenweenie, he just knew that Burton would be perfect. (Apparently, the movie studio had been trying to get him to go with another director, whose work Reubens didn't like. So here's another good lesson, and a piece of career advice I give all the time: A great network of contacts is indispensable!)

Reubens talked a bit about the iconic nature of the character he has created, and the difficulty of continuing to play the childlike Pee-wee (though Pee-wee's age remains a mystery) as he (Reubens) ages. He jokes, "You'll be seeing Pee-wee in a turtleneck real soon."

Reubens also touched on a notion that is appropriate to SXSWi, at which people are discussing all things related to social media—the difficulty of maintaining a work persona that is separate from your personal persona. For many years, Reubens was photographed and interviewed only as Pee-wee; it was an extended and complex piece of performance art (though Reubens is too modest to call it that).

That is, Reubens was photographed only as Pee-wee until, as he says, this one day. ... And because, perhaps, Reubens kept his true identity so private and appeared only to the world as Pee-wee, this photo seemed even more shocking, amplifying the resulting scandal (which was blown so out of proportion as to approach the level of farce). We live in a different era, and nowadays it's even harder to separate one's "work persona" from one's "private persona." It's a good caution: Your private life is likely to find its way into the public eye.

For the first movie role he took after this scandal (in Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Reubens asked that his character look as much like his mugshot as possible. Now that's facing negative press head-on and turning it into a positive.



(Top photo: Pee-wee Herman at the Academy Awards in 1988; photographer, Alan Light [courtesy of Wikipedia Commons].)

Grammarly

It seems that computers can do just about anything these days. A fan of the television show Jeopardy, I've been watching with interest the show's commercials for the upcoming contest between two former champions and an IBM supercomputer. (In test runs, the computer has beaten its human opponents—just barely.)

Maybe that computer could serve as a copy editor. But the software grammar checkers now available to us still cause more problems than they solve.

Take Grammarly, which bills itself as the "world's most accurate grammar checker" and charges a small monthly fee for unlimited use. This is an attractive notion for me—I often serve as my own copy editor, and it can be difficult to proof and edit one's own writing.

So, expecting to be humbled, I ran an article I'd recently written—"Selling Yourself in the Job Interview"—through Grammarly.

I was disappointed with its first suggestion. Grammarly believes the persistent grammar myth about not ending a sentence with a preposition. Yes, you should avoid ending sentences with unnecessary prepositions, as in "Where is the car at?" But any copy editor who suggests replacing the perfectly acceptable sentence "I have no idea what the professor is talking about" with the sentence "I have no idea about that which the professor is talking" (as Grammarly did) should be fired immediately.

Grammarly incorrectly identified the subject of this sentence: "Offering solutions to these problems is a great way to overcome a lack of directly applicable experience." It suggested that the subject of this sentence was plural, and that "is" was incorrect. It is not. (This inability to correctly handle subject-verb agreement is common to computer grammar checkers.)

Grammarly didn't like this sentence either: "Prepare three or four effective sound bites that highlight your past successes and your skills." It suggested, instead: "Prepare three or for effective, sound bites that highlight your past successes and your skills."

That suggested comma is especially problematic—because comma usage is difficult to master, and many writers might not know that it would be incorrect here. (Grammarly thought that "sound" was an adjective, not part of the compound noun "sound bites.")

Grammarly suggests removing all contractions from your writing. This is a good suggestion for a lot of formal and academic writing. It also made a potentially helpful suggestion about removing the word "specific" (a word that is often redundant). But all in all, this grammar checker wanted to insert too many errors. I can't recommend it.

Beaver Can Have It

Some of you may remember me as an etiquette-advice columnist—and although I've put that work (mostly) behind me, I do follow developments in the world of manners.

So I read a recent Huffington Post article, "Rudeness Is a Neurotoxin," with interest—and, then, disappointment.

I don't (and really couldn't) dispute the notion that early experiences shape a person's brain, and that a child who is physically or verbally abused is likelier to grow into a person who is abusive (or, one could say, "rude")—not only because he learns the behavior, but also because the abuse has measurable physical effects.

I do take issue with the article's frame, though—the notion that the United States in the 1950s (as modeled by the characters on the TV show Leave It to Beaver) was, or modern-day Japan is, somehow "more polite" than modern-day American culture.

Here's the thing: You can't always measure politeness in a relative way. What is polite to one culture may be impolite to another (consider belching, which is improper in some dining rooms but an appropriate expression of enjoyment in others). This doesn't make one culture more impolite than the other—the two merely have different norms.

Japan has a culture very different from ours, and, yes, the beautiful, courtly deferential behavior a tourist enjoys in nice hotels and restaurants can be a delightful change. But scraping and bowing doesn't define good manners. American plainspokenness can be considered a virtue, and plenty of accepted Japanese behavior (blithely reading soft-core porn while riding the subway, just for instance) is unacceptable by American standards of politeness.

If we could go back to 1950s America, we would surely find that suburban children behaved in a generally more deferential way toward elders, and that women addressed their husbands in a generally more docile manner. But we'd also find broadly institutionalized racism and sexism among people considered paragons of "politeness." People like the Cleavers would not have been surprised to hear their neighbors say that black Americans and white Americans should not live in the same neighborhood, or that a woman's place is in the home, or that homosexuals should be imprisoned. By that measure, modern American suburbanites are far more polite than suburbanites of the 1950s: if they think these things, they are much likelier to keep those thoughts to themselves.

And think of the smell! If Mr. Cleaver and Mrs. Cleaver bathed once or twice a week, I'm sure they considered that quite sufficient. When you look at personal hygiene, our requirements of the people we share society with have become much stricter very recently.

Yes, modern society can be jarring, and loud, and unpleasant, but I'll take it and its personal freedoms (which etiquette rules help define for us) over the world of Leave It to Beaver.

Obviously, it's a meme that bugs me: "Things were so polite back then, in the mythical past." Don't believe it. We Americans haven't gotten less polite. We simply have different (and, I would say, better) standards to uphold.

Sentence Edit of the Day: Dangling from the Rear

Most writers and editors have trained themselves to watch out for danglers and other misplaced phrases (prepositional phrases, especially) at the beginning of a sentence.

So, because I usually work with copy written by well-trained writers and editors, I often find misplaced phrases at the end of a sentence. Here's one:

Just remember to return the favor when others contact you by responding promptly to their requests.

This sentence is confusing (or at least slightly unpleasant to read) because the phrase "by responding promptly to their requests" is attached to the nearest verb—"contact"—instead of the verb it's truly modifying: "return." Here's one fix:

Just remember to return the favor by responding promptly to others' requests.

If you work in an environment where aggressive changes to text are grumbled about, a "rear dangler" (or a squinting modifier) can often be fixed by adding a comma (which can seem to separate the phrase from any dangerous attachments):

Just remember to return the favor when others contact you, by responding promptly to their requests.

A mentor used to call these commas "clarity commas," and they should be used sparingly.

Relative clauses, too, often get mixed up in sentences. Here's a sentence that a friend asked me to help sort out:

Three trends accelerated in 2010 that may redefine the way we shop for good.

Here are the sentence's two main problems: The clause "that may redefine ..." is clumsily situated. And "for good" is trying to be a prepositional phrase that attaches to "shop" (it is intended to adverbially modify "redefine").

Here's my fix:

Three trends that may forever redefine the way we shop accelerated in 2010.

If you feel that "accelerated in 2010" needs more prominence in the sentence, you might try:

Three trends that accelerated in 2010 may forever redefine the way we shop.