1. Adventure fiction: stories in which characters are involved in dangerous and/or exhilarating exploits

2. Airport novel: a work of fiction, generally genre fiction, so named because of its availability at stores in international airports in order to provide airline passengers with a light diversion during a flight

3. Allegory: a story using symbolism to express truths about the human condition

4. Bildungsroman: a story detailing the emotional and moral growth of a character

5. Black comedy: a story in which the humor derives from the misfortunes and/or reproachable behavior of characters

6. Comedy: a story with elements and situations intended to amuse

7. Comedy-drama: a story with both humorous and serious elements

8. Comedy of errors (farce): a story involving energetic action revolving around humorous predicaments and coincidences

9. Comedy of manners: a story that mocks class pretensions and/or prejudices

10. Crime fiction: stories based on the commission and/or investigation of wrongdoing

11. Detective fiction: stories in which the protagonist investigates a crime

12. Epic: originally a long poem celebrating the exploits of a factual or fictitious hero, but now applied to prose works on the same theme as well

13. Epistolary fiction: stories constructed as a series of letters exchanged between characters

14. Fantasy fiction: stories involving imaginary beings in the real world or in an alternate reality and assuming suspension of disbelief about magic and/or supernatural powers

15. Fictional autobiography: a story purporting to be a first-person account of someone’s life

16. Fictional biography: a story structured to resemble a factual life story

17. Genre fiction: stories intended to appeal to readers because of adherence to a specific formula (such as adventure fiction or detective fiction), rather than on their literary merits

18. Gothic fiction: stories often taking place in an isolated setting and involving strange and/or perilous happenings

19. Horror fiction: stories incorporating supernatural and/or inexplicable elements and intended to arouse fear and dread

20. Melodrama: a story that emphasizes action over characterization and features exaggeratedly dramatic plot elements

21. Mystery fiction: stories that detail the solution of a crime or other wrongdoing

22. Pastiche: a story that imitates one or more established works, or consists of episodes of such works

23. Picaresque: an episodically structured story featuring a rogue or an antihero as the protagonist

24. Parody: a story mocking the pretensions or weaknesses of a particular author,
style, or genre

25. Romance: a love story; also a tale taking place in a distant time and place and involving adventure with often supernatural or mysterious elements

26. Romantic comedy: a lighthearted story detailing a romance and its complications

27. Romp: a boisterously comical tale

28. Satire: a story that pokes fun at human shortcomings such as arrogance, greed, and vanity

29. Science fiction: stories focusing on how science and technology affect individuals and civilizations

30. Screwball comedy: a fast-paced story involving improbable situations and antics from which the humor derives

31. Swashbuckler: an adventure story in which the hero accomplishes great feats to aid a noble cause

32. Thriller: a dramatic story punctuated with action, adventure, and suspense

33. Tragedy: a story with a catastrophic and/or unfortunate outcome

34. Tragicomedy: a story with both humorous and heartbreaking aspects

35. Travelogue: a story with a plot centering on a significant amount of travel

That’s a joke, folks. (So’s the headline.)

But StyleGuard is fact, not fiction: The Associated Press announced it last week in a press release. According to the release, the plug-in “is similar in functionality to Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar proofing tools and intuitively checks Word documents for the AP Stylebook’s fundamental spelling, language, punctuation, usage, and journalistic style guidelines.”

That’s all well and good — just another layer of technological assistance for writers, like spell-checking functions — but every editorial enhancement like this increases the possibility of two unfortunate outcomes:

1. Upper management will assume that such tools obviate or reduce the need for flesh-and-blood-and-red-ink editors.
2. Writers will become less diligent about taking responsibility for the quality and clarity of their prose.

Call me biased, but I strongly believe that the classic editorial-review protocol — writer, editor(s), proofreader — will never go out of (ahem) style. The latter stages can be (and often are) omitted, but at the expense of editorial excellence. As an editor and writer, I know all too well, from both perspectives, how the lack of an editing stage can have a deleterious impact on prose, or at least result in published errors.

Also, I know that tools can become crutches if they supplant rather than supplement human judgment. Spell-checking and grammar-checking programs, StyleGuard, and similar innovations to come will never replace the writer’s own critical eye (or an objective second opinion), and there is some evidence that using them can cause one’s own editing skills to deteriorate. Not only that, but less skillful writers can overrely on such tools, accept their sometimes flawed corrections without question, and otherwise ignore their shortcomings.

Do I use spell-checking? Of course. No sensible writer (or editor) should bypass the opportunity for its assistance. But I overrule it regularly, and I carefully peruse my prose (admittedly, sometimes not carefully enough) before I submit it for publication.

Would I use StyleGuard? Of course — if I adhered to Associated Press style. (And if I used a PC; it’s not compatible with Macs.) But I don’t. It’s ideal for writers who do so, thoroughly or with few exceptions. But AP style is highly formulaic, allowing for little flexibility or ambiguity. Compare it with the much more complex (and therefore, for me, much more useful) guidance of The Chicago Manual of Style. Because Chicago often offers alternatives — and is much more detailed — it’s ill suited for a regimented software program.

By all means, buy AP StyleGuard if it suits your needs. But don’t uninstall your brain.

That’s about 1,700 words, or six double-spaced manuscript pages, give or take, a day — assuming that you write every day.

Insane? More like insanely ingenious. The idea behind this seemingly insurmountable goal is to write for quantity, not for quality — to dash off a first draft under the auspices of a worldwide project to distance yourself from the little voice in your head that tells you that you should go back and polish that passage, pare that paragraph, or prune that page.

It’s basically hours and hours of feverish, fervent, frantic freewriting — a technique for unleashing your creativity by abandoning any pretext of inserting your editorial alter ego into the process. Write, write some more, and just keep on writing, without looking back.

The sponsors of NaNoWriMo, as it’s abbreviated, acknowledge that may seem like a risky endeavor. You may limp to a finish at midnight on November 30, only to discover that you have devoted much of your precious time to churning out — what? What did you accomplish? The product of a few hundred thousand keystrokes. Is it ready for publication? Hardly.

But no novel, no short story, no poem, no article or review or essay or other composition, is print-ready. That’s not the point. The point is that you will have overcome your trepidation at devoting so much time and effort toward crafting a towering achievement in prose, using the novelty of the project as an excuse. And then you will have a first draft of a novel (and then the real work starts).

Last year, only a little more than 10 percent of participants reached their goal of producing the first draft of a 50,000-word novel. But nearly 200,000 others staggered away from their computers on the last day of November with at least the start of something satisfying.

Sign up at the NaNoWriMo Web site, and explore the site’s features to help you motivate yourself. One of these is a tool that lets you update your word count daily. You can also post excerpts of your work in progress for others to read.

So, are you going to give it a shot? Of course you are. Good luck!

Rhyming Reduplication

When we talk about doing the hokey-pokey, or refer to a razzle-dazzle spectacle or a namby-pamby attitude, we’re employing rhyming reduplication, which usually serves to emphasize with a playful near duplication of a meaningful word (fuzzy-wuzzy, itsy-bitsy), though sometimes both words have meaning and the rhyming is a fringe benefit that makes the term catchier (“chick flick”).

Many reduplicatives are pairings of nonsense words (fuddy-duddy, hanky-panky), and their origin is obscure, but others with seemingly meaningless elements have at least a likely etymology: Hurly-burly may stem from the kinetic term hurl, and willy-nilly goes back several centuries to any one of several possible expressions such as “Will he, nill he” (“Whether he will or he won’t”).

Exact Reduplication

A similar type of construction stems from efforts by adults to help children learn by repetition — hence baby talk like bye-bye and choo-choo. But some exact reduplication is used disparagingly in grown-up contexts: Two popular exact reduplicatives, blah-blah and “yada yada” (spelled and repeated variously and perhaps stemming from the earlier British English slang term yatter-yatter) mock dull or meaningless speech.

Ablaut Reduplication

A third form, named for the word for change of vowel sounds, is exemplified by the terms chitchat and dillydally, each of which has, unlike most rhyming reduplicatives, the substantial word in the second position rather than the first. Others, like crisscross and zigzag, more transparently demonstrate that most ablaut reduplications refer to action, especially reciprocated movements or behaviors.

Note that in these examples, and in most other ablaut reduplicatives, the first vowel is always an i, produced by making a close, or high sound (meaning it is achieved by high placement of the tongue) and that the second vowel is always low.

Other Reduplicative Forms

New reduplicative vocabulary is slow to emerge. Exceptions include occasional slang terms (“boob tube,” hip-hop) or ad hoc coinages constructed like fancy-schmancy. (The latter type actually has a name: shm-reduplication.) Speaking of fancy-schmancy, there’s also a formal name (contrastive focus reduplication) for exact reduplication employed to clarify the relationship between a variation of an archetypal meaning and the archetypal usage itself, as in “When you say ‘Dude, that’s bad,’ do you mean good-bad, or bad-bad?”

Uses of Reduplication

Reduplicatives are handy little items for injecting a note of whimsy or a sharp edge into fiction or nonfiction alike. They can convey humorous or sarcastic understatement (“It’s just another case of high-finance hocus-pocus,” “The wish-washy White House flip-flops again”) or serve to mock or belittle a target (“The socialite’s hoity-toity hubris just as she tripped was literally pride coming before a fall,” “Her eency-weency voice showcased her itsy-bitsy talent”).

They’re also useful, however, for positive or neutral language (“The pitter-patter of little feet on the hardwood floor presaged the appearance of my preschooler,” “My explosive sneeze caused the birds to erupt from the bushes and flee helter-skelter”).

But don’t use a hodgepodge or a mishmash of reduplicatives pell-mell: Make sure you know their senses and connotations, and verify whether they’re open, hyphenated, or closed compounds.

Those were more or less reprehensible behaviors — or they would have been if they had actually occurred. But these incidents, and a few others also outlined below, are all overstated or outright fabricated, loosely based on actual events but bearing little or no resemblance to them.

1. Electric Dylan

The accounts that suggest that Bob Dylan was not well received the first time he, backed by members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, played live with an electric guitar stemmed from Dylan’s own misperception of the audience reaction and some faulty memories. Some audience members were upset, but only because Dylan’s set was so short. And master of ceremonies Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul, and Mary fame), who was said to have been incensed at the sound, was not angered by electrified Dylan but by the poor quality of the amplified sound.

Some concertgoers and critics alike did later complain about Dylan, but it was his perceived shift toward more commercial songwriting that caused their ire, with perhaps some confused bandwagon-jumping criticism of his amplification.

2. Spitting on Veterans

There were isolated incidences of hostile behavior toward soldiers returning from tours of duty in Vietnam, but their reception was generally very positive. Only later, when antiwar sentiment grew and some veterans traumatized by having fought in a hellish war — and doing so on the losing side — returned Stateside, did a few of them and their sympathizers begin to embellish these anomalous events and conflate them with isolated nonexpectorating protesters into a frequent and widespread occurrence.

3. Bra Burning

In September 1968, in Atlantic City, a group of female protesters symbolically shed their adherence to society’s standards for femininity by tossing bras, girdles, cosmetics, and other beautification accouterments into a garbage can. Though there was supposedly a suggestion that the accumulation be ignited, no bras were burned at this seminal feminist event.

Two years later, in Berkeley, California, a similar event that took place did involve combustion, but no widespread bra burning ever took place. (At neither event were bras actually removed and discarded.) One journalist’s metaphorical association of the demonstrators with draft-card burners apparently gave rise to a widespread misunderstanding that numerous such conflagrations occurred.

4. Hats Off

It was once widely believed that just as Clark Gable, by not wearing a T-shirt under his dress shirt in the early screwball comedy It Happened One Night, supposedly inspired men to refrain from buying undershirts, with catastrophic results for their manufacturers, John F. Kennedy doomed the chapeau industry by going hatless at his inaugural ceremony.

It’s easy to believe that if he did indeed go bareheaded, he was only following, and not precipitating, a trend, because hats were already going out of fashion. However, the entire premise is false: Multiple photographs depict him wearing a silk top hat as part of his formal attire throughout that day.

5. “Try Acting”

Sir Laurence Olivier supposedly derided Dustin Hoffman’s efforts to prepare for the torture scene in the political thriller Marathon Man by going without sleep, asking him, “Why don’t you try acting?”

In truth, Hoffman, whose first marriage was failing while he was filming the movie, showed up on the set one day looking bedraggled after partying at Studio 54. When Olivier, his costar, noticed his condition, Hoffman evasively said he had been staying up all night to get himself in the mind-set for a grueling scene. Olivier did offer the advice “Why don’t you try acting?” but it was in jest, and they shared a laugh over it.

Relation to Writing

So, what do these corrections have to do with writing? A great deal, it turns out. These myths and misperceptions were largely perpetuated by writing — by people distorting facts in articles, books, and other written accounts of the events, followed by others regenerating the errors. The lesson to be learned is this: When you write about something, be sure you know what you’re writing about. Do not bolster fallacies by blindly accepting what you read or heard. Before incorporating historical events great or small into your fiction or nonfiction, investigate and corroborate.