Being as this is my first Christmas with a girlfriend, I had to do something I never had to do before.  Go shopping for a female!  It’s surprising difficult to come up with good gift ideas for someone. 

I wondered how I would know when I was done shopping for her.  Some will say it’s the amount of money you spend, the size of the gifts, or some other easily discernible measurement.  Being a geek and a scientist I looked at shopping as a problem that needed a simple and straightforward solution.

Here is what I came up with.  There are three requirements that must be met in order to complete your shopping.  They are practicality, thoughtfulness and extravagance.

Practicality is about satisfying some basic need.  Is the gift useful and something the person wants or needs?  Gifts like appliances, furniture, clothes, a movie, music CD and so on.  Things they will use on a regular basis and thus in using the item think of you.

Thoughtfulness is about giving something that shows you love/care for the person.  This usually requires you to do real work with the gift.  A picture frame for example would be practical but by putting in a picture of you and your girlfriend/wife you now made something thoughtful.  It’s original and shows that you used some brain power in getting the gift.  It’s something they can display for others to see and know you got it.

Extravagance is all about the splurge.  It’s spoiling the person and demonstrating that you are willing to give of yourself for their happiness.  Now don’

…excerpt from: www.alanbarber.org…

The other day at the library book sale, I spotted a title that seemed to belong among my useful books about writing, Jefferson D. Bates�s Writing With Precision.

I only just looked it over yesterday, and saw with delight that Bates�s first principle of more effective writing is, �Prefer the active voice.� (Seabury students will moan inwardly as they read that advice.) He goes from that to advocate using strong, vivid verbs rather than inert �nominalized� forms, hewing to specific rather than vague expressions, and keeping related sentence elements near one another. I couldn�t have said it better myself.

I still plump for Joseph Williams�s Style as my premier book on writing, but every reinforcement is welcome in the battle against empty, flaccid prose. Bates adds a section on outlining (absent from my second-hand copy, darn it, since I need someone to help me cultivate my outlining discipline) and exercises-and-answers that illustrate his principles of writing. Well done, more than worth the fifty cents I spent for it, and refreshing encouragement for my approach to writing.

…excerpt from: akma.disseminary.org…