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Show Acting Alone _ 2 Page 432 and economic redemption of an entire nation as well as. . ." Here the contract went on a few lines in an insane tone, even for this context. The words themselves sounded familiar, in such a chilling way as to make Sam doubt the authenticity of this document and, it necessarily followed, of this entire enterprise, including his big chance for literary fame. So, of course, he forced himself to ignore the next few lines and to presume that some legal secretary was having a twisted joke on someone, and continued reading at the point where the language settled back comfortably into the more appropriate tones of emotional sterility and unabashed venality that befit any iron-clad, legally binding contract. " . . . the style of the whole conforming strictly to Miller and Swift's Handbook of Nonsexist Writing (Lippincott & Crowell, NYC), and also conforming in no less strict a fashion to the fifth- or fourth-grade (more popularly known as the "Hemingwayesque") readability index as prepared by the National Council of Teachers of English in their latest report: that is to say, a specific maximum number of letters per word, words per sentence, sentences per paragraph, and a minimum number of paragraphs per page. . ." Sam would roll his hospital surplus belly-hovering table over to the dozing couch and would stare at the writerly paraphernalia he'd been provided with. Medium-sized stacks of fifty percent rag bond. Medium-sized stacks of IBM carbon tapes to go with the IBM Electronic 75 that was perpetually breaking down. This lemon, this ludicrous symptom of the breakdown of America's technological superiority had no mag card option, and contained but a meager eight-character memory, into which, to save himself some time if he ever accumulated enough words to begin typing the MS, Sam had shrewdly pumped the |
