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“What is your opinion on the proposed Continuity of Government Amendments for the US Constitution?”Thanks for asking, Timothy—have to warn you though, this is going to be blunt.The concept is interesting, but I think unnecessary.The execution is… what’s the superlative adjective of “catastrophic”? It would destroy the Republic within a generation.Amendment 28The Offices of the Head of State and Head of Government of these United States are hereby Separated, the President shall remain as Head of Government. The Office of the Head of State shall be created under that Title and granted only the powers to control the State in the event that Continuity of Government is invoked.OK, invoked by whom? Invoked how?It’s probably outlined further down the list—but a law should never be dependent on another law not yet in existence for its meaning. This goes double (triple? sextuple?) for constitutional amendments.Otherwise, this is an interesting attempt to separate out the functions of “President-as-Executive” from “President-as-Face-of-the-Nation”, but it doesn’t define either role’s limits and powers, so it fails at this early stage.(Again, maybe there’s more detail later—I’m intentionally commenting before I’ve read the whole thing, because each amendment has to stand on its own feet.)Amendment 29The Office of the Head of State shall be filled by election in the Senate of the United States by three-fourths majority of the persons in that body. The qualifications to hold this Office are, being over the age of fifty, a native born citizen (by soil and blood), and not Active Duty or Reserve Military personnel, Additionally no person who has held the rank of General or Admiral may ever hold this office. The term of service in this Office is twenty years. Further only One term may be served by any individual, and no person in that family may serve in the Office for the next three generations.Fairly anodyne, though I’m not really sure why Generals and Admirals are barred. A provision that would have excluded George Washington seems ill-conceived to me, just as a general rule.The problems are mostly practical:First, a 3/4 majority in the Senate will very frequently be impossible to secure—so expect vacancies in this office. A lot.Second, there is no definition of “family” or of “generation”, so it’s not really clear who is barred.Is a third-cousin of the previous Head of State prohibited? If the grandson of the previous Head’s oldest child marries the daughter of the previous Head’s youngest child (second or third cousins, so it’s entirely legal and not that weird), can their child hold office? He’s third-generation on his mother’s side, but fourth-generation on his father’s side.Legally, it’s simpler to speak of “degrees of consanguinity”, because that’s a reasonably well-defined term (though it still gets murky with intergenerational cousin scenarios). But then you’d need to add verbiage to account for adoptions.Amendment 30To Guarantee the freedoms and liberty of the people of these United States, the Military is hereby unilaterally empowered under the authority of the Head of State to remove from office all members of the United States Congress (House and Senate) as well as the President, Vice President, and the Cabinet, should they be found to have exceeded their authority and powers as granted by the Constitution of these United States. The President shall, prior to removal, transfer Powers of State to the Office of the Head of State. All persons Removed under this Amendment are Barred from holding any public office in the future.And… here comes the fall of the Republic.You’ve just given a single person the authority to remove (by military force!) any elected official whom he or she deems has violated the constitutional limits of their authority.And you’ve already given them incentive to use this weapon, because they themselves assume “temporary” control over the government if “continuity of government” is disrupted.It’s quite unambiguously a “Make-Your-Own-Fuhrer Kit”.I should stop here—but I’m curious whether there are any interesting ideas (or other things to warn against) further down.Amendment 31To ensure the will of the People is observed and upheld elections shall be scheduled on a date not less than eight weeks and not greater than 12 weeks after the date on which the government is removed from office. These elections timed to allow for candidates to campaign shall be conducted under the auspices of he Head of State, who will upon election of the new President, transfer Powers of State back to that Office. Should the Head of State Fail to do so they shall be executed for treason and with that execution Powers of State shall automatically transfer back to the Office of the President. (At which point the Senate shall elect a new Head of State)OK, first, let me just note that it’s becoming clear that these are really intended as one amendment with multiple sections. The Bill of Rights was introduced as ten (actually twelve) distinct and discrete amendments because each of them dealt with a different subject and could be approved or rejected separately—but when multiple “amendments” are part of one unified system, they really shouldn’t be separate.That being said…This is a good notion of a safeguard—it at least shows an awareness of the problems that could arise.But it’s toothless. It provides no contingencies for legitimate delays in elections (because twelve weeks is really not a long time, so it’s entirely conceivable that something comes up—unlike our current election, which are regularly-timed so that there’s literally two years to prepare for them each time)—and that means it will leave us open to pretextual delays.Think about it: a perceived “virtuous” Head of State tries his best to schedule elections within twelve weeks, and can’t get them scheduled until the fourteenth week. Now, the nation just won’t stand for executing someone over a very understandable two-week delay, so they don’t.But now you’ve set a precedent that the Amendment really only forbids unreasonable delays. And the next, less-virtuous Head of State takes advantage of that to give all manner of “very reasonable” excuses until such time as he has solidified his control over the military—at which point, “for the good of the Republic”, he declares that he’s going to stay in office a while longer.Also, imposing the death penalty on a “strict liability” basis just seems like a bad idea anyway.Amendment 32Any Person attempting to stall, interfere with, or otherwise derail the procedure of Continuity of Government shall be executed for treason without appeal, be they Congresspeople, Executive Officials, or Military Personnel.The technical quibble first:You say, “Any Person” at the top, but then give a list at the end without any catchall language. That leaves it ambiguous whether this no-appeal death sentence applies to any person interfering with the process (e.g., a protester disrupting the polls) or only to “Congresspeople, Executive Officials, or Military Personnel.”Beyond that, though… how do we try these people? What is the standard for having “attempt[ed] to stall, interfere with, or otherwise derail the procedure”?And you say no appeal—I get why, because the appellate process often appears to convert death sentences sub silentio into life imprisonment. But what if someone actually does get an unfair trial?Now, the explanation at the bottom puts this all in much better context—it’s based on a fictional government from a world-building project involving a very different initial situation than we have now or had at the founding of this nation.The flaws are all still there and still relevant—but looking at it as a work of speculative fiction rather than a piece of political/legislative theorycraft makes it a bit less alarming.And, to be honest, from that perspective, it is an interesting and creative proposal to imagine, even if not viable. It would be interesting to read a piece of fiction with this sort of government played out to watch the collapse into tyranny as the “safeguards” get weaponized against freedom.As I said at the top, I can understand the motives for brainstorming this sort of thing. But with any policy proposal, the first level of proofing should be, “Let me try to break this.”Assume you’re a “bad guy” trying to get around these rules or use them for personal gain. And remember that the rules themselves are just words on paper—if you give someone the tools and power to successfully ignore them (as here), assume he will.The actual Framers of the Constitution started from a base assumption that government could not be trusted to do the right thing for its own sake, and they crafted all their intricate provisions with the primary aim of limiting the harm it could do, while still giving it enough power to govern effectively.Everyone knows Madison’s famous quote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”Most people forget that there’s a second part to that:If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.—James Madison, Federalist No. 51

Reading. Reading in the genre one is working in definitely makes for better writers; but reading and re-reading as much as possible - in any and all genres or form - improves one's writing. I've read thousands of film and television scripts for studios and production companies as well as for my own education; I've read and had to analyze miles-high piles of complex financial information, case law, and regulation for my various work in the financial sector; and I like to read as much as I can about pretty much anything, fiction and non-fiction. I gravitate to non-fiction, or mystery/crime/detective fiction; but I will read horror, romance, sci-fi, self-help and classic literature because I learn about story-telling, plotting, persuasion, structure, language, settings, character and form from everything I read.Writing. Write every day. Practice writing every day. 5 minutes, 20 minutes, four hours - it doesn't matter. Questions on Quora provide excellent practice for writing to a prompt; sometimes I'll just draft an answer and not publish, and that will suffice as my writing for the day. Sometimes I'll do more purposeful writing exercises, including writing for 5 minutes incorporating 3 random words (from writing workshop coach Ellen Snortland) or entering NYC Midnight flash writing contests (Inspiring Challenges for Writers and Filmmakers). Sometimes I'm working on a writing project. Writing everyday makes me a better writer.Experimenting. I'll try to write in a different genre or form. And fail. But I'll try. It helps me better understand the conventions and boundaries of the genre that I'm working in.Re-writing. Edit. Revise an idea, restructure a chapter, throw out my darlings, rephrase my run-ons, reinstate my darlings, check for typos, set aside. Get a snack, drink some water, do some laundry. Add adjectives, eliminate adverbs, check for lazy ideas and construction. Go for a walk. Talk with someone in real life. Ignore the parts I can't make work. Delete. Rewrite. Reread the parts that I'm happy with. Restructure. Fact-check. Review and rewrite. Rewrite again. Repeat. Rewrite.Reading aloud. Speaking the words I've written and listening to myself reading those words out loud provides insight not gathered by reading and re-reading the words in my head.Research. Research is key - sometimes it's like going down the rabbithole, but more often it helps me better understand the history of a place or use the jargon common to the particular endeavor or process that I'm trying to describe. The better I understand the underlying facts and details no matter how complex, the easier it is to write them so someone else can understand the emotion, experience, and perspective I am trying to convey - not that it's ever easy.Even the most fictional settings are rooted in reality. One of the "flash fiction" challenges I entered I set in a Paris sewer; as I researched the setting, I discovered critical details on the internet (like photos of the giant iron cleaning balls that use gravity to push sludge ahead and clean the sewage tunnels; and the art and homes of graffiti artists and underground dwellers in the 2000 kilometers of sewer tunnels) that I used to make the story better and my imaginary setting more real.Note-taking and observation. I take written notes, audio notes on my phone, and lots of photographs.Facebook posts occasionally serve as notes and allow me to practice capturing a mood, parts of a conversation, or a moment; and comments from friends provide me with additional perspective. Instagram posts are mood and memory jogs for sense of place, and allow me to condense experience or observation via hashtag. I like to take a lot of photographs, using either my phone or my big camera. Photography works my writing muscles: focus and lens selection translates to story perspective or voice; composition and framing to story structure; light, color, and contrast to emotion, tone, relationships and detail.The more I document, journal, and photograph, the quicker and better I am at translating experience and emotion to symbols on a page.Listening. Good writers are careful witnesses and keen observers, in addition to being story-tellers and artisans of language.I work, from time to time, as a mediator. I pay attention not only to what people are saying or what they've submitted in documentation ahead of each mediation, but also to their moods, emotions, urgency, body language and responses. People speak in chunks and bits and pieces and rants and tones and interruptions and thick silences. When I'm listening to someone speak, I'm always thinking "so what is he really saying?" and "how do I fairly translate or clarify what Party One is saying in a way that Party Two will hear" in order to do my job, to help resolve a disputed point or identify areas of agreement. In my former life as a corporate manager, my listening was focussed on interpreting instruction - identifying what actions were required based on a company mandate as expressed through a supervisor's or subordinate's words - for example, send an email confirming instructions, rewrite a policy, change a process, call security, etc. - without their providing specific step-by-step detailed instructions. My writing in that workplace was factual, unemotional logical argument or review, no dialogue.In order for me to write better creative non-fiction, I have to be able to write dialogue. I have to force myself to learn and apply a different listening style - to listen "flat" instead of Active listening. I'm training myself to listen on multiple levels in conversation, paying attention to how someone is speaking in addition to the substance of what they are saying, so I can write dialogue that is true to a character. Phrases, cadences, and slang expressions convey tremendous amounts of information in real life, but sometimes require revision to make them read well, require compressing real time into story time, and be rephrased to move story forward. Transcribing audio or taking verbatim notes as quickly as possible after having a conversation helps. (One famous writer told me he regularly goes off to the restroom during dinners to write conversation details in a notepad. On one particularly inspiring evening, his frequent excused absences from the table gave his dining companions cause to voice concern over his health).It's critical for me to work on improving my listening skills, so I can be more adept, adaptive, and focussed on spoken language and be a better writer. I'm working hard on being a keener "ear-witness" in addition to listening through my heart and my head. It's hella difficult.Discipline, Process, and Setting: I've started giving myself deadlines (compiled research finished by Tuesday; rough outline for Wednesday; synopsis/treatment by next week; 10 pages by the 15th; chapter revised by dinnertime; etc.) like a project manager. I'm not good yet at sticking to project phases or meeting those deadlines, but I've at least identified the elements of my projects and am improving my discipline. Breaking down my writing goals and understanding dependent deliverables - research, reading, interview, character description, proposal, outline, chapter, rough draft, revision, etc. keeps me from getting overwhelmed and boggled and confused, and reduces my frustration. Similarly, finding and making comfortable, well-ordered places to write with limited distractions (at a clean desk, at a coffee shop, etc.) makes sure I get to it.That said, laundry, dog-walking, craving an ice cream, Facebook notifications, and Quora are constant distractions. (I'm currently unemployed, so searching for paying work is also a kind of distraction - but I distract myself from my precarious financial situation by writing, so there ya go.)Writing Groups: Being part of a writing group is critical to improving my writing. I'm currently part of two writing groups. I struggle with resistance everyday. Receiving constructive criticism from trusted, patient colleagues and fellow sufferers of this writing compulsion is invaluable. Knowing that others expect me to show up keeps me disciplined (mostly) and wanting to deliver. My colleagues' comments, criticisms and opinions are powerful motivation; and their support means the world to me. I write because I want to learn, because I want to understand more about the world and the human condition, because I want to share my story, because I want to inform, because I want to be heard, because I want to be read, because I want to know. But I suffer from insecurity, laziness, distraction, frustration.My writing groups inspire me. Their discipline, dedication and effort makes me put in the work to hone my craft. Their thoughtful review and patient consideration of my failures and challenges spark and introduce me to approaches and solutions that improve my work. Their work, no matter how raw, inspires me, and motivates me to think differently, and I take pride and delight in their success and accomplishment as if it was my own.Readers: Having someone read my writing improves my writing, whether or not I get feedback and comments. Forums like Quora, where people can express their approval, disapproval, and comment, encourage me to be a more effective communicator. There is little better encouragement than having a complete stranger engage with your writing. Having people read and comment, even when their comments are not about the craft of writing, tells you something about what you have communicated versus what you think you have communicated. My writing group provides me with a consistent, vested readership; writing for work or school has also improved my writing, because someone reads and challenges what I've written.Writing is communication. If I have no expectation that anyone will read what I'm writing, all I have are notes, maybe a rough draft or sketch, perhaps no more than a shopping list of ideas to try blending together for dinnertime conversation. If no one reads what I've written, I don't know whether I've succeeded in communicating; I won't know how to measure my success. I won't even know if I've written! Consider the thought experiment: if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is near to hear it, did it make a sound? If I don't have a reader, I don't know if I'm a writer, never mind whether or not my writing is improving.Being read is the single most important factor in improving my writing. Thank you, dear reader, for reading through to the end!

Depends heavily on how important the language is to the plot of your work. There are several approaches.Throw together random syllables, maybe a bunch of apostrophes, and sprinkle it across the story. Have it come from the mouth of foreign characters to underscore their foreignness, with them throwing in random bits and pieces every now and then. This is the quickest and also dirtiest approach, since it absolves you entirely of the task of inventing something with structure and meaning. It’s also a fairly cheap thing to do and probably not what you’re after. Just bringing it up since you see it so often in comics, for example.Make mention of a foreign language (on signs, for example), of the fact that the protagonist cannot understand what may be said or written, or devote some time to their struggle with grammar, words and pronunciation. Do not, however, ever tell the reader what this language actually looks like. This gets around a very prominent problem: putting unintelligible text into your work and having to explain its meaning somehow (with footnotes, people translating, context, a lexicon in the appendix or simply leaving things unresolved). If you don’t actually have examples of the fictional language, you needn’t bother with making one, obviously. Again, probably not the angle of this question.Come up with new words as you need them, but don’t bother with inventing grammar rules - just take those of English, since few readers will actually wonder what the inner structure of the foreign text in your work is. So if the foreign guy says alare he canu magajin olo? it’s just word-for-word “what is your purpose here?”, with you pulling words from thin air and no thought given to their etymology. Works for most situations and is certainly better than inventing nonsense. As soon as you get readers that are interested in your language (like I would certainly be), this is a recipe for disappointment, however.Borrow some or all of the structure from a foreign language you know. Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s say you speak German - what ideas can you draw from that? German has gender, while English does not. German also has case, more complex plural formation rules and a lot more things English lacks. This is where we actually start conlanging, and this is also where you start reading about linguistics and figuring out what a language actually does under the hood. I’ll leave this topic for now and finish the list - I’ll come back to the process of conlanging itself below.As a sort of hybrid of the two previous points, read up on how other languages express certain things, then make up words and twist your native language’s grammar a little. If we take the “what is your purpose here” sentence again, we could leave out the “is” (as Russian or Arabic do), treat “here” as an adjective and specify that this language places question words at the end, not at the beginning. Essentially “your here purpose what?” Canu olo magajin alare?Then you could use this as a starting point for other considerations to make your language less like English:If canu means “your”, maybe “you” is can?So, do we have an -u suffix that forms the genitive? Does that mean that if the word for “man” is bana, the genitive is banu? Or banau? Or banahu? Banadu? Look, we’re already doing grammar!Olo means “here” - what’s “there”? Ala maybe?Or maybe the language is prefixing, and the word for “you” is nu, with the genitive expressed by ca?How do you pronounce all this? Gotta read up on phonology!Even if you don’t develop your language to be different from English in this way, you can still make use of a simple trick: English uses many little function words, but why not turn some of them into affixes? Why not stick the “your” part to the end of a word (Finnish or Turkish do this) and say “purpose-your”, same for “car-my”, “house-his” etc? Why not write articles together with the word they modify (thehouse, anapple?) Or take the personal pronouns and use them as suffixes (Alex read-he abook)? Since you’re replacing English words with your own ones, these transparent replacements won’t be noticed.Read about many different languages, especially non-European ones, and how they do things, then grab the features you find interesting and compose a language from them. This requires some serious research and persistence because the stuff most languages of the world do can be quite mind-bending if you’re only used to what comes out of Europe. Also, you’ll find that languages are complex creatures. Scratch that, extremely complex creatures. You’ll be asking yourself “how could I express that” almost non-stop. How often you yield to the temptation of just doing it like your mother tongue does it is up to you. You can make up your own words or imitate those of a language you know, but this style of conlanging (called a priori) usually involves creation essentially from nothing, with not a lot more than aesthetical influence from real languages. Again, let me come back to this later.Do all the a priori things of the point above, but take it a step further by creating older stages of the language, right down to its proto-form. This is the ultimate crown jewel of conlanging - making a language, then evolving it through several intermediate stages into the form you want to use in your work. You end up with multiple languages in one, possibly even including dialects, and a very rich and dense repository of words where you will be able to tell everyone interested what adunchaisa is derived from, used to mean five hundred years ago and how it looks in the dialect of the South Coast. I probably don’t need to tell you that doing this will keep you occupied for years, if not decades.Conlanging is thus a question of what you want. The various strategies are to some extent compatible with another - many people take a real language like Latin and evolve their own Romance language, or make an offshoot of Russian with lots of Chinese words, or imagine an alternate history where the Aztecs were the ones to conquer Europe and make dialects of Nahuatl influenced by Celtic, Romance, Germanic and whatnot. Others go full a priori on the grammar but take the vocabulary mostly from real language families. There are many options.But I promised to outline the process of conlanging a little more. I have written about this before, so browsing my Quora posts might help you too, or the conlanging topic in general. Most of the guide below will assume you’re going for an a priori conlang, one that freely cherry-picks linguistic features and distills them into a new language. It’s what I like best, personally. If you’re going for the “twist English a bit with new words”, you don’t need all of this.First of all:The Language Construction KitThis link is a very good intro to conlanging. The author is well-known in the community and has also published books on the topic.The biggest problem when people without a lot of knowledge about linguistics try to make a language is that they’re not even aware of the absolutely dazzling range of variation among human languages, as well as their complexity. It doesn’t even occur to most people (and even experienced linguists, while we’re at it) how many bases you need to cover when creating a language, and how many ways there are to do it.So the first thing you need to do is read a lot. Get yourself on Wikipedia and dig through the linguistics topics - phonology, morphology, typology, syntax, grammars of languages, all that. To learn how to make new words from existing ones, read about derivational morphology. Open your mind to the possibilities, and ask if you don’t understand what the hell a syntactically ergative active-stative language is.To equip yourself with the basic building blocks of a language, as well as to avoid embarrassing yourself when someone asks you how to pronounce your words, you need a phoneme system. Check out the Wiki articles on vowels and consonants to see how linguistics looks at them. Basically, you need to decide what sound distinctions will be meaningful in your language. English has a lot of vowels - Arabic has only three. Hindi has a far more sophisticated consonant system than English. French has nasal vowels. Russian has palatalisation. Some Native American languages have no nasals. Chinese has tones, as does most of East Asia. Finnish has no voiced consonants. You can do whatever you like - the easiest approach is probably to pick a language that you like, looking at its sound system and letting it inspire you.So, you’ve picked your phonemes and a way to spell them in the Latin alphabet. By doing that, you’re ensuring that whatever you do, you’ll always know what the material you can make words from is. Now to the words themselves.While the phoneme is the smallest distinguishing feature a language can have (which is why “pot” and “bot” are two different words - /p/ and /b/ are phonemic in English), the morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language. Morphemes can be entire words (dog, house, monkey) or affixes (monkey-s). English is a language rather poor in morphemes, but some examples from the other end of the spectrum can be found all over the Americas, for example Navajo or Greenlandic, whose words are truly magnificent morpheme chains. For the purpose of conlanging, you’ll have to decide how many morphemes you want in an average word - are you making a language that operates mostly with free morphemes, that is, rather independent words? Or do you want long, complex words that consist of many morphemes? This is one of the questions of typology. You language can say “I go to work then come home and eat dinner” in ten words, or use tons of suffixes to literally say “work-to-go-having-done-I home-to-come-I dinner-eat-I-and”. Or something in between. Again, it pays to look at as many languages as possible.Syntax is how you build sentences, roughly. English has very strict word order rules, but many languages don’t - look at what Russian allows, or Latin. They have freer word order because they have more powerful morphology than English - it’s all tied together. At the very least, you want to specify in what order your words usually appear. You’ll run into terms like SVO, SOV, VSO here - the order of subject, verb and object. Having a different word order from English can already go a long way to make your language seem more exotic. Irish has VSO, Turkish has SOV, Malagasy (on Madagascar) has VOS, and some funny folks in the Amazon region do OSV or even OVS stuff.I could waffle on endlessly about linguistic details, but this post is already quite monstrous, so I’m gonna say a few words about language and culture too. It cannot be overstated how intimately language and culture are connected, which shows up big time in the vocabulary. Human language is one big metaphor (ever wondered why “get” can mean “understand”, or why the boss politician is called “president” - “he who sits in front”?) and if you want to make naturalistic vocabulary, prepare do read up a lot on etymology. It’s crazy where some of our words come from, man, and how they change over time. Given the right historical context, almost every word can turn into every other. “Shit” and “science” related, by the way.But back to culture. You’re never just developing a language, but a whole culture behind it too. Ask yourself what climate they live in, what is important to them, how the genders treat each other, how warlike they are. All of this can be the basis of beautiful sayings and idioms, which are probably the most worthwhile conlang pieces to have in a fictional work. If your desert culture protagonist lets out a colourful oath after being jostled in a crowd, gets asked by his love interest what that means and then has to explain to her, ears red from embarrassment, that he wishes for a million grains of sand to clog the other guy’s mom’s vagina, hilarity can ensue. If he’s from an arctic seal hunter culture, his metaphor will be different. Landlocked civilisations will not have words for ships or the open sea, but will borrow those from other languages. While the thirty words for snow that the Inuit are said to have are a myth (largely born from a misunderstanding of what a “word” is in Inuit languages), a language will have more sophisticated vocabulary in areas that its speakers value. Nothing is too crazy here, either. “The sound a spear makes when it is withdrawn from the flesh of an opponent” may sound weird, but it’s in fact a rather special piece of Zulu onomatopoeia that by extension became the name of the entire weapon, wielded by Zulu troops under King Shaka. The word is iklwa. Can’t you just see it?So much for this. There’s at least a hundred things I’d have liked to include in this, but it’d simply blow out of proportion. I can only repeat: read a lot about linguistics, take a look at the Construction Kit and decide for yourself how much time you want to devote to the secret vice, as Tolkien - the godfather of conlanging - called it. And if you need further help, well, not a day goes by without me looking at my Quora inbox.