“Avoid reading so as not to taint your creative brilliance; ignore any rules of grammar and syntax that are too complex and boring; and never, ever revise.” — writing tips never given by successful authors Lovecraft is not my favorite author — in part because the horror conventions he experimented with are now so common…
One of the six current game pieces will be voted out, to make room for one of these new ones. I’m partial to the captain’s chair in Star Trek Monopoly. What do you think about these options? Hasbro, maker of the board game available in 111 countries and 43 languages, is replacing one of the…
Kim asked on Twitter: “Is there a canon for digital narratives / interactive stories / hypertext literature yet? A list of accepted classics and forms?” What followed was a lot of us going “we don’t know”. And I wasn’t exactly helpful, by pointing out that those three things are (in some ways) completely different. But.…
Why is English spelling such a tangle? It all started when Latin-speaking missionaries arrived in Britain in the 6th century without enough letters in their alphabet. They had 23. (They didn’t have “j”, “u” or “w”.) Yet the Germanic Anglo-Saxon languages had at least 37 phonemes, or distinctive sounds. The Romans didn’t have a letter,…
What’s your comma IQ? Mine just so happens to be awesome. Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Similar:"The threat is no longer simply from government censorship."After using examples from Warsaw and Pra…CultureHow Nasty Was Nero, Really?In The New Yorker, Rebecca Reed reports …CultureThe Media Pyramid: “Any content where ideology leads to falsehood is bad for you.”You Are…
Talk nerdy to me. You’re my type. What about old friend Helvetica, Miss Typography of 1957 (and pretty much every year after)? Coles theorizes that its universality stems from the fact that its “shapes and widths are unusually uniform.” This homogeneity makes it perfect for big display logos but “not as effective for long passages…
I’m particularly tickled by the MLA reference. 4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence | The Onion Similar:Higgs Boson VideoGreat video about subatomic particles, f…AcademiaWhen is the phrase "when asked about…" part of good news writing? Rarely.A new graphic for an existing handout, w…AcademiaI ditched Google for Bing with ChatGPT…
Wonderful, magical theater story. It was looking awfully bleak for the Saturday evening performance of “My Fair Lady” when Artistic Director Molly Smith walked onstage surrounded by her cast to deliver some grim news. She informed the nearly full house that flu had laid low several cast members, including Manna Nichols, who played the lead…
Really helpful definition from a “Pinkalicous” children’s theater study guide. That’ll clear everything right up for the kiddos, won’t it? Similar:The Hidden Feminist Messages in 'Schoolhouse Rock!'Hidden? Sure, but certainly not accident…AcademiaIs your child texting about recursive acronym palindromes? Is your child texting about recursive …AmusingIn an Unpredictable Job Market, How Should People Think About…
A hype-heavy treatment of a recent study (named vaguely as the “American Freshman Survey,” in the article, but not actually cited or dated… I found a copy of a 2011 report). While students are much more likely to call themselves gifted in writing abilities, objective test scores actually show that their writing abilities are far…
In other words, more than the profound lessons on the corrupting influence of power, more than the stirring battle scenes, more even than beloved characters like Frodo and Sam, readers came to Tolkien’s books for the rich, magical world that they built out of his words. Martin has taken this lesson to heart in his…
My first-year writing students generally know they aren’t supposed to use Wikipedia as a source in a research paper, but many can’t quite articulate why. A willingness to trace a citation to its source and evaluate the source, rather than accept the source uncritically, is crucial to intellectual competence in the Information Age. An article…
Virginia Woolf had to reassure the public in 1922: “Oh, yes dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair,” even as journalists crowed over the death of “that lavender-scented little old lady of literature.” “Everybody is forever saying that the essay is dead,” John Leonard observed in 1982. “This is always…
The WordPress extension Jetpack provided me with thus chart, showing a million hits to an instructional web page (on formatting a paper in MLA style) stretched out over about 16 months. The weekly traffic peaks on Mondays and bottoms out on Fridays (with a sharp spike late Sunday, stretching past midnight, thus puffing up the…
A six-year-old who was warned not to pretend to shoot his classmates with scissors later made a shooting gesture with his fingers, and has now been suspended. A parent reacting to the story told a reporter “I wouldn’t expect someone to do that to my child, and if they did, I would expect some type…
I’m slated to teach Shakespeare this fall… blogging this for future reference. Six Shakespearean actors and directors go in search of the greatest dramatist who ever lived by revealing the stories behind and the wonders within some of his greatest plays BBC Four – Shakespeare Uncovered. Similar:The 3 Scariest Words A Boy Can Hear ("Be…
I just noticed a mild traffic spike over the past few days, and after a little digging, learned a page on my blog is currently first out of 2 billion hits for something I blogged about in July. A different, related search returns the same page first out of 2.4 billion hits. Thanks to traffic…
Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years – an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28…
This is great advice for everybody. I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something. So…
If you smoke two cigarettes, you lose 30 minutes of your life. Exercise for 20 minutes, and you gain two units of microlife. Over time bad habits accelerate your aging, and good habits slow it down… — Scientific American. Similar:Who cares about hyphens, commas and capital letters? You should.You’re a busy editor, fighting a deadlin…BooksWhen F.…