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When I teach creative writing, I notice that novices frequently write as if describing a what a TV screen would show if a camera had zoomed in for a close-up of their narrator’s face. By contrast, an experienced writer would rely on a much wider range of storytelling techniqes, including dialogue and interior thoughts. “What do…
Two people who saw a police encounter on Wednesday reported different details; surveillance videotape showed that both of them were wrong. —NYT Similar:Wood pile stacking animation (Blender 3D)For a medieval project, I wanted a wood …AmusingReflections on Flannery O'Connor's "The River"I’m teaching “The River” today in an “In…CultureI Felt a Great Disturbance in the Font.…
There are plenty of folks happy to tell you how to write better, just as any doctor will tell you to “eat right and exercise.” But changing your writing (or eating) habits only happens when you understand why you do what you do. I can help you with that. | That proposal or email you wrote…
I love some good meta. I wrote a dialogue-heavy short story about writing dialogue-driven short stories. Mark C. Marino wrote this excllent MPR-style essay about the formulaic endings of NPR stories, which are designed to leave you feeling smarter but emptier, so that you return to fill your pledge-drive mug with another dose of First World…
One of our seniors interviewed recent graduates for her Honors project. It’s all too common for English majors to hear “What can you do with an English degree?” from well-meaning relatives and friends, implying that the most viable career for an English major is that of a “starving artist.” So what can you do with…
However, running parallel to the evolution of these [graphic] games was a family of explicitly, un- ashamedly narrative titles. Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther & Woods, 1977), Zork I (1980), and Adventureland (Andventure International, 1978) have equal importance in the evolution of video games, but rarely receive the same kind of general, mainstream popular cultural appreciation…
This author did a great job articulating the unease I felt when I learned about Apple’s racially diverse emoji. I don’t like it when interfaces translate my textual emoticons ;-) into graphic symbols. Now I feel like I’ll have to think deliberately about whatever color the autocorrect chooses for those graphics. Because I’m black, should I…
“There’s such an emphasis on keeping student enthusiasm going and getting them to want to actively participate. When you start talking about grammar, it’s like asking them to eat their vegetables, and no one wants to ask them to do that.” —Death to high school English – Salon.com. Similar:In Defense of DistractionIf you’re a fan…
A hypertext choose-your-own adventure narrative set at a board meeting at a game development company. You are the lead writer on a game that is going straight to hell. And guess who has to fix it? I clicked through out of curiosity and kept clicking. Very enjoyable.The Writer Will Do Something by Matthew S. Burns.…
Blog ten-beat lines of verse, like Shakespeare wrote. But lazy bloggers, fill you not your posts With words transpos’d, poetic more to seem. Like this, who speaks? Like Yoda will you sound. Nor stuff your limping lines with pointless words And really wasteful phrases filling space And stretching points so thin across each line In order to fulfill the ten-beat rule. Yet rhymeless…
This is good news. It’s unfair that government-funded studies get published in private databases that make money off of the public’s desire to access results of studies paid for by our taxes. NSF will require that articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and papers in juried conference proceedings or transactions be deposited in a public access…
Language is a fluid, living social construct. The rules of grammar were not carved on stone tablets and handed down by God. They were created by human beings who had observations about how language works, and opinions about how it should work. “Subject pronoun,” “predicate nominative,” and the like are almost insider terms, ones that…
A student’s short story featuring a treasure hunt at an ancestral mansion uses a vintage name for the mistress of the house a vintage name and supplies a butler, suggesting a Victorian Engliand setting. But the story also used the term “flashlight” — an Americanism for what the Brits are more likely to call an “electric…
Text has been redacted by bullet (hole)s. We are promised victory and we will surely get it. Now I don’t like killing innocent people it is forbidden in Islam but due to said (hole) it is allowed. All credit goes (hole) via seattlepi.com. Similar:'Our worst nightmare': New legal filings detail reporting of Rolling Stone's U-Va. gang ra…The court documents,…
I’m building a new site for a non-profit and will probably be moving the student newspaper to a new template, so this is the time to think of such things. Similar:Always Bet on TextGraydon Hoare offers a rousing hymn to t…CybercultureHow to Disagree Academically: Using Graham's "Disagreement Hierarchy" to organize a colleg…How to Disagree Academically:…
I quibble with The Chronicle headline writer’s notion that paper & pencil are “no-tech,” but hand-written notes are valuable. Students tested right after a lecture tended to answer factual questions equally well regardless of how they took notes, but students who handwrote their notes did consistently better on conceptual questions. What’s more, when students were…
I’m teaching “The River” today in an “Introduction to Literary Study” course. Demonstrating that we know what to do if we ever encounter such a little boy in real life won’t help us to understand O’Connor’s literary accomplishment. From a Catholic perspective, the mysteries of God are beyond anyone’s understanding. Anyone who prays for God…
I love giving the “what is rhetoric” lecture in my freshman writing seminar. Most students have at least heard of a rhetorical question, but most don’t know what “rhetoric” means, nor have they heard of logos, pathos and ethos. The first thing that students need to know about rhetoric, then, is that it’s all around…
A chemist celebrates the liberal arts. Our culture has drawn an artificial line between art and science, one that did not exist for innovators like Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs. Leonardo’s curiosity and passion for painting, writing, engineering and biology helped him triumph in both art and science; his study of anatomy and dissections…
When backwards newbie poets write
Up rhymes they clever wish to set,
Like Master Yoda do they sound
And awkwarder their poems get.