When Twitter arrived on the scene, its proponents found themselves defending the very short. James Poniewozik put Twitter in historical context, and, in the New York Times, writer and teacher Andy Selsberg argued that writing short could make you a better writer.
Now, in the L.A. Times, Pico Iyer writes a defense of the [...]
Yesterday we talked about a tool to help you analyze your writing for “flabbiness” or “fitness” based on your use of prepositions, adjective and adverbs, and so on. But could analyzing your writing tell you something about your mental fitness, too?
Researchers now believe that they may be able to detect the early signs of [...]
The worlds of monument-building and writing don’t overlap much–but recently, the unveiling of the Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial on the national mall offered an important lesson on why every word matters. Perhaps you heard about it?
In 1968, shortly before his assasination, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a speech titled “The Drum [...]
When I was an MFA student at the University of Maryland, Stanley Plumly said two things about my poetry that have stuck with me and shaped not only how I think about my writing process but also how I approach teaching creative writing.
In one conference, he asked, Will you ever write a ten-syllable line? Stanley [...]
When I heard The Great Gatsby had been rewritten for intermediate readers, I did what many lovers of the novel probably did—checked the online version to see how my favorite passage had been changed, shook my fist, and then re-read the original, penciling all kinds of ecstatic remarks into the margins.
In case you missed Celeste’s [...]
Neurolinguist Philip Davis is studying the effects of Shakespeare on the brain. Big Think has more info:
In all of his plays, sonnets and narrative poems, Shakespeare used 17,677 words. Of these, he invented approximately 1,700, or nearly 10 percent. Shakespeare did this by changing the part of speech of words, adding prefixes and suffixes, [...]
Whether I’m reading poetry or fiction, I’m always looking for beautiful sentences, the kinds that make the hair on my arms stand up at their deftness, their grace. Take these three examples:
For a moment she stared at the darkness as though it were the surface of a pond into which someone she loved had disappeared, [...]
Twitter turned five this week—an event celebrated by some and bemoaned by others. Is the (very) short form killing or helping our communication?
Writer and teacher Andy Selsberg argues that learning to write short can make you a better writer:
I don’t expect all my graduates to go on to Twitter-based careers, but learning how to [...]
That basic unit of literature, the sentence, has been getting a lot of attention lately thanks to Stanley Fish’s new book How to Write a Sentence. In it, Fish makes an argument that sentences are to writing what paint is to painting:
But wouldn’t the equivalent of paint be words rather than sentences? Actually, no, [...]
If you are what you eat, what happens when someone else eats what you are? In Aimee Bender’s latest novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, 9-year old Rose first experiences this conundrum when she tastes her mother’s birthday cake, only to come away with the uncomfortable understanding of her mother’s lonely dissatisfaction with life. The cake betrays the inner feelings of the cook. Over the course of the novel and Rose’s life, the predicament continues, building to an unwanted fixation of what constitutes food and those who grow and prepare it.
