Category: writingPage 2 of 3
Wordle is “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide.” Words that appear more often are presented more prominently. The site will make word clouds…
“The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves,…
Zachart Kanin in the New Yorker .
According to Jacob Nielsen, in a post of nearly 500 words, such as this one, readers can be expected to spend an average of about 45 seconds on…
Overblown prose often springs up exactly where you would expect to find it. But shouldn’t this extraordinary opening by Peter Hartlaub to his review of Grand Theft Auto…
This is pretty awesome. When Hillary challenged Barack to a “Lincoln-Douglas” style debate, Fox TV’s national news ran the following graphic. I guess they thought she said “Lincoln-Douglass.”…
Lies I’ve told my 3 year old recently By Raul Gutierrez Trees talk to each other at night. All fish are named either Lorna or Jack. Before your…
Some book titles feel so much a part of their texts that that the works’ draft titles seem like oddly fitted hats, discarded in the dressing room; others…
Recently there has been an uptick in talk about semicolons. Witness: Hooray for the ; I say! A subterranean semicolon! FANBOYS and the Semicolon Colbert on punctuation How…
The first rule of good writing is that there are no rules. If Elmore Leonard had written Ulysses, or Metamorphosis, or Remembrance of Things Past, or Death on…
Conde Nast commissioned a distinguished group of writers to nominate their favorite travel books. Participating authors included André Aciman, Monica Ali, Julia Alvarez, Tom Bissell, Geraldine Brooks, Vikram…
For the past couple of years amazon.com has been including a feature it calls “text stats” on many of its book pages. Among the statistics presented are “readability…
A while ago I asked for opinions about helpful books for writers and got some good responses. Commentators included Alan Bernheimer, Benjamin Chambers, Carol Peters, Christine Thomas, DMS,…
El Blogador at Inner Diablog (whose interesting posts I often consult in the context of my Buried Mirror research) cites Samuel Pepys and Jean Baudrillard as models for…
Ms. Oates, rambling a bit, reveals that during “the first six weeks” of a writing project she is quite miserable. This is somewhat surprising to me, because I…
The most popular pages on this website, in terms of sheer volume of visitors, are those in my guide to getting a book published. (They account for the…
The Guardian has an ongoing feature displaying writers’ workrooms. The common features tend to be clutter, piles of books, and undistinguished furniture. Shown is the room of AS…
At Frisco Vista I’ve told the story of the Belgum Sanitarium, which was located in Wildcat Canyon above Richmond on the San Francisco Bay. It’s a romantic little…
Print journalists criticizing bloggers is nothing new. So when Michael Skube, a journalism professor at Elon University, wrote an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, in which…
Ed Champion excoriates Karen Holt for writing in Publishers Weekly that includes passages such as this: There was the time at BEA when I wanted to ask Margaret…
The LAT covers the Mirthala Salinas affair. UPDATE, Nov. 18, 2007: The above link (now removed) has gone bad. Here’s a summary of the story.
Copyblogger has posted a list of 10 steps to becoming a better writer. Here’s the link, but never mind, the full list follows: Write. Write more. Write even…
Although BoingBoing has already copied the entire article (under the heading “Ursula LeGuin rips into Slate Magazine”), this post “on serious literature,” which appears on the Ansible website,…