Language Arts
Just added to the Language Arts Guide: TVTropes - Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means “stereotyped and trite”. In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them. (Some history of the site…)
Also added: Homonyms - Ever since the second grade, Alan Cooper has been interested in words like caret and carrot.
Also added: Aphorisms - Aphorisms Galore feeds your wit; “A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.”
How I Met My Wife (UPenn)
It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate.
I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, [or should that be hevelled?—BES] and she moved in a gainly way.
I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I’d have to make bones about it, since I was travelling cognito. Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn’t be peccable. Only toward and heard-of behavior would do.
How To Order A Beer In 50 Languages
The Land Of Underwater Birds (Rumpus).
What makes a good title? What makes a bad one?
And how do you know when you’ve found the right one?
These questions come up occasionally in the creative writing classes I teach, and I’m sorry to say I don’t have any easy answers. The honest truth is I struggle with titles myself. On the one hand, they seem like the least important part of the writing process: Shouldn’t the story or novel speak for itself? On the other, they’re the first words anyone reads, and in some respect the most important words of all—what we sniff before ordering the bottle. I can’t tell you how many times students have thanked me for assigning a short story they wouldn’t have read on their own because they hated the title. “Sea Oak,” by George Saunders, seems to fall into this camp: a fine title, if you’ve read the story, but which in the uninitiated stirs up visions of 17th century frigates.
Ten Rules For Writing Fiction (Part Two)
David Foster Wallace Audio Project
Simply Putting On Weight (LRB).
Salmon – the name, it’s thought, derives from the Latin salire, ‘to leap’ – has always been a fish apart, marked by its unusual capacity to migrate between the distinct worlds of salt and fresh water. According to William Camden’s Britannia (1586), the salmon leaps of Pembrokeshire were Britain’s first tourist attractions, at which scores of people would gather to ‘stand and wonder at the strength and sleight by which they see the Salmon get out of the Sea into the said River’. The spectacle remains one of the great sights of autumn, and people still crowd the banks of the Teifi to watch the returning salmon launch themselves at the cascading waters in brute determination to reach their ancestral spawning grounds upstream. Many don’t make it, but for those that do, it marks the end of an extraordinary circular migration that begins and ends in the same shallow gravel-beds to which every sea-run adult will seek to return at least once in its life: an impulse that was confirmed by Francis Bacon in the 1620s, when he tied ‘a Ribband or some known tape or thred’ around the tail of a sea-bound smolt, retrieving it the following year when the fish returned as a splendid silver grilse.