The #politics of #words: #post-truth,#gaslighting and #cognitivedissonance
Stephen Colbert has a complaint. The the Oxford English Dictionary named “post-truth” its word of the year for 2016. Stephen Colbert said he covered that idea ten years previously in his conlang word “truthiness.” Now unlike other dictionaries, The Oxford English dictionary doesn’t propose to tell you how to...
The Craft of Writing: 200 Most Common Words As Parts of Speech
Two hundred words are said to comprise eighty percent of all English sentences. Here is the list broken down into parts of speech. Why? Because you should know what weapons you are hurling at an unsuspecting public. It’s been nigh many years when the nuns at my Catholic grammar...
The Craft of Writing: 200 Most Common Words As Parts of Speech
(Beth Turnage Blog) It’s been nigh many years since the nuns at my Catholic grammar school made me memorize parts of speech at the age of seven and had me parse sentences at the tender age of ten. The funny thing is that my children never had to struggle...
The Craft of Writing: Lexical Density and You
According to the study, Success with Style: Using Writing Style to Predict the Success of Novels, by Stony Brook University’s Vikas Gajingunte Ashok, Song Feng, and Yejin Choi, whether or not a book will sell can be determined by several quantifiable factors. The researchers downloaded classic literature from the...
The Art of #Writing: How To Finish a Book
Now, not to disparage those writers that have spent the last four decades polishing their magnum opus, but there comes a time to finish a book. Like a relationship gone bad, it’s a bit ripe and it’s time to move on already. Aren’t there other stories you want to...
The Comeback of Serial Fiction
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Do you remember Buck Rogers? Not the campy television show, but the shorts that used to come on in the movies before the main show? Okay, I’m dating myself here, even thought by the time I got to see...
Writing: #Whatyoucan’tdo
Being raised a #goodcatholicgirl I got a big dose of “#whatyoucan’tdo”. I even had an older male relative tell me when I eight years old, that girls didn’t become doctors. Geez. It was an overdose, really, enough so I immediately threw out all the rules as soon as I...