The first three months are in the books, one-quarter of the year done. I’ve posted reports for each of the first three months with all kinds of numbers. But the most important lessons don’t lie in the statistics. Beyond the numbers, so far I’ve learned two lessons from writing a blog post every day. 1. […]
The 2 Lessons I’ve Learned So Far from My Blog Challenge Read More »
Gestation of Ideas: On Vertical Writing and Living Nick Ripatrazone discusses vertical writing, a concept he learned from writer Andre Dubus’s essay “The Habit of Writing,” which appeared in the anthology On Writing Short Stories, edited by Tom Bailey. Dubus writes that, instead of trying to force stories into being, he gives ideas time to
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Whenever I find an interesting article, I leave it open on my browser because I just know it will form the basis of a spectacular blog post. I’ve always done this, but in the past I would finally just close everything and start over again because the web is, after all, an infinite source of
Too Many Open Browser Tabs Read More »
Shakespeare’s Plays Reveal His Psychological Signature A hot trend in literary criticism is the use of computers to analyze text, a field known as digital humanities. Recently Ryan Boyd, a graduate researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, and James Pennebaker, the Liberal Arts Regents Centennial Professor of Psychology at the university, conducted one
Psychological Text Analysis Read More »
Here are my statistics for March: Number of posts written: 31 Shortest post: 220 Longest post: 2,150 Total words written: 23,345 Average post length: 753 Distribution of posts across my three blogs: Change of Perspective: 11 Notes in the Margin: 10 Retreading for Retirement: 12 The total of posts here may not equal the number
Blog a Day Challenge: March Report Read More »
I Read Only Books by Women For a Year: Here’s What Happened A constant topic of literary criticism (in both senses of criticism) is that the Western canon is populated by an over-abundance of dead White guys and that we don’t read or even hear about enough authors from the margins of society (e.g., women,
Face it, book snobs, crime fiction is real literature – and Ian Rankin proves it On the occasion of Ian Rankin’s becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Allan Massie discusses the author of the John Rebus novels and crime fiction in general. Massie bets that having been “received into Scotland’s intellectual elite
On Novels and Novelists Read More »
Being a Better Online Reader Maria Konnikova collects evidence and hypotheses about how the shift from print to online texts has changed the experience of reading. She begins with reference to Maryanne Wolf, whose book Proust and the Squid examines the history of the science and development of the reading brain from antiquity to the
January was all about convincing myself that I could indeed find something to write about and produce a blog post every day. In February I turned my gaze outward and looked at other blogs and bloggers instead of just my blog/myself as blogger. I found a number of blogs that I learned a lot from.
Blog a Day Challenge: February Report Read More »
It’s the final day of this course, Day 10, which offers the following challenges: Prompt: future Form: sonnet Device: chiasmus Sonnet A sonnet is normally composed of 14 lines of verse. There are several ways you can split your sonnet into stanzas (if you wish to), though the most common ones are 8–6 and 4–4–3–3.
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