Do you want to have credibility with your readers? That’s a major part of the tool traditionally called ethos. Jimmy Fallon, it turns out, is a sort of Ethos Savant, as this article in Forbes explains.
One technique that Fallon uses brilliantly in nearly every interview is finding common ground with his guest. Sometimes Fallon finds common ground simply by reminding the guest of an experience they share on a personal level. He told Julia Roberts that his baby, Winnie, had just turned one. “Do you have any advice for me?” He asked Roberts, the mother of three children.
It can work for a late-night TV host, but it can also work for a writer.
Every generation, it seems, believes that the cinema of their time, in response to the war of their time, has invented the War-is-Hell movie. Before The Hurt Locker, before The Deer Hunter, before Rambo, before MASH, and before Catch 22, there was The Big Parade. Check out what the Smithsonian has to say about this 1925 film.
The Folger Shakespeare Library has released thousands of literature-related images into the public domain. This will be more interesting to those looking at English and older works than to those in American and newer literature, but I did find a lovely caricature of Edgar Allan Poe and a photo of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Nothing on David Foster Wallace, I’m afraid.
Read about it at Open Culture.
In a recent study, Kindle readers were found to score lower in reading comprehension than people who read the same text in print.
The study, presented in Italy at a conference last month and set to be published as a paper, gave 50 readers the same short story by Elizabeth George to read. Half read the 28-page story on a Kindle, and half in a paperback, with readers then tested on aspects of the story including objects, characters and settings.
Apparently the largest difference came in how readers were able to reconstruct the chronology of a story. Obviously this show a biased for old-school linear story telling. Who cares whether Hamlet killed Polonius before or after Laertes kills Hamlet?
Doesn’t that look like spam? Amazingly, and because you are a student at JCCC, it is NOT spam. You, by virtue of your stellar student status, can get Microsoft Office for FREE-FREE-FREE. Here’s the skinny…
But then you need Office to read that, so…
For more information and how to download your free copies please visit:
http://jcccstu-public.sharepoint.com/
If this doesn’t make you want to drop out of school and take up…I dunno, maybe jousting, then I’m not sure what will.
Or maybe it ought to make you want to be an engineer or computer scientist.
Are you disorganized? I found this piece of advice from the world of professional cooking an intriguing way to look at organization.
NPR Story on Mise en Place
In a book on how we think, Roger Martin suggests that:
Thinking – especially thinking in words and sentences – is a form of internal communication. In thinking, you-in-the-present communicates with you-in-the-future. But though thinking is a private and covert activity, it is influenced by external interactions – in particular, by how you communicate with others. Communicative patterns become mental habits. The implication is that counterproductive – closed, oblivious, disconnected, narrow, hermetic, rigid – ways of communicating are thereby internalized and become counterproductive ways of thinking.
And you didn’t believe that learning to write well was important? If Martin is correct, then the ability to communicate well correlates strongly with the ability to think effectively.
Are We Getting Stupider?
A cluster of studies suggest that average IQ has fallen in recent years after decades of steady increases. One explanation is the greater influence of youth culture and the decreased influence of older people on the young.
What does this mean? I’m not sure, but I bet a previous generation could have figured it out!