Tag Archives: English language

Encore! 9 Great Links to Help With “Pesky” Grammatical Stuff.

grammar

I’ve a confession to make. I’ve never been great with  grammar. Maybe that’s why I work primarily in video ;-)   I’m sure some of you more keen- eyed grammarians have spotted the odd blunder or two in my posts. However, when I do write major pieces I always rely on a good editor to polish my work. For those of you who prefer to work on your own, here’s a great list…Read more.

Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup there’s so much good stuff to choose from. As a closet designer, I was particularly drawn to The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design.  This is a must on every designer’s wish list. As someone who volunteers at our local Hospice, I was deeply moved by Hospice Hand Portraiture.  And if your business involves the gathering or tellingof stories, you’ll want to read Telling Your Story: The Secrets To Content Branding.

  • People Of The Bookshelf. “Alpha by subject … or by dinner party seating rules? Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks on a shelving obsession.”
  • Are You Overwhelmed by Marketing? “Does it seem like there are just too many things to do to market your business? It’s easy to get overwhelmed by marketing ideas, plans, and tasks, especially when many of them involve learning new skills. And then people are always telling you about something else to do. But you’re only one person. You can only afford to pay for so much help. Is it really even possible to do everything about marketing that others say you should? Here are four steps to find a clear path out of marketing overwhelm.”
  • Hospice Hand Portraiture. “As a hospice nurse and photographer I have the honor to witness and capture the unwavering expression of love that endures between people living with terminal illness… Hand portraiture preserves this important expression of love. Each hand is different; a symbol of identity that embodies character and tells stories. Hands reveal honest emotion. Hands are for holding.”
  • The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design. “Every once in a while, along comes a book-as-artifact that becomes an instant, inextricable necessity in the life of any graphic design aficionado. This season, it’s The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design — an impressive, exhaustive, rigorously researched, and beautifully produced compendium of 500 seminal designs…”
  • Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir No. 1.[Paris Review Interview] The Liars’ Club, Karr’s 1995 memoir of her Gothic childhood in a swampy East Texas oil-refining town, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, sold half a million copies, and made its forty-year-old author, who was then an obscure poet, a literary celebrity…For a writer who has shared herself with the public in three memoirs, Mary Karr is an extraordinarily elusive interview subject. Nearly two years passed between our initial contact, in July of 2007, and our first session.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this aerticle.]
  • 9 Of The Most Beautiful Words In The English Language. “I’ve riffled the pages of scores of old dictionaries and ransacked my father’s old army trunks, which now contain hundreds of my journals and notebooks. More than once during my restocking I’ve thought of the startling line in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, where Captain Hook is described: “The man isn’t wholly evil; he has a thesaurus in his cabin.” Recently, I felt even more vindicated about my ardent belief in the beauty of word books when I heard the deadpan comedian Stephen Wright say on late-night television, “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
  • Telling Your Story: The Secrets To Content Branding. “Facts are boring but putting facts into a context with emotion makes them memorable. Stories help you connect with people on a sensory level…The late Steve Sabol, the man behind NFL Films, once said “tell me a fact and I’ll learn, tell me a truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

In today’s Monday’s Link Roundup I have the perfect gift for the hard to buy for bibliophile. Check out A Perfume That Smells Of An Obscure Pleasure: The Printed Word. On a more serious note don’t miss the NPR interview with Arnold Weinstein, author of Morning, Noon, And Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books. This is definitely on my list of books to read.

  • A Matter of Fashion. “Linguists insist that it’s wrong to designate any kind of English “proper” because language always changes and always has. A common objection is that even so, all people must know which forms of language are acceptable in the public sphere, at the peril of unemployability or, at least, social handicap. Fair enough – but there’s a middle ground.”
  • Your Life As A Mini-Movie.Ptch picks up where your static photo feeds on Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Viddy, Facebook, and Google+ leave off. Dreamworks, the animation studio behind Shrek, is backing the iOS app, which… lets users create, edit, and share 60-second mini-movies from their own photos and video clips. Then comes the movie magic. Ptch helps users add title cards, offers soundtrack help with one of more than 80 preloaded songs, and even integrates comments from your social networks. Like other outfits that do Instagram-like treatments for video, Ptch lets mini-movie makers wrap their creations in one of eight styles. You can share new creations on Ptch, as well as on your desired social channels.”
  • Life Stages In Literature.[NPR Interview] “Guest: Arnold Weinstein, distinguished professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and author of Morning, Noon, And Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books. What Twain, Woolf, Roth, Morrison and more tell us about growing up and growing old.The stories and insights to place us, ground us, in our own lives. Literature can get at the heart of what we’re doing and the experience we share can be illuminated.”
  • Best Online Language Tools for Word Nerds. “Beside the standard-issue dictionary and spellchecker offered by most word processors and operating systems, there are several web-based language tools at your disposal that can get you just the information you need. Let’s take a look at some of the best online language tools for word nerds and regular people who just want to say that word correctly in conversation.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

This Monday’s Link Roundup has its usual eclectic mix. For the “shock of the old” take a look at Vintage Ad Sexism.  If you’re a Dorothy Parker fan, you’ll love  Dorothy Parker and the 5 Senses. Her clever use of the senses is a perfect jumping off point for memory prompts. And Seth Godin reminds us of the hard reality of marketing in The unforgiving arithmetic of the funnel.

  • Dorothy Parker and the 5 Senses. “I found three great Parker quotes that show her intriguing use of the five senses. The first two below are ones that I feature in my SheWrites post today…The third one, I selected to share with you here. Below it is a special writing prompt that it inspired.”
  • Why can smells unlock forgotten memories? “The toy cupboard at my grandmother’s house had a particular smell. I cannot tell you what it was, but sometimes now, as an adult, I will catch a whiff of it. The smell brings with it memories I thought were lost, memories of visits to my grandparents’ house, of my grandmother, and of playing with the toys from the toy cupboard. But why do smells have this power to unlock forgotten memories?”
  • 5 Steps to Turn Audiences into Clients. “Public speaking can be one of the most powerful methods for an independent professional to land new clients. But it doesn’t always work out that way. Before you book your next speaking engagement, ask yourself these five questions to make sure you’re on the right track to turn your audience into clients.”
  • The unforgiving arithmetic of the funnel. “One percent.That’s how many you get if you’re lucky. One percent of the subscribers to the Times read an article and take action. One percent of the visitors to a website click a button to find out more. sparked by an idea and go do something about it. And then!”
  • The myth of English as a global language. “English spelling is notoriously inconsistent, and some have gone further, calling it “the world’s most awesome mess” or “an insult to human intelligence” (both these from linguists, one American, one Austrian)…How did this unsystematic system come about? And is it really that bad? Some say that there are only a few hundred deeply irregular words, but the trouble is that most of them are common. Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle even went so far as to claim that we have “close to an optimal system”, though that takes a deal of argument to convince.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Welcome to another issue of Monday’s Link Roundup. For those of you who are discovering this weekly roundup for the first time, a word of explanation. The links I select are those that I find personally entertaining, informative, amusing, thought provoking, and unusual. As well, they all have some connection to the realms of personal history, memoir, oral history, and biography. I hope you enjoy your visit here today.

  • How a Book is Made: AD 400 vs. 1947 vs. 1961 vs. 2011. “I love books, their past and their future. Yet, while ubiquitous and commodified, books and how they come to be remains an enigma for most of us. No longer. From Discovery comes this 5-minute microdocumentary on how books are made.”
  • Movellas democratises ebook publishing for Europe. “Movellas is bringing a popular Japanese concept for mobile partwork publishing to Europe. The publishing platform — which just won a Meffy for the Best Mobile Social Media Service — allows aspiring authors to write short novels chapter-by-chapter in a social and interactive environment.”
  • Selling My Mother’s Dresses. “Some of my favorite things — including the sundress I’m wearing today and the Winnie the Pooh car that Jay is pushing our daughter in — are from someone else’s life. I find no joy in shopping at regular stores anymore…I love trying to sniff out a memory from a bud vase or a favorite song from a case of L.P.’s. The stains and broken switches, the bend in the knee of an old pair of jeans. Sometimes I just want to look at how many Mason jars one person can collect and imagine what they might’ve held. It’s comforting to know that someone has breathed and laughed inside a sweater before me. That I am part of a continuum.” [Thanks to Mary M. Harrison of Morning Glory Memoirs for alerting me to this item.]
  • Helvetica: A documentary Film by Gary Hustwit. “Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which recently celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives.”
  • World Wide Words. “The English language is forever changing. New words appear; old ones fall out of use or change their meanings. World Wide Words tries to record at least some part of this shifting wordscape by featuring new words, word histories, the background to words in the news, and the curiosities of native English speech.”
  • Schools, beware the e-book bandwagon. “..schools may want to pause before jumping on the e-book bandwagon. In a study last year at the University of Washington, a group of graduate students were given Kindles, and their use of the devices was monitored through diary entries and interviews. By the end of the school year, nearly two-thirds of the students had abandoned the Kindle or were using it only infrequently. Of those who continued to use the e-reader regularly, many had “switched to a different and usually less desirable reading technique,” researchers said.” [Thanks to Paula Stahel of Breath and Shadows Productions for alerting me to this item.]

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

A Happy July 4th to all my American readers. If you’re taking it easy today, why not settle back  and check out some of the great links in this Monday’s Link Roundup? My favorite is Any Last Words? It made me ponder what I’d want for the opening line of my obituary.

  • What Is the Difference Between a Hobby and a Business? “It’s important to get the right answer to this question, because it has broad implications regarding your taxes and bookkeeping. In this post, we’ll discuss this important topic and provide some additional resources that you can turn to with questions.”
  • Best-Ever Guide to Integrating Stories into Speeches, Presentations, Indeed, Any Influential Message. “A couple of weeks ago… I noted that Terrence Gargiulo, who delivered a commencement speech recently, was “considering doing a meta analysis of how [he] worked with the craft of story making to research, design, and deliver this talk. Well, he’s done it, and the resulting white paper is a wonderful primer on bringing story into the communication of any kind of influential message, including speeches and presentations.”
  • Any Last Words? The narrator of  Timothy Schaffert’s new novel The Coffins of Little Hope  is the 83-year old obituary writer of a small-town newspaper in Nebraska.  “Inspired we asked you to provide the first sentence to your own obituary…The responses — humorous, whimsical, and poignant — rolled in, and we asked the authors of our favorites to read them.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
  • Chicago Billboards, 1942. “This film produced by the outdoor advertising industry in the 1940s is a great slice of everyday history. It shows some classic product advertisements, vintage Chicago street scenes and antique vehicles. We also get an in depth story about how outdoor advertising works. This third part is in gorgeous color including some great footage of public transit.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Hello. And welcome to Monday’s Link Roundup. For book designers don’t miss Inside Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Unmakeable” Interactive Book. It’s remarkable. For all of us who struggle with PowerPoint there’s useful advice in Five Ways to Not Suck at PowerPoint. For a thoughtful look at the future of publishing check out Apple-Esquire dust-up bodes ill for the publishing utopia we pictured.

  • Language May Help Create, Not Just Convey, Thoughts and Feelings. “The language we speak may influence not only our thoughts, but our implicit preferences as well. That’s the finding of a study by psychologists at Harvard University, who found that bilingual individuals’ opinions of different ethnic groups were affected by the language in which they took a test examining their biases and predilections.”
  • Inside Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Unmakeable” Interactive Book. “The book is actually a kind of interactive paper-sculpture: Foer and his collaborators at Die Keure in Belgium took the pages of another book, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, and literally carved a brand new story out of them using a die-cut technique.”
  • 45 Great Cultural Icons Revisited. “Below, you will find 45+ video & audio clips that record the words and actions of major figures from a bygone era. Artists, architects, filmmakers, actors, poets, novelists, composers, musicians, world-changing leaders, and those not easily categorized – they’re all here.”
  • Taking Care of Your Personal Archives. “…as a part of the Smithsonian’s October Archives Month celebrations, Smithsonian Institution Archives experts answered your questions about your own personal archives. The Facebook Q&A session we held over at the main Smithsonian Facebook page was a great success, and so we wanted to highlight some of the interesting questions that came out of the session.”
  • Five Ways to Not Suck at PowerPoint. “It’s easy to blame PowerPoint for boring presentations, but designer Jesse Desjardins suggests that more often than not, the speaker’s to blame, not the tool. In Desjardins’ presentation he outlines five common presentation design mistakes that can be easily avoided, along with suggestions on how you might do so.”
  • Grieving in the Facebook Age. “Chances are you’ve thought about what happens to you after you die, but have you ever wondered what happens to your social media?”
  • Apple-Esquire dust-up bodes ill for the publishing utopia we pictured. “…the news that Esquire had to tone down the racy bits to be published at the App Store realizes fears that have been murmured since Apple posited itself as the distributor of the future: Can a company that’s proved infamously fickle about deciding which apps will be sold in its store and which won’t really be hands-off about editorial content? Could a corporation with a messianic leader whose success derives from, among other things, obsessive design control really stand back? The answer is, apparently not.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup be sure to check out find stillness to cure the illness.  It’s about taking time to stop and be mindful. Altogether now… breathing in slowly… and breathing out slowly… Don’t you feel better already? ;)

Top 5 Most Unique Family Trees. “While I love any well-designed Family Tree, I especially adore the more modern versions that add a little uniqueness to the time-tested keepsake. So whether you’re looking for a way to visually express your family ties or for a special gift (like for a new baby, perhaps!), here are some beautiful and unique Family Trees.”

Highlights from the World of Visual Storytelling, Part 1. “…if visual storytelling in graphic novels is growing, it is also growing in numerous other manifestations and venues. Here’s a partial sampling from the last several months; look for Part 2 of this post on Oct. 10.”

Graphics Atlas. “…a new online resource that brings sophisticated print identification and characteristic exploration tools to archivists, curators, historians, collectors, conservators, educators, and the general public.”

Goodbye, cruel words: English. It’s dead to me.“The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself.” [Thanks to Paula Stahel of  Breath and Shadows Productions for alerting me to this item.]

Ancestorville. “… a genealogy web site with more than 4,000 lost family photographs, antique paper, and identified genealogy antiques for sale. The site has identified more than 10,000 surnames amongst the items available for sale.”

Important Slavery Collection Goes Online. “The New-York Historical Society  has announced the launch of a new online portal to nearly 12,000 pages of source materials documenting the history of slavery in the United States, the Atlantic slave trade and the abolitionist movement. Made readily accessible to the general public for the first time at www.nyhistory.org/slaverycollections,  these documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represent fourteen of the most important collections in the library’s Manuscript Department.”

find stillness to cure the illness. “It’s a busy day, and you’re inundated by non-stop emails, text messages, phone calls, instant message requests, notifications, interruptions of all kinds.”

9 Great Links to Help With “Pesky” Grammatical Stuff.

grammarI’ve a confession to make. I’ve never been great with  grammar. Maybe that’s why I work primarily in video ;-)   I’m sure some of you more keen- eyed grammarians have spotted the odd blunder or two in my posts. However, when I do write major pieces I always rely on a good editor to polish my work.

For those of you who prefer to work on your own, here’s a great list composed by the Online Education  Database:  150 Resources to Help You Write Better, Faster, and More Persuasively. The following list is excerpted  from their section on English Language Skills.

  1. English Grammar FAQ: A simple and easy-to-use list of common English language problems and how to solve them. This list was compiled through an extensive archive of postings to alt.usage.english by John  Lawler, Linguistics, U. Michigan, Ann Arbor.
  2. 50Tools to Increase Your Writing Skills: Offered by Poynter Online, these tips are clever and wise. Although Poynter is geared toward journalists, this list is geared toward any writer.
  3. Grammar, Punctuation, and Capitalization for Technical Writers and Editors: Although this comprehensive guide is geared toward technical writing, its easy-to-use format and easy-to-understand explanations  would benefit any writer.
  4. Guide to Grammar and Style: Written by Jack Lynch, this site provides grammatical rules and explanations, comments on style, and suggestions on usage that Lynch put together for his classes.
  5. Guide to Grammar and Writing: Choose from several modules that will help you to determine how to structure your writing. The Capital Community College Foundation sponsors the Guide to Grammar and Writing.
  6. Hypergrammar: The University of Ottawa provides a heavily linked explanation to all things proper in English grammar. This is a comprehensive one-stop shop for structure, spelling, and punctuation.
  7. Free Online Spell Checker: It checks for spelling and grammar mistakes and then gives instant feedback.
  8. The Elements of Style: William Strunk, Jr. wrote the classic reference book for any student and conscientious writer. Bartleby.com offers the entire book free online.
  9. Verbix: Did he lay or lie? Which tense should you use? If you’re confused, this English conjugator will help you to determine how to use verbs in the proper tense. You can also Ask Oxford if you’d prefer.

Photo by Margaret Vincent

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