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So, you seem to be at an impasse. On the one hand, you have generations of grade school English teachers rightly warning their pupils that people might chuckle at them if they use the word ‘irregardless’. On the other hand, you have the scientific rigor of the modern linguistic community touting descriptivism as the…
DAVIES: You know, and you say many times in the book that you're more a writer than a performer. CLEESE: It's always hard for people to believe that because of course, anytime they've seen me it's because I've been performing. You know, they don't go to their televisions and switch them on and see me sitting at home…
What I really, truly miss is the physical trail that typing usually gives you. Typing on an actual typewriter on paper is only a softer version of chiseling words into stone.
When I am reading Hamlet I often develop an urge to tell people about it, as if the Melancholy Dane's history had heretofore been classified as a top secret. I am bursting with information about Hamlet, so filled am I by the massive "evidence" presented by Shakespeare. So I sit down at my writing table and begin to…
The most astounding example I encountered back in my early days studying Chinese was during a lunch with three graduate students in the Peking University Chinese department. I had a bad cold that day, and wanted to write a note to a friend to cancel a meeting. I found that I couldn’t write the character ti 嚔 in the…
When you write something down, either while taking notes or while trying to write your own original thoughts, you’re dealing with what literacy scholars call “transcription fluency”: How quickly and fluidly you can get down — “transcribe” — the stuff that’s in your head. One of the reasons we formally teach…
One of the most powerful writing/language arts components of the MPS Comprehensive Literacy Plan (CLP) is the robust use of mentor texts across all grade levels. A mentor text is a piece of writing (book, article, pamphlet, caption, etc.) used to exemplify a specific aspect of writers’ craft. Mentor texts are used…
Hu was well known as the primary advocate for the literary revolution of the era, a movement which aimed to replace scholarly classical Chinese in writing with the vernacular spoken language, and to cultivate and stimulate new forms of literature. In an article originally published in New Youth in January 1917 titled…
I'm reminded of Douglas Engelbart's classic paper "Augmenting Human itellect,"2 on his belief in the power of computers. He wrote this in 1962, way before the PC, and argued that it's better to improve and facilitate the tiny things we do every day than it is to attempt to replace entire human jobs with monolithic…
...older people in traditional societies have a huge significance that would never occur to us in our modern, literate societies, where our sources of information are books and the Internet. In contrast, in traditional societies without writing, older people are the repositories of information. It's their knowledge…
And then, of course, you can't be a writer unless you actually write, and it doesn't take as much time as people think. You know, the number of people who say, well, I'm going to write a book when I have time, they're never going to have the time. And I started writing seriously when I had four tiny children. Well, I…
Information is a part of all systems of power. Top bureaucrats try to control information as part of their control over subordinates and clients. Corporations try to control information through trade secrets and patents. Militaries try to control information using the rationale of “national security.” So-called…
In last week's NYT Book Review's back page Essay, writer Steven Johnson tells of his mid-1980s undergraduate years in Brown University's semiotics program. This is from a student paper he wrote at the time: The predicament of any tropological analysis of narrative always lies in its own effaced and circuitous recourse…
And for all their power and speed, today’s digital machines have shown little creative ability. They can’t compose very good songs, write great novels, or generate good ideas for new businesses. Apparent exceptions here only prove the rule. A prankster used an online generator of abstracts for computer science papers…
By the time I was back to Copenhagen, the journal containing Linus' article had arrived from the States. I quickly read it and immediately reread it. Most of the language was above me, and so I could only get a general impression of his argument. I had no way of judging whether it made sense. The only thing I was sure…
• The desire to explore • Self-control • Creativity • Verbal communication • Decoding nonverbal communication
I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian…
Another consequence of our own shift from quadruped to biped concerns the sinuses, which give such grief to many of us (including me at the moment of writing) because their drainage hole is in the very last place a sensible designer would have chosen. Williams quotes an Australian colleague, Professor Derek Denton:*…
This book is crammed with original ideas—very few of them my own. Science writers become accustomed to the feeling that they are intellectual plagiarists, raiding the minds of those who are too busy to tell the world about their discoveries. There are scores of people who could have written each chapter of my book…
No direct quotes for this meme.