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Posts tagged writing
Move Your Story Right Along: The Elements of Style Rap
In 1918, William Strunk penned The Elements of Style, which his former student E.B. White revised in 1959 … Nearly a century later, Columbia grad students Jake Heller (“Strunk”) and Ben Teitelbaum (“White”) pay homage to the iconic style manual.
(via Brain Pickings)
By Farhad Manjoo
January 13, 2011
The people who study and design the typewritten word decided long ago that we should use one space, not two, between sentences … Hundreds of years ago some typesetters would end sentences with a double space, others would use a single space, and a few renegades would use three or four spaces. Inconsistency reigned in all facets of written communication; there were few conventions regarding spelling, punctuation, character design, and ways to add emphasis to type. But as typesetting became more widespread, its practitioners began to adopt best practices. [James Felici, author of the The Complete Manual of Typography] writes that typesetters in Europe began to settle on a single space around the early 20th century. America followed soon after. Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule.
When I was 18, I got into a fight with my boyfriend, one of those fights where I was entirely out of line. I left his apartment for a while and drove around our college town, trying to remember how you apologized to someone. I went to the grocery store and made my way to the bakery, picking out a cake with flowers on it, the kind you fight over with other kids at birthday parties when you’re little. I pointed it out to the woman behind the counter.
“Do you want to say something on it?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Can you put ‘Sorry for being a cunt’ on it?”
“No, no, I cannot,” she huffed at me.
We were in a standoff. I can only imagine what she thought of a teenage girl putting such a word in buttercream icing. She stood strong and I didn’t back down. She called her manager over, a younger woman who started laughing when she heard what the problem was. She tried to convince her employee to write my message in buttercream and then she tried to compromise with me.
“Maybe ‘sorry for being a bitch’?” she said.
“No, it was worse than that, I was a total cunt,” I said.
“I won’t write bitch either,” said the employee, arms crossed.
Finally, the manager grabbed the icing herself and wrote my message on it. I paid for it and took it to my then boyfriend’s apartment. I knocked and held it out to him. He read it and read it again and looked from my face to the cake and back again a few times. I shrugged and he let me inside, setting the cake on the kitchen table. We sat and ate it together, forgetting why we had been so upset. He ate the part that said “cunt” on it and I got the flower.
—
I don’t remember how to make friends, if I ever did at all.
Cake is never having to say you’re sorry.
Got a girl crush on: Joan Didion’s packing list
My list:
To Pack and Wear:
jeans
embellished and/or graphic tees
v-neck cardigans
black matte jersey wrap dress
bra, undies
purple leggings, sweatshirt, socks for sleeping
ballet flats
boots
earrings
watch
gummy bears
instant oatmeal
bag with: toothbrush and toothpaste, floss, shampoo and conditioner, razor, deodorant, q-tips, Cetaphil, lotion, flat iron, tweezers, emery board, nail polish and nail polish remover
To Carry:
iPhone and USB cable, power brick, and earphones
MacBook Air and charger
pen (black ink) and planner
2+ recent issues of The New Yorker
merino wool wrap
worry beads
gum
Nalgene bottle
keys
wallet with license and debit card
bag with: eyelash curler and mascara, tinted moisturizer, blush and brush, C.O. Bigelow Mentha Lip Tint, hair pins and elastics, prescriptions
1,154 notes (via gotagirlcrush & piccoloniccolo)
We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.
Charts & Graphs… Friends, Lovers, and Family: Actors, Architects, Gentry, Muses, Painters, Writers
205 notes (via vintageanchor)
“[Kids] don’t get to decide anything. The idea that their words have power or that their ideas will be taken seriously is what makes their curiosity really spark.”—Jon Stewart on the Story Pirates’ stage productions based on young writers’ short stories
(via msnbc video: Arr! ‘Pirates’ show it’s fun to use imagination)
On prescience/ridiculousness in nervous breakdowns, practical originality, and “destroying the tyranny of plot.”
By Ned Beauman
September 7, 2011
Discovering that the website TV Tropes began as a Buffy the Vampire Slayer messageboard is like discovering that Borges’ “Library of Babel” began as a one-volume cricketer’s almanac. Since 2004, TV Tropes has swollen into a frighteningly comprehensive taxonomy of all known plot devices across all known media. Every story that’s ever thrilled you is there in microscopic cross section. In some respects it resembles books like Georges Polti’s The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations or Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots, but it’s not nearly so reductive: it’s maximalist not minimalist, always delighted to add new categories. Really, its closest cousin is the Aarne–Thompson classification system, which attempts to anatomize all the world’s folklore into about 2,500 elements.
