Writing Gooder

Firefox is better for writers. Period. End of sentence. If the choice you have is between Internet Explorer and Firefox, always opt for the latter. Unfortunately, I can’t say if the same holds true with Safari, which I have never used, or with Opera, which I briefly flirted with a while back.

But why is Firefox better for writers? Three reasons: stability, utility, and spellability. In fact, Firefox is currently telling me that ‘spellability’ is not an actual word. Darn.

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I think this is really a big thing for (especially) young writer’s.  Most parents don’t let their children use swear words at all, so when they finally are able to (in private, with friends, after turning 18…that kind of thing) there often becomes a struggle between a want to use them and a need not to.  This especially comes out in writing.  Curse words can quickly make or break a piece.  This article is from Writer’s Digest by Morgan Hunt and does a good job of explaining how to decide whether or not to use swear words..

Remember the George Carlin bit about seven words you can never say on TV? Well, never say never. Those words–and their second cousins–crop up routinely on cable stations, as well as on the silver screen, on CDs and in modern novels.

I’m not convinced the proliferation of obscenities and profanity in our culture is a plus. As a parent, I cringe at our culture’s tin-ear tolerance for obscenities, but Puritanical censorship isn’t the answer; swearwords express things humans want to say. To me, they’re to writing what rain is to the land: you need them occasionally to make your created world bloom with color. But too much can be dreary or destructive. To navigate between prude and crude in my own writing, I ask myself these three questions when I hit a roadblock:

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 I have quite a few divorced socks.

 Three weeks ago, while folding laundry, you noticed a sock was missing. Last week, another sock disappeared. Where are they going? You’ve hidden a micro camera inside a sock to find out. Describe what is happening to your socks.

Ever read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes?  If you haven’t, you really should.  It’s a fantastic book about a severely mentally handicapped person who becomes super-intelligent thanks to medicine, then chronicles his mental decline back to an IQ of 60.

In the book, the protagonist (Charlie Gordon) keeps a journal of his mental rise then fall.  Near the beginning, his tutor teaches him about punctuation.  Unable to initially comprehend the concept, Charlie adds commas, periods, question marks, brackets, etc. everywhere.  As his intelligence grows, Charlie understands punctuation and curses his earlier mistakes. (more…)

Recently, the Young Writers Society increased from a Page Rank of 4 to 5, which is nice but not extraordinary.  However, other portions of the site did very well, with both the YWS Blog and the 101 Tips for Writers moving from 0 to 4.  There’s actually a large number of pages now on YWS with a Page Rank of 4, which is very good.

Yet, not all sites fared as well!  Most notably, Writing.com fell from a PR 6 to a PR 4.  Of course, this largely means nothing from a practical standpoint, but it is funny that YWS now has a higher PR than that awkward behemoth.   Why the huge change for Writing.com?  Well it seems that the new Page Ranks no longer include paid links, of which Writing.com had hundreds.  YWS? Zero paid links.

Most of the other writing sites appeared to have fared well; notably Copyblogger which moved from PR 6 to PR 7.

Of course, there’s no telling how accurate the new Page Ranks actually are, and they are subject to change.  For instance, YouTube went from PR 8 to PR 3 before someone at Google noticed the boo-boo.

National Novel Writing Month is coming up in just a couple days, but do you have a plot line yet?  If you don’t, no need to worry.  After all, no one is expecting you to send in your finished novel as a homework assignment on December 1.

But what if you are in that fix, and though it is a largely inconsequential problem, it can nonetheless cause a great amount of stress.  Fortunately, there tons of plot lines out there at your disposal!

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Till I Hear It From You by The Gin Blossoms

Ever wish that you could shout and ask a question in the same sentence without having to use two different punctuation marks at the end of the sentence? Well, fear not! Because you actually can.

In 1964 a creative American named Martin Specktor decided that it would help advertising if you could show a surprise rhetorical question in one punctuation mark. Thus, the interrobang was born.

Actually, combined forms of punctuation have been around for a long time, including the interrobang. It just happened no one named it before then. Heck, where did you think we got the semi colon? ; it just looks like a comma and a colon had a baby! Awww, cute!

Of course, the interrobang isn’t popular…anywhere, really. It’s a completely useless punctuation when most people just use !? or forget about it all together. If more people started making use of the interrobang, maybe it would show up in school books, and be used so often that it would have to be taught. But would you really approve of reading a sentence with one of these on the end‽ I wouldn’t, at least not until they give us a more visible punctuation mark. It looks like a blurry, badly drawn P.

What are your thoughts? Are you going to find a new way to use this avant-garde punctuation mark?

This has to be the most bizarre thing I have ever seen….And yet, it is incredebly hilarious.

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs.

What!? At first, this made absolutely no sense…But you can read more and make sense of it yourself. It’s rather hard to understand the sentence except for when they substitute other words into the sentence. Strange, isn’t it?