Writing Gooder

I’m writing this at 7 pm on the East Coast of the United States, so for many of you, this comes a bit late.  However, I hope everyone reading this had a good Christmas.  If you celebrate Hannukkah, then I hope you had a good Hannukkah.  If you celebrate a holiday that isn’t Christmas or Hannukkah, then I hope your holiday went very well.

By the way, I imagine that since you’re reading this blog, you might be interested in how literature (specifically Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol) has shaped Christmas as it is celebrated in the modern-day.  If you are, check out Dickens: The Man Who Invented Christmas at The Victorian Web.

Jonathan Fields has an article up at Copyblogger about using Negativity bias to your advantage in writing titles for blog posts.  I urge you to read the article, and I think it can be expanded to include titles for stories and poems on YWS as well.

First, Wikipedia defines negativity bias as:

Negativity bias is the name for a psychological phenomenon by which humans pay more attention to and give more weight to negative than positive experiences or other kinds of information.

As Fields mentions, negativity bias isn’t a bad thing; it’s simply human nature.  We don’t wish harm upon others, and we certainly don’t want to see someone get hurt.  Yet, when something bad happens, we have an irresistible urge to find out what happened.

A little over a month ago, I wrote about how to write a good title.  In order to write a good title, you should be specific (although not overly so).  That is, if you simply say your title is going to be “Misery,” then the potential reader is going to have no idea what your story is about, and she will thus skip over it.

In addition to being specific, though, your title should also grab the reader’s attention.  This is where negativity bias comes in.  Pretend for a moment that you only have time to read one story.  Which of the following do you think most people will read:

• Love Denied and My Life’s Descent Into Total Agony
• My Life’s Descent

Since most poems and stories deal with repression, love, and anger, there is plenty of room to use negativity bias to one’s advantage.

I joined writing.com a couple years ago, a month or so after I joined YWS.  I made one post, my welcome post, in which I plugged YWS of course, and in which they promptly removed and sent me a message to tell me they removed it and that it was “under investigation”…basically.  Since then I haven’t touched my account there, haven’t even signed in, and maybe three months later they sent me a message saying that if I didn’t sign in within 30 days they would delete my account entirely.  So I’m thinking….”hmm…what a loss” and don’t sign in, counting on them deleting it. 

I got another message a couple months ago that said the same thing: 30 days until my account is doomed.  Still did nothing to stop it. 

Got another message this morning entitled “Writing.com Birthday Month!” for my birthday (obviously) this month. 

And I have one question that no one can answer: How are they counting these 30 days?? 

I have a suspicion is goes like this: Schwam, doo, doo and heif…

(Warning: link filled with ridiculousness.)

What’s your favorite movie of all time?

…okay. So this is mainly because I forgot EVERYTHING as far as differential equations go. Writing helps me sort things out. So while I go over my notes, I am going to write the steps down.

The first problem is this:

Consider unsteady state diffusion of a species into a slab. The thickness of the slab is b. At time before zero, the slab is at a uniform concentration Co. At time t greater than zero the surfaces of the slab are maintained at concentration C1. The PDE of concern is;

(∂C/∂t)=D(∂2C/∂x2)

where the LHS term accounts for the time dependency and the RHS term for diffusion in the slab. Since the problem is symmetric we can solve for half the slab, using the following BCs, after placing the coordinate system at the middle of the slab:

#1) t=0, C=C1, x=b/2
#3) any t, (∂C/∂x)=0, x=0

Using separation of variables obtain the solution for C.

The solution?

(more…)