Hacking Instagram Stories in the name of classic literature … By embracing the changing times, we were able to get hundreds of thousands of readers to crack open a timeless novel. Proving the best stories will always stay with us. No matter how many gym selfies people are posting. Source: Insta Novels These are pretty…
What is an error in English? The concept of language errors is a fuzzy one. I’ll leave to linguists the technical definitions. Here we’re concerned only with deviations from the standard use of English as judged by sophisticated users such as professional writers, editors, teachers, and literate executives and personnel officers. The aim of this…
A FEW WEEKS AGO, CJR WROTE about a disturbance in the force caused by what was perceived as sudden and inexplicable changes in the Associated Press Stylebook’s hyphenation guidelines. Even though the guidelines were not sudden, and even though AP explained them thoroughly, people were upset. Source: AP hyphen outrage continues with guidance update –…
The French military wants to figure out what its armed forces might face in the future. To help, it’s bringing on a group of people who are well-versed in imagining the future: science fiction writers. The UK’s Telegraph reports that France’s Defence Innovation Agency is hiring between four and five writers to form a “Red Team” that will come…
The Google Fonts team has teamed up with Thomas Jockin to create a series of fonts that are aimed at improving reading speed. To learn more about the research behind this initiative, see here for more details. Source: G Suite Updates Blog: New fonts intended to help improve reading speed now available in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides…
Source: Storytelling | Arts and humanities | Khan Academy Disney’s Imagineering in a box consists of two different takes on the storytelling process. The first class, Imagineering in a box, takes participants through several lessons on what goes on when designing theme parks and attractions. The second class, Pixar in a box: the art of…
But! A recent NYPL project has paid for the already-digitized registration records to be marked up as XML. (I was not involved, BTW, apart from saying “yes, this would work” four years ago.) Now for anything that’s unambiguously a “book”, we have a parseable record of its pre-1964 interactions with the Copyright Office: the initial registration and any potential renewal….
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, have talked about language and why and how we use it for 100 episodes! Today there’ll be a celebratory parade of language-related facts that you’ve learned from the Allusionist and I’ve learned from making the Allusionist, so some old facts, some new facts – well, the…