Author RSSStartle Your Readers By Beginning Your Sentences With Correlative Conjunctions
Master writers choose to start their sentences with unusual constructions not only to to pique curiosity, but also to startle the reader. Notice how Charles Dickens opens his long novel David Copperfield with the correlative conjunction 'whether/or.' Dick...
George Orwell: Big Brother Gives Rules for Writing
Any professional who writes memos, letters, articles, white papers, position papers, or any type of prose, knows that there is an accepted standard English. George Orwell's rules for writing until today remain the indispensable rules for fine writing.
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A Fading Fad: Show, Don't Tell
Percy Lubbock (an authority on Henry James' novels and narrative innovations), started a new trend for writers of fiction: the technique of "show, don't tell." Since Lubbock published his book in 1921, many writing workshops, writing manuals, style textbo...
Thoughtful Dialogue
The aim of intelligent dialogue is to unveil the soul of characters. Like fish characters breathe, live, survive or die through their mouths. But just because dialogue 'brings characters to life through their speech' doesn't mean that it has to be used th...
Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy: Good and Ill Fortune
According to Aristotle a tragedy must happen to a high personage to be truly a tragedy. The rapid fall from power that happened to Boethius fits the Aristotelian definition. Boethius (480 - 524/6), born in Rome of an ancient family, served as the head of ...
Conquering the Inferiority Complex
Only a cold fish will tell you that he hasn't had butterflies in his stomach, sweaty palms, and a creaky voice when called upon to speak in public. And who hasn't forfeited good opportunities for advancement or closing good deals simply because of unfound...
A Reading of Pascal's Pensees on Fidelity
Because some books are fraught with so much wisdom, I can only read a few pages at a time. So inevitably I am always reading and re-reading them; as I do, for example, with Pascal. In his Pensees, Pascal, expounding on the virtue of fidelity writes: "He n...
Don't Count Sheep, Count Your Blessings: Cure for Insomnia
Snow-white hair, strong jaw, aquiline nose, a six-footer, soft-spoken, barrel-chested, and as handsome as they come. Yes, that is my friend Joe. My friend Joe Templeton, a crusty Army veteran, is now in his early 70s, yet he looks a young 50! Over the yea...
Self-Development by Examining the Past Day
In front of the Delphic Oracle-temple is written: Know Thyself. Now, being fond of Samuel Johnson's Essays, which I often read and re-read, one fated day I found some valuable remarks that complemented the Delphic maxim.
Johnson a most versatile August...
Daisy Buchanan: a Strange Beauty and Echolalia
When Edgar Allan Poe quoted --in his Gothic tale Ligeia-- Elizabethan politician and scholar Francis Bacon, I asked myself:"Is there some truth to this?" The quotation is startling and deserves exploration: "There's no exquisite beauty," says Bacon, Lord ...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Saint Augustine
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778), musician, vagabond, philosopher, prose stylist, novelist, educator, and acknowledged father of the French Revolution and Romanticism, remains today a colorful character --both derided and revered.
In this article I ...
The Power to Change Us: Stendhal
Literary schools and literary movements come and go; some without even leaving a trace. And while many critics, philosophers, writers, and theorists will go on debating what 'literature' is, I will simply assume that it --literature-- exists and that is ...
Is Deconstruction and its Founder Derrida Both Dead?
Although Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2007, born in Algiers), is the founder of the philosophical movement Deconstructionism, his work goes beyond that: logocentrism, binary oppositions, writing as a metaphysical system, philosophy of language, and theory.
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Magic Realism in the United States: Hawthorne
Although magic realism may seem to be a product of Eastern European and Latin American writers, the genre has been cultivated in the United State by writers of different generations.
If one considers magic realism to be a literary genre that combines f...
Erasmus of Rotterdam on Sentence Variation, Sentence Openers, and Ambiguity
Copyright (c) 2010 Marciano Guerrero
Discussing the methods of sentence variation by using allegory and proverbs —which at times result in enigmas— in his book On Copia, Erasmus says:
"For things should not be written in such a way that everyone...