Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide | Creative Nonfiction A design professor from Denmark once drew for me a picture of the creative process, which had been the subject of his doctoral dissertation. “Here,” he said. “This is what it looks like”: Aha, I thought, as we discussed parallels in the writing process. Nothing is wasted though, said the design professor, because every bend in the process is helping you to arrive at your necessary structure. The remarkable thing about personal essays, which openly mimic this exploratory process, is that they can be so quirky in their “shape.” Narrative with a lift Narrative is the natural starting place since narrative is a natural structure for telling others about personal events. Take, for example, Jo Ann Beard’s essay “The Fourth State of Matter.” Narrative essays keep us engaged because we want answers to such questions. One interesting side note: trauma, which is a common source for personal essays, can easily cause an author to get stuck on the sort of plateau Kittredge described.
Blog » The Best Work in Literature If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed . Thanks for reading! Photo by Daniel Leininger / Flickr The following post by Manjula Martin ( @manjulamartin ) is part of our online companion to our Spring 2013 issue on The Business of Literature. Click here for an overview of the issue . i. Even then, I viewed my summer gig as work I would one day leave behind: when I grew up, I was certain, I would become a full-time artist. My family’s store was housed in a grand 1910 sandstone building, formerly a bank. In the business of literature, the people who mind the store—from writers to editors to Tumblrs— often have other jobs, too. ii. I was sixteen and about to graduate from high school by the time a coworker said to me, “So, what are you gonna do now?” “I dunno,” I said, “maybe drop out of college and move to New York and become a famous writer by the age of twenty-one?” Did I really believe I would be a bestselling author with a sweet Soho loft by age twenty-one? iii. iv.
Using Mind Maps For Creating Novels | No Wasted Ink Take a word. Place that word in the center of a sheet of paper and circle it. Let the word tease your brain. Allow related ideas, words or concepts to be inspired by this word. Write down those new ideas around the word. Draw lines to connect them. When I’m first beginning a novel’s outline, I like to use mind maps to help generate characters and plot points. Overall Plot Mind Map Start with a central Node, the title of your book. Next I generate mind maps for each of the points that I come up with in the hubs. Character Generation Mind Map Write the name of your character in the center of a sheet of paper. Plot Generation Mind Map Think of an moment in time that will happen in your novel. I am a paper person and write my mind maps in a composition notebook with my fountain pens. I have included a review of five of the the mind mapping software programs below. Freemind This was the first mind map program that I used when I started creating the maps. Xmind MindMeister TheBrain Prezi Like this:
Los Angeles Review of Books - John Gray’s Godless Mysticism: On "The Silence Of Animals" Login Save time by using free lessons & activities created by educators worldwide! Be inspired! Combine digital content and your files to create a lesson Tes resources YouTube Links PDFs PowerPoint Word Doc Images Dropbox Google Drive Blendspace quick start resources Save time by using free lessons & activities created by educators worldwide! Combine digital content and your files to create a lesson Tes resources YouTube Links PDFs PowerPoint Word Doc Images Dropbox Google Drive Blendspace quick start resources
Small Talk I recently found myself sitting across a table from a stranger, chewing awkwardly in silence. It was a familiar scenario: a hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop with not enough tables and me sitting alone, assenting readily when an older woman asked if she could share my premium slice of real estate. She sat down and we both began to eat, eyes studiously averted—quickly, the silence became unbearable. The weather has a long-standing monopoly on the small talk market, and it’s not hard to see why. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first appearance of the term “small talk” to eighteenth-century British Parliamentarian Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son , a collection of pedagogical nuggets dispensing wisdom on a comprehensive range of topics, as befits a book with the subtitle “On the Fine Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman.” A little small talk before getting down to business is like washing your hands in preparation for a meal. Heidegger is not unaware of this. .
Interactive Learning Sites for Education - Home The Science of Loneliness: How Isolation Can Kill You Who are the lonely? They’re the outsiders: not just the elderly, but also the poor, the bullied, the different. Surveys confirm that people who feel discriminated against are more likely to feel lonely than those who don’t, even when they don’t fall into the categories above. A key part of feeling lonely is feeling rejected, and that, it turns out, is the most damaging part. To psychologists trying to puzzle out how social experiences affect health, AIDS amounted to something of a natural experiment, the chance to observe the effects of conditions so extreme that no ethical person would knowingly subject another person to them. In the mid-to late ’80s, the UCLA lab obtained access to a long-term study of gay men who enrolled without knowing whether they were infected with HIV. Steven Cole was a young postdoctoral student in the lab itching to move beyond his field’s mind-body split. It eventually occurred to Cole to try to imagine the world from a gay man’s perspective. Ariel Lee
My Favorite WSQ Please see the "revisited" version of this post, published in July of 2016, by clicking here.*Please read my WSQing page for more details, descriptions, and workflow* A "WSQ" (pronounced wisk) in my class is what we call "homework" in my flipped classroom. It stands for this: [read an update on the WSQ after using it for several weeks in my classroom here] W - Watch Students must watch the video for the assigned lesson and take notes in their SSS packets (this stands for "Student Success Sheets" and I have them for each unit/chapter) I have created for them. Some of my very high achieving students have asked "Do I have to watch the video" and under certain circumstances, I say "no", but you still have to complete the notes on the SSS packet. A few issues I am already noticing with this is that there are still important things that I say about the concepts that students miss if they don't watch the video. S - Summary Students have to write a summary of what they watched in the video.
The One That Got Away: Why James Wood is Wrong About Underworld (And Why Anyone Should Care) ShareThis The One That Got Away: Why James Wood is Wrong About Underworld (And Why Anyone Should Care) Essay by Garth Risk Hallberg Tags: don delillo, literary criticism, postmodern fiction I. I had always assumed that “the media” was a rhetorical hobbyhorse, like “the culture” or “postmodernism”: useful in a pub debate or an op-ed column, and otherwise too abstract to pin down. “Look! A matronly woman just descended from a double-decker bus was gesturing toward NBC’s souvenir store. Philip Roth long ago lamented the way American life outraces the novelist’s imagination, but lately one feels an entirely different order of mismatch is at hand. One reputable school of thought, with roots somewhere across the Atlantic, would have us disregard this unmapped area as quite beside the point. Another school of thought (notably American, notably male) anguishes at the difficulty of capturing The Great, Sprawling Wreck of It All. II. Or perhaps this last sentence is too like one of Wood’s. III.
46 Tools To Make Infographics In The Classroom Infographics are interesting–a mash of (hopefully) easily-consumed visuals (so, symbols, shapes, and images) and added relevant character-based data (so, numbers, words, and brief sentences). The learning application for them is clear, with many academic standards–including the Common Core standards–requiring teachers to use a variety of media forms, charts, and other data for both information reading as well as general fluency. It’s curious they haven’t really “caught on” in schools considering how well they bridge both the old-form textbook habit of cramming tons of information into a small space, while also neatly overlapping with the dynamic and digital world. So if you want to try to make infographics–or better yet have students make them–where do you start? The 46 tools below, curated by Faisal Khan, are a good place to start.
The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss - Liza Mundy It is more than a little ironic that gay marriage has emerged as the era’s defining civil-rights struggle even as marriage itself seems more endangered every day. Americans are waiting longer to marry: according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median age of first marriage is 28 for men and 26 for women, up from 23 and 20, respectively, in 1950. Rates of cohabitation have risen swiftly and sharply, and more people than ever are living single. Most Americans still marry at some point, but many of those marriages end in divorce. Though people may be waiting to marry, they are not necessarily waiting to have children. Against this backdrop, gay-marriage opponents have argued that allowing same-sex couples to wed will pretty much finish matrimony off. Liza Mundy and Hanna Rosin discuss what same-sex couples can teach straight couples about marriage and parenting. But what if the critics are correct, just not in the way they suppose? Not all is broken within modern marriage, of course.