Course Name: Formatting MS Word For Amazon Kindle Platform: Open Learning Price: $11 Format: 17 videos that should be two to five minutes in length. Complete course is nearly a hour. Summary: Teaches one how to format .doc and .docx documents for Amazon Kindle. Website: https://www.openlearning.com/courses/formattingmswordforamazonkindle
“Our writing instruments are also working on our thoughts.” Nietzsche wrote, or more precisely typed, this sentence on a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, a wondrous strange contraption that looks a little like a koosh ball cast in brass and studded with typewriter keys. Depressing a key plunged a lever with the typeface downward onto the paper clutched in the underbelly.
It’s well-known that Nietzsche acquired the Writing Ball to compensate for his failing eyesight. Working by touch, he used it to compose terse, aphoristic phrasings exactly like that oft-quoted pronouncement. Our writing instruments, he suggested, are not just conveniences or contrivances for the expression of ideas; they actively shape the limits and expanse of what we have to say. Not only do we write differently with a fountain pen than with a crayon because they each feel different in our hands, we write (and think) different kinds of things.
But what can writing tools and writing machines really tell us about writing? Having just published my book “Track Changes” on the literary history of word processing, I found such questions were much on my mind. Every interviewer I spoke with wanted to know how computers had changed literary style. Sometimes they meant style for an individual author; sometimes they seemed to want me to pronounce upon the literary establishment (whatever that is) in its entirety.
Style is at once something tangible – built up out of individual words and phrasings, with the academic specialization of stylometry devoted to its study – and elusive, associated with a writer’s “voice” or the unique “feel” of their prose. Doubtless this is why it fascinates us, and why we’re so concerned to know what computers are doing to it. And yet I think the question is misplaced.
Word processing did change the game
We know a lot of things about how computers changed the nature of literary writing: revision, obviously, became easier, and in fact the distinction between revision and composition began to erode entirely. (There are now dedicated writing devices that force you to power through a draft without stopping to revise.)
WordStar, shown here running on a Kaypro IV, was the word processor of choice for a number of early adopters.Matthew Kirschenbaum, CC BY-ND
We also know that word processors found their way into plots and settings, as typewriters had in novels like William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” or Stephen King’s “Misery.”
And we know that the circumstances of literary production changed: In 1983, as I detailed in my book, John Updike used his typewriter to fire off a note dismissing his secretary because he had just gotten a word processor. A year later Primo Levi wrote to an English friend that he was “in danger of becoming a Mac bore.” When she wrote back that it was merely a “clever new typewriter,” he replied: “It’s a lot more than that! It’s a memory prosthesis, an archive, an unprotesting secretary, a new game each day, as well as a designer, as you will see from the enclosed centipede picture.”
But none of these are really observations about style.
Style is the sum of many different influences – the instrument the author is writing with, to be sure, but also market trends and editorial dictates, what an author is reading that week, his or her emotional state and much else besides. (Nietzsche himself had chosen the word “Gedanke” in his original German – “thoughts” – not anything so particular as style.)
Recently, in fact, two researchers tried to determine whether literary style could be measured based on whether or not writers had been through an MFA program, another deterministic variable seemingly easy enough to isolate. They failed.
Rather than style, the sense of the text
Sitting at a typewriter, we are always in the present moment as the carriage trundles forward character by character, line by line. Word processing, by contrast, allowed writers to grasp a manuscript as a whole, a gestalt. The entire manuscript was instantly available via search functions. Whole passages could be moved at will, and chapters or sections reordered. The textual field became fluid and malleable, a potentially infinite expanse, or at least limited only by the computer’s ever-expanding memory.
The result was a new kind of control over writing space, a sentiment shared by early adopters of the technology otherwise as different from one another as National Book Award winner Stanley Elkin and queen of the vampires Anne Rice. “Once you really get used to a computer and you get used to entering the information from that keyboard, things happen in your mind, I mean, you change as a writer. You’re able to do things that maybe you never would have thought of doing before,” concluded Rice. Elkin extolled his renewed appreciation for plot after acquiring a word processor in 1979: “Plots have become very interesting to me,” he told an interviewer at the time. “You put the machine into the search mode, and you find what the reference was earlier, and you can begin to use these things as tools, or nails, in putting the plot together.”
What Elkin and Rice are describing, each in their own way, is what composition theorists like Christina Haas have called the “sense of the text.” It means the mental model of the words on the page (or screen) and how the writer perceives his or her relationship to them. Word processing, as the testimony of countless writers suggests, profoundly altered their sense of the text, both in terms of how they approached their writing and what they thought possible. But all of that is a far cry from “style,” typically defined as an author’s individual word choices and sentence structures or arrangements.
This illustration from an early word processing manual sought to reassure anxious authors that their prose was still there, even after it had scrolled off the edge of the screen.PerfectWriter manual, Author provided
Running word-processed prose through a computer
Which is not to say that kind of analysis couldn’t be done. In fact, specialists have been doing it for decades. You would begin by choosing a writer like Isaac Asimov, someone who wrote a lot and for whom we happen to know the exact day on which he acquired his first computer: a TRS-80 Model II on May 6, 1981. You would want a digitized corpus of his books from before and after, and then you would see what you could find with your algorithms.
Even then, though, the question would nag: What would those algorithms tell you? They might reveal some heretofore unimagined master key to Asimov’s oeuvre. But you might also be left with something like stylometrist Louis Milic’s contention about Jonathan Swift, famously demolished by literary theorist Stanley Fish: “The low frequency of initial determiners, taken together with the high frequency of initial connectives, makes [Swift] a writer who likes transitions and made much of connectives.”
As it happens, a couple of researchers a few years back performed exactly this exercise with Nietzsche; tantalizingly, they were apparently able to distinguish between his earlier and later style, pivoting around the onset of his blindness and the acquisition of the Writing Ball. Their results were based on word frequencies, an analysis of which showed the philosopher’s writings to cluster into different groupings based on dates in which the texts were composed.
And yet, a table of word frequencies has nothing to do with sentence length, which was the impetus for the philosopher’s own comment in the first place. Nietzsche, after all, was remarking on the way in which the Malling-Hansen lent itself to brief bursts of text (not unlike tweets) – not the evolution of his personal vocabulary. And we also know that the Writing Ball was only one of several workarounds Nietzsche was eventually forced to adopt – he also dictated prose aloud to secretaries, for example. Anne Fadimanonce claimed she could detect the “spoor” of word processing in other writers’ prose. Using computers to sniff out other computers may yet tell us fascinating things about the delicate membrane between thoughts and the written word. Indeed, it may be that the best way to measure the technology’s impact on literary style is in aggregate, through big data approaches: assembling dozens or hundreds of authors’ bodies of work. It would be fascinating to know, for example, whether the dictates of the grammar checkers built into modern word processors have had a measurable impact on literary prose.
But we’ll still be left with all the imponderables of hands on keyboards. Writing machines may be complicated, but writing itself is always infinitely more so. Matthew Kirschenbaum, Professor of English, University of Maryland
When looking at my draft posts, I came across several drafts that were actually published posts. Yet, they were still listed as draft.
Perhaps this is an error on my part? Right now, reviewing the draft documents to verify that they have not been published is the most important thing for the blog. While the housekeeping is being done, enjoy these two quotes.
"A drabble is a short work of fiction of around one hundred words in length.The purpose of the drabble is brevity, testing the author's ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in a confined space." - Wikipedia
"FreePhotos.cc is a free resource where you can find creative commons photos for your website or print projects.Search for any topic using the search box (e.g. "Dogs", "Flowers", etc.), browse results and download. You can mention the photographer if you want, as a token of respect for the work.FreePhotos.cc uses the APIs from a few stock photo providers and gathers images in one place for easy preview and download. We are not associated with these services in any way, other than to power search results."
Those words stood out to me when I came across the Movie Pilot website. Skimming the website you will learn that writers are called Creators.
Who Are Creators -passionate movies & TV fans -they write all the content on the website Why Write For Movie Pilot -get your writing noticed -join the entertainment community
Creators Journey
join
write and publish
get featured
Free and money. What? They offer free training. You can also earn money?
Creators Academy Learn about free training here. Generate Revenue Do you want to possibly earn money? Read about that here.
Writers block? Need help starting a short story? Plot Generator, from our friends in the UK, is a website for your review.
Plot Generator will:
help you write a story
give you ideas to create your own story
write a story for you (thinking you definitely want to rewrite it)
Their instructions on how to plot a good story:
1. Choose a theme from our selection of plot generators.
2. Give us some keywords to play with or let us prompt some ideas at random.
3. We automatically create a plot, title and a cover for your novel or film.
Generators at their website:
Short Story
Movie Script
Drabble*
*According to Wikipedia, "a drabble is a short work of fiction of around one hundred words in length.".
Blurb** generators:
Freestyle
Romance
Fantasy
Paranormal Romance
Crime
Horror
Mystery
Science Fiction
Vampire
Bronte Sisters
Summertime
**Research reveals that a blurb is a short advertisement written to entice someone to purchase or read a book. Blurbs are usually located on book jackets.
Sinoun posted a link to download free templates for a zine or a booklet on her blog. These templates work in Microsoft Word. Quick information about the download files:
4 to 40 pages
half size
8.5" x 11" paper folded in half
be sure to read the "A few notes about the templates" section
Page choices for download: 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 36, and 40.
"If you would like to write an article to be published on
CheapScholar.org, the following are some guidelines for your
submission."
Anybody can do it! Whether you are a blogger, a CheapScholar.org
reader or just someone that has helpful information to share, we want
to hear from you.
The subject matter of the article has to somehow be related to the
financial aspect of college. Some examples are topics related to Paying
For College, Saving For College, Financial Aid, Education Loans,
Scholarships, Grants, Etc… Check out our TAGS in the right hand column
[at their website] for more ideas or look at our Archives.
No commercials please. If you are wanting to represent your
organization and/or your services on CheapScholar.org, provide great
content in your article and our readers will be sure to visit your site
and check out what you have to offer. We will share a link to your
site in the byline of the article.
Length doesn’t matter. Sometimes the best information comes in
small doses. The important thing is that your article conveys the
message that you are attempting to communicate. Now if you decide to
write a thesis, no problem, I will just break it up into a series of
articles.
Article needs to be original, written by you, and not previously published on other websites.
"The Ten-Minute Novelwill help you sculpt a full-length piece of creative writing in just ten minutes a day. Starting with a daily practical exercise, it will help you manage your writing schedule within this time frame and help you bring your novel to life. You will be able to clarify your vision and review your time commitments, as well as understand your own abilities. Learning to observe the world around you, write quickly and tap into your unique voice will help you to create all the elements of your story and, by the time you've finished all the exercises, you'll have created something beautiful." You can visit the website to get information about the 2018 Conference. http://www.10minutenovelists.com/write-a-novel-in-ten-minutes/
In honor of Black History month, we recommend for review and/or purchase, this book, written by Kenneth C. Davis, "In the Shadow of Liberty: The Hidden History of Slavery, Four Presidents, and Five Black Lives."
"Did you know that many of America’s Founding Fathers―who fought for liberty and justice for all―were slave owners?
Through the powerful stories of five enslaved people who were “owned” by four of our greatest presidents, this book helps set the record straight about the role slavery played in the founding of America. From Billy Lee, valet to George Washington, to Alfred Jackson, faithful servant of Andrew Jackson, these dramatic narratives explore our country’s great tragedy―that a nation “conceived in liberty” was also born in shackles.
These stories help us know the real people who were essential to the birth of this nation but traditionally have been left out of the history books. Their stories are true―and they should be heard."*
The Writer's Edit blog teaches us how to finish a novel by breaking the writing process down to 30 minutes a day.
"Writing a novel is no easy feat, least of all while writers juggle various commitments like day jobs, family and social lives. Which is why we’ve put together the ultimate guide on how to write a novel in 30 minutes per day.
No matter what your life’s like, everyone has 30 minutes to spare. Use your lunch break at work, watch half an hour less of that b-grade TV show, or wake up a little earlier…"
WikiHow has an article explaining how to write three types of poems. The article is broken down into four parts:
Sample Poems
Starting the Poem
Writing the Poem
Polishing the Poem
The article covers these types:
-Limerick, -Tanka, -Cinquain.
The Limerick poem "has five lines that rhyme."
The style is the ending word in the first line and second lines rhymes. The ending word in the third and fourth lines rhyme. The fifth line ending word rhymes with the first and second ending word.
A Tanka poem, which is new to me, contains five lines. Unlike the Limerick poem, the Tanka poem does not rhyme. Tanka emphasizes syllables.
Last, but not least, is the Cinquain poem. The Cinquain poem "have five lines that usually follow a specific structure."
Are you passionate about Bitcoin? Are you a Bitcoin enthusiast? If so, then you are who the blog is looking for.
"Write for us." 
"The Ten-Minute Novel will help you sculpt a full-length piece of creative writing in just ten minutes a day. Starting with a daily practical exercise, it will help you manage your writing schedule within this time frame and help you bring your novel to life. 
Lucy V. Hay describes seven ways to dig into your mind and reveal your writing talent.
![The Perfect Anatomy of a Modern Web Writer [Infographic]](https://copyblogger.com/cdn-origin/images/650/copyblogger-web-writer-anatomy-infographic.png "The Perfect Anatomy of a Modern Web Writer [Infographic]")
