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Backstory
Albert A. Dalia, author of "Dream of the Dragon Pool"
Fri Feb 08 00:00:00 EST 2008
I suppose my mother's reading to me as a child could be logged as my first introduction to fiction. In-between my childhood delight with fiction and my fiction writing career, two masters and a Ph.D. in history happened. It was after my Ph.D. in 1985 that I returned to fiction. I guess I had exhausted my curiosity about the "truth." Or, more accurately, I had exhausted my curiosity about formal historical study as a path to understanding "reality."
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Blog Excerpts
Think Big
Thu Feb 07 00:00:00 EST 2008
At Big Think! This new website gives you access to "hundreds of hours of direct, unfiltered interviews with today's leading thinkers, movers and shakers." Listen to folks like New Yorker editor David Remnick, former poet laureate of the U.S. Billy Collins and actress and author Anna Deavere Smith -- and post your own questions and comments.
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Blog Du Jour
Keep It Short
Wed Feb 06 00:00:00 EST 2008
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Behind the Dictionary
Tracking Slang
Wed Feb 06 00:00:00 EST 2008
For the past three decades Professor Connie Eble has been pursuing a unique project: Tracking the slang of her students. The in-house linguist of the University of North Carolina's English Department, she polls her students every semester about their non-standard language. This long-term research has given Professor Eble a singular window into the function of language in society, which she discusses in her book Slang and Sociability. Professor Eble recently gathered the latest crop of slang from her students, so we called her to find out what she found, and what it means.
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Dog Eared
Getting Excited About Words
Tue Feb 05 00:00:00 EST 2008
We asked Bob Greenman, the author and educator we interview in this week's "Teachers at Work" feature, to recommend books about vocabulary. Here are his picks:
America in So Many Words, by Allan A. Metcalf and David K. Barnhart. "Year by year, the stories behind significant American words like cookie (1703), squatter (1788), hobo (1847), bathtub (1870), muckraker (1906), jukebox (1939), duh ( 1963) and newbie (1993)."
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VT Tip o' the Week
Meanings Can Be Expressed by Multiple Words
Mon Feb 04 00:00:00 EST 2008
Just as a word can have many meanings, a meaning, or sense, can be expressed using multiple words. For instance, "produce a literary work" can be expressed by not only the word pen, but also write, compose, and indite. The words associated with the same meaning are all synonyms, and therefore belong to the same synset. In the Visual Thesaurus, words that belong to a synset are connected to their shared meaning by solid lines.
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Teachers at Work
Teaching Words in Context
Mon Feb 04 00:00:00 EST 2008
When Bob Greenman taught high school journalism and English in Brooklyn, NY, public schools he found himself turning to the New York Times for more than just the news. "I had the kids work on vocabulary from the paper," the 30-year veteran educator explains. "It's peerless for vocabulary acquisition, even better than reading classic fiction." That experience inspired Bob to put together a book called Words That Make a Difference, a compendium of vocabulary words with contextual examples from the New York Times, and another one he co-authored with his wife Carol, this time with examples from the Atlantic Monthly magazine. We spoke to Bob about his practical approach to teaching vocabulary.
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Language Lounge
The Poet and the Dictionary
Fri Feb 01 00:00:00 EST 2008
Do you feel called upon to justify the activity of reading the dictionary? Seek no further! This month we visit a poet who whiled away many hours with her eyes glued to the fine print, and ended up having quite a lot to show for it.
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Blog Excerpts
Papa's Writing Tips
Thu Jan 31 00:00:00 EST 2008
The website Copyblogger asks business writers, "who better than Hemingway to emulate?" Sure, you're penning a white paper, not For Whom the Bell Tolls. But we can all learn from Hemingway's mastery. Here's how Copyblogger distills it.
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"Bad Language"
Ten Laws for Better Email
Wed Jan 30 00:00:00 EST 2008
Most emails are badly written. No surprise, perhaps, since we write more emails than anything else. By 2010, the business world will have produced 27,000 billion gigabytes of email. So what goes wrong?
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