

Topic : Reading![]() Article Topics:Language LoungeA Monthly Column for Word LoversPride and Prejudice and Natural Language Processing April 2, 2018 By Orin Hargraves
As I read Jane Austen, the question that is ever in the back of my mind is, how did she do it? Surprisingly, computers are quite helpful in discovering some of the aspects of Austen's writing that make it distinctive in the wide field of English fiction.
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Article Topics:Dog EaredBooks we loveStats Meet Lit in an Insightful New Book About Writing April 19, 2017 By Mark Peters
Anyone interested in literature or becoming a better writer will find something to like here: Blatt doesn't just shine a light on writing, he lets in a whole new area of the electromagnetic spectrum.
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Dog EaredBooks we love"Word by Word" is a Funny, Revealing Look at the Life of a Lexicographer March 30, 2017 By Mark Peters
Lexicography is famously considered an art and science, but Kory Stamper thinks of it as a craft, a term implying "care, repetitive work, apprenticeship, and practice." Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries is a wonderful firsthand account of a lexicographical craftsperson who is master of another craft: writing. Few books about words—or anything else—are this well-written.
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Article Topics:Word CountWriters Talk About WritingHarry Potter and the Discombobulated Description October 24, 2016 By Adam Cooper
The spells are quite witty, but they aren't the only examples of wordplay in the Harry Potter universe. In the Potter novels J. K. Rowling uses vocabulary that has made her characters living creatures to generations of readers. This tradition continues in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
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Word CountWriters Talk About WritingMy Favorite Writer: Anthony Trollope September 2, 2016 By Michael Lydon
All avid readers have their own favorite writers. Yours may be Daniel Defoe or Charles Dickens, Vladimir Nabokov or Ogden Nash, Agatha Christie or Anton Chekhov, F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway, P. G. Wodehouse or A. A. Milne, Philip Roth or Stephen King; whom you love matters little. What does matter is that something in the style, the subject, or the subtleties of one or another writer so matches your own passions and quirks that you fall in love with that writer, and year after year you keep returning to enjoy his or her cordial company.
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Here's a perennially useful guide for choosing what book to read next: think of a title you've long known by name but never read, go straight to a library or bookstore, get it, and read it. Through decades that guide has steered me to Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Hugo's Les Miserables, all of Austen, Dickens, and Twain, and many, many more. Continue reading... |
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