Cell Phone Novelists

Uploaded by Nuigurumi

Check out this article.  It appears that the top ten novels in Japan were written on mobile phones.  I can hear the click-clack of thumbs now.  If getting rid of keyboards is happening soon and literature is being produced on a IPhone, what does that mean for traditional education. 

I can just imagine Shakespere now, writing Hamlet with the Verizon network people following him.  Can you hear my writing now?  How about now?

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Are We Smarter or Dumber than We Used to Be?

Uploaded Ms. Kathleen

This is my salute to presidents on presidents day posting.  I remember people talking about history when I was growing up.  They said it was much harder to know history to day because there was so much more to remember.  In fact, when my father was in grade school, he only needed to know the presidents up to Hoover. 

I think it’s really hard to compare an education today with an education from 30, 40 or 70 years ago.  It’s a different world and in a lot of cases all the facts have changed.  The worlds of medicine and science are completely different.  A  lot of what people thought was right turned out to be wrong and there’s also a lot of stuff that noone every dreamed of that has become common place.  Here’s to quick examples.  If you studied Einstein in physics, you would have heard that the universe is curved.  Turns out that last year they proved that the universe is perfactly flat in all directions.

If you graduated from Harvard with a Ph.D., in communications in 1960, you would have no idea on how to text message or do a simple Google search.  You won’t find it in any curriculum for another 30 years or more.

How about geography, try comparing a map from 1980 and 2007?  You’re straight As in 1980, become an F today.  You even have to change your 2007 map to make Kosovo an independent country.

Are you keeping up with your reading?  In 1900, only a few thousand books got published.  Today, it’s over 100,000.  And your vocabulary?  In 1960, there were about 200,000 words in the English Dictionary.  Now there are over a million.  Can you define “woot” and use it in a sentence?  Most 10 year olds can. 

 As with many things, the good old days often aren’t as good as people’s memories.  It’s tough to measure new world oranges against old world apples.

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Do We Write and Read More or Less?

Uploaded by Joseph Dath

 On a gut level, you might say that kids today just don’t read and write like we used to…or most adults just don’t read books. 

However, when you dig into it a little what’s really evident is that reading and writing have changed so much that comparing the past to today is comparing apples to oranges.

Here’s what I mean.  It used to be that you wrote long letters to friends and family and dropped them in the mail box.  In fact, a lot of history is recorded letters.  The civil war is a great example because it is one of the most documented wars because of all the letters.  The big change is not a decline in writing but a decline in using a paper and pen.  If you added up all the emails, text messages and posts on social networking sites, the amount of writing is massively greater.  Think about when congress wants another departments emails and the get several million emails to look at.

Well what about newspapers.  No one reads newspapers like they used to.  This is an absolutely true statement.  The reality is that people are probably more engaged and interested in their world, but news print just doesn’t cut it.  I could wait for old news to appear on my door step or I could just go to Yahoo news and see what’s happening right now.  A newspaper might offer you two or three columnists on a subject while you can go on line and get a hundred different points of view.  Newspapers also have to compete with 24/7 cable news and sports.  I remember rushing to the paper to get the sports scores in the morning.  Now I can watch the ticker on ESPN or call them up on my cell phone.

I know you’ll say, what about books.  No one reads books any more.  I’d say some one has the be reading books because the number of books in print each year has exploded.  Today about a 100,000 books are published each year.  If you read a book a week, you’d be reading .005% of the new books.  Hard to keep up on your reading that way.  Think about all the people who used to own a really good set of encyclopedias.  Their basically worthless today because if you want the knowledge of the world a quick Google search will work and you can get everything in multi-media.

So here’s a good question, have we change the way we teach reading and writing to fit a new world or are we still in line with the 1950s?

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A Good Rant on the Web

After reading lots of blogs and especially the comments, I think ranting is very poplular.  Sometimes it’s just an argument for the sake of arguing.  Here’s a interesting video that’s a lot like some of the blogs.  It’s also good for all the Monty Python fans out there.

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A Good Quote Goes a Long Way

One of my favorite quotes is from the Elvis Presley song “Are you lonesome tonight?” where he sing, “Someone once said, the world is a stage…”  Well I think that person was Shakespere but I could be wrong.  Having the right quote at the right time can add a lot to your writing and speaking.  So here are some quotes from some very quotable people, feel free to submit your favorites:

• Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
  H. L. Mencken
• Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.
  Orson Welles
• About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation.
  Will Rogers
• Another thing that freaks me out is time. Time is like a book. You have a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s just a cycle.
  Mike Tyson
• A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.
  Mark Twain
• I don’t think silicone makes a girl good or bad.
  James Caan
• For days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.
  Johnny Carson
• I found there was only one way to look thin, hang out with fat people.
  Rodney Dangerfield
• A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn’t make sense.
  James Thurber
• A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
  Ernest Hemingway
• I never rooted against an opponent, but I never rooted for him either.
  Arnold Palmer
• Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.
  Yogi Berra
• I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.
  Yogi Berra
• I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
  J. D. Salinger
• I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses. Stephen King
• At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.
  Salvador Dali
•  I have a very strict gun control policy: if there’s a gun around, I want to be in control of it. Clint Eastwood
• Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.
  Bob Dylan

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Cool Blogging Site – Test Your Blogs Reading Level

This site measures the reading level of your blog.  I read a lot of posts that my only response is “huh?”  Having a hire reading level doesn’t mean that it’s more intelligent or better written.  It just means you’re using larger words and more complex sentence structures.  If you’re writing to be read, I’d keep you’re writing at a 8th to 12th grade level.

 Test your blogs reading level.

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Strong Narrative Style – Audio VI

Some writers have a very strong writing style without a lot of purple prose.  One of these writers is Elmore Leonard.  He started out writing westerns and went on the mystery and crime novels.  One of his best known is Get Shorty which was turned into a movie with John Travolta.  He also wrote 3:10 to Yuma the Russell Crowe movie.

One of his best quotes about writing was the his secret was to leave out all the parts people skip.  Listening to his books we discovered one of the best readers Arliss Howard.  He narrates two books, the Hot Kid and the sequel Up in Honey’s Room.  It’s a story about Carlos Webster and his rise in the Oklahoma Marshal’s service.  It’s set in the 30s and 40s.  The narrator gets the accents and syntax just right to make these books really easy to listen to. 

 

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Women versus Men as Readers – Audio Part V

Does it make a difference?  It does and it doesn’t.  How’s that for a strong stand.  When the main character is female, the book is better read by and women and vice versa.  Here’s a very good example.  Alexander McCall Smith has a fantasitic series:  The No. 1 Ladies Detective Series.  The series is about “traditionally built” Precious Ramotswe who travels Botswana in her little white van solving mysteries.  To read all the names and syntax are difficult but to hear it is wonderful and educational. 

The reader is Lisette Lecat.  She’s one of the best.  She also reads other stories about Africa.  She really makes these stories pop.  She lowers her voice for male characters but they still have a soft edge which really fits many of the characters. Here are a few of those books:

 

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Readers Make a Big Difference – Audio Part IV

It’s interesting when you hear different readers read the same story.  It actually changes the characters and even the tone of the story.  The better reads actually make the story better.  Here’s an example.  Robert B. Parker

  is considered the dean of American crime writers.  He has written scores of books around three different characters.  Spenser, Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall.  It’s interesting that Sunny Randall seems to be a female Jesse Stone and in the book Blue Screen they hook up. 

Anyway since he’s written so many books over the years, they get read by different people.  There are maybe five people who have read Spenser books from Burt Reynolds to Richard Massur and Joe Montagne.  They’re all good but Joe Montagne really gets identified with the characters and adds a tone of sarcasm that makes the character unique. 

Jesse Stone novels are read by Robert Forster and Scott Sowers.  Both excellent readers but very different.  Robert Forster has a flatter even style that adds a level of depression for Jesse. 

The best way to listen to series like this is to start early in the series and work forward.  As you learn the characters, you easily pick up all the references in later books.  It gets you into the story quickly.  The other thing that makes Parker’s style easy to listen to is that he doesn’t repeat information.  For example, a character goes through an event and then has to tell it to the cops.  He simply writes and then I told them the story.  Here are just a couple of the Parker books:

The other thing that’s interesting about his writing is that you end up knowing more about what each character is wearing than any other books you’ll read.  It’s very fashionable crime.

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Learning to Read from Great Readers – Audio Part III

 This is the third in the series.  One of the things you can learn from audio books is how to be a great reader.  Listening to how the best read is really insightful. 

Who makes the best readers?  So far it seems that it’s actors and singers.  Yes, singers are wonderful readers.  Here’s a book on tape that goes over the top.  It’s read by Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.  It’s a collection from the old west with Louis Lamour. 

I can’t give this one five pizzas, so I’m giving if five chuckwagons.

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