writing - Taryn . on Diigo

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The Smart Set: The Term Paper Artist - October 10, 2008

Tags: academia, education, writing, writer on 2008-10-24 and saved by11 people -All Annotations (5) -About

The term paper biz is managed by brokers who take financial risks by accepting credit card payments and psychological risks by actually talking to the clients. Most of the customers just aren't very bright. One of my brokers would even mark assignments with the code words DUMB CLIENT. That meant to use simple English; nothing's worse than a client calling back to ask a broker — most of whom had no particular academic training — what certain words in the paper meant. One time a client actually asked to talk to me personally and lamented that he just didn't "know a lot about Plah-toe." Distance learning meant that he'd never heard anyone say the name.
In broad strokes, there are three types of term paper clients. DUMB CLIENTS predominate. They should not be in college.
The second type of client is the one-timer. A chemistry major trapped in a poetry class thanks to the vagaries of schedule and distribution requirements, or worse, the poet trapped in a chemistry class.
The third group is perhaps the most tragic: They are well-educated professionals who simply lack English-language skills.
Term paper work is also extremely easy, once you get the hang of it. It's like an old dance routine buried in one's muscle memory. You hear the tune — say, "Unlike the ancient Greek tragic playwrights, Shakespeare likes to insert humor in his tragedies" — and your body does the rest automatically. I'd just scan Google or databases like Questia.com for a few quotes from primary and secondary sources, create an argument based on whatever popped up from my search, write the introduction and underline the thesis statement, then fill in the empty spaces between quotes with whatever came to mind.

Geolocating Compositional Strategies at the Virtual University » Writing Prompt 1

from the abstract: a pedagogy centered on the “virtual university” can be used to disrupt the very terms that create distance between the official and the everyday. In this argument, we show how geoblogging can be used to construct complex, process-based writing situations. Far from simply replicating academic conventions, geolocational approaches contextualize acts of analysis and composition by mapping them as practices onto a larger socio-cultural landscape. On this virtual surface, students learn to locate the forms and functions of academic writing within the actual spaces that they live in.

Tags: teaching, writing, technology, geolocation on 2008-10-24 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.jenterysayers.com

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Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers: Malcolm Gladwell

Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them. We’d like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.

Tags: creativity, prodigy, art, painting, writing, fiction, interview on 2008-10-14 and saved by7 people -All Annotations (15) -About

more fromwww.newyorker.com

they typically believe that learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings. Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goal.
An experimental innovator would go back to Haiti thirty times. That’s how that kind of mind figures out what it wants to do. When Cézanne was painting a portrait of the critic Gustave Geffroy, he made him endure eighty sittings, over three months, before announcing the project a failure. (The result is one of that string of masterpieces in the Musée d’Orsay.) When Cézanne painted his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, he made Vollard arrive at eight in the morning and sit on a rickety platform until eleven-thirty, without a break, on a hundred and fifty occasions—before abandoning the portrait. He would paint a scene, then repaint it, then paint it again. He was notorious for slashing his canvases to pieces in fits of frustration.
Mark Twain was the same way. Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on Twain’s trial-and-error method: “His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again.” Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on “Huckleberry Finn” so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.
“More happily endowed and more integral personalities have been able to express themselves harmoniously from the very first. But such rich, complex, and conflicting natures as Cézanne’s require a long period of fermentation.” Cézanne was trying something so elusive that he couldn’t master it until he’d spent decades practicing.
If you read “Everything Is Illuminated,” you end up with the same feeling you get when you read “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara”—the sense of transport you experience when a work of literature draws you into its own world. Both are works of art. It’s just that, as artists, Fountain and Foer could not be less alike. Fountain went to Haiti thirty times. Foer went to Trachimbrod just once. “I mean, it was nothing,” Foer said. “I had absolutely no experience there at all. It was just a springboard for my book. It was like an empty swimming pool that had to be filled up.” Total time spent getting inspiration for his novel: three days.
B
Sharie was Ben’s wife. But she was also—to borrow a term from long ago—his patron. That word has a condescending edge to it today, because we think it far more appropriate for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to be supported by the marketplace. But the marketplace works only for people like Jonathan Safran Foer, whose art emerges, fully realized, at the beginning of their career, or Picasso,
But for Zola, Cézanne would have remained an unhappy banker’s son in Provence; but for Pissarro, he would never have learned how to paint; but for Vollard (at the urging of Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and Monet), his canvases would have rotted away in some attic; and, but for his father, Cézanne’s long apprenticeship would have been a financial impossibility. That is an extraordinary list of patrons.

The Millions: The Best Sports Journalism Ever (According to Bill Simmons)

Tags: athletics, writing, journalism on 2008-10-12 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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What we write about when we write about sportswriting | Sport | guardian.co.uk

Tags: literature, poetry, athletics, football, book_review, italy, brazil, publishing, writing, books on 2008-10-09 -All Annotations (2) -About

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Writers urged by ex-poet laureate to defend wildlife

Tags: writing, fiction, climate_crisis, social_change, evolution on 2008-10-07 -All Annotations (1) -About

more fromwww.post-gazette.com

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A History of the Future of Narrative: Robert Coover (ELO)

skip ahead to 25 minutes or so

Tags: digital_media, literature, e-books, publishing, history, writing, video on 2008-09-25 -All Annotations (1) -About

more fromeliterature.org

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Have We Reached the End of Book Publishing As We Know It? -- New York Magazine

"...difficult problems to solve. But as a series of interrelated challenges, they constitute a full-blown crisis—a climate change as unpredictable as it is inevitable. And like global warming, it elicits reactions ranging from denial to Darwinian survivalism to determined stabs at warding off disaster—attempts not to recapture some long-lost era but to harness new, untapped sources of power..." [I wish NYMag would offer a single-page format]

Tags: publishing, publishing_industry, e-books, writing on 2008-09-17 and saved by8 people -All Annotations (2) -About

more fromnymag.com

p.2
By the nineties, five big conglomerates were divvying up the spoils and their lucrative backlists. Many of the smaller companies that had been struggling, like FSG, Ecco, and Crown, were flush with corporate resources. But in exchange, they gave up final say in how they’d publish their books—or even what books they’d publish. And suddenly an industry accustomed to 5 percent margins was being run by media moguls aiming for double digits.

p.3
But overspending isn’t going away, even with a rotten economy. Last month, Harvard economist Anita Elberse wrote a piece debunking the hypothesis of Chris Anderson’s anti-blockbuster blockbuster, The Long Tail (which Bob Miller acquired at Hyperion for a mere $550,000). Elberse led off with a tidbit from a study of Hachette’s Grand Central Publishing. Of 61 books on its 2006 list, each title averaged a profit of almost $100,000. But without the top seller, which earned $5 million, that average drops to $18,000. “A blockbuster strategy still makes the most sense,” she concludes. [The article in reference is narrow and thoroughly poor - hinges on the book-as-commodity paradigm.]

p.5
“Some people say there’s not enough marketing done for a book, and I think that’s total bullshit. You do the marketing that works, and not much is working right now.” —PETER MILLER, DIRECTOR OF PUBLICITY, BLOOMSBURY

p.6
The remaindering and shredding of books—a cost borne largely by the publisher—is a relic of a consignment model developed during the Depression that makes no modern sense. Publishers also pay for placement in big bookstores, which they call “co-op,” under a complicated arrangement meant to cover up the fact that it’s payola (or, as some call it, extortion).

“The fear of Google [BookSearch] is ridiculous paranoia. The fear of Amazon is enlightened self-interest.” —MIKE SHATZKIN, BOOK-INDUSTRY CONSULTANT

p.7
Editors and retailers alike fear that it’s bent on building a vertical publishi
post by taryn930 on 2008-09-17

PdF2008 Talks: Doug Rushkoff on the New Renaissance

must see must see must see
associated text:http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/rushkoff08/rushkoff08_index.html

Tags: video, democracy, social_network, obama, writing, media on 2008-09-15 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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if:book: a unified field theory of publishing in the networked era

Tags: writer, writing, reading, networked_book, e-books, publishing, publishing_industry, digital_media on 2008-09-08 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (59) -About

more fromwww.futureofthebook.org

Ever since we published Ken Wark's Gamer Theory I've tended to think of the author of a networked book as a leader of a group effort, similar in many respects to the role of a professor in a seminar. The professor has presumably set the topic and likely knows more about it than the other participants, but her role is to lead the group in a combined effort to synthesize and extend knowledge. This is not to suggest that one size will fit all authors
A mother in London recently described her ten-year old boy's reading behavior: “He'll be reading a (printed) book. He'll put the book down and go to the book's website. Then, he'll check what other readers are writing in the forums, and maybe leave a message himself, then return to the book. He'll put the book down again and google a query that's occurred to him.”
once we acknowledge the intrinsic relationship between reading and writing as equally crucial elements of the same equation — we can begin to redefine the roles of publisher and editor. An old-style formulation might be that t publishers and editors serve the packaging and distribution of authors’ ideas. A new formulation might be that publishers and editors contribute to building a community that involves an author and a group of readers who are exploring a subject.
Authors should be able to choose the level of moderation/participation at which they want to engage; ditto for readers.
It's not necessary for ALL projects to take this continuous/never-finished form.
main distinction of this new model is not type of media but the mechanism of distribution
in the long term arc of change i am imagining, novels will not continue to be the dominant form of fiction. My bet now is that to understand where fiction is going we should look at what’s happening with “video games.”
emergence of celebrity editors and readers
Over time we are also likely to see the emergence of "professional readers" whose work consistus of tagging our digitized culture
It’s important to design sites that are outward-looking, emphasizing the fact that boundaries with the rest of the net are porous.
Books can have momentum, not in the current sense of position on a best-seller or Amazon list, but rather in the size and activity-level of their communities.
Books can be imagined as channels, especially when they "gather" other books around them.
imagine google searches that make visible not just the interconnections between hits but also how the content of each hit relates to the rest of the document and/or discipline it’s part of

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Signs of life | 456 Berea Street

a revolution is occurring - welcome back!

Tags: writing on 2008-09-05 -All Annotations (0) -About

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How a Wired article comes to be

!! watch

Tags: writing on 2008-09-05 -All Annotations (0) -About

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if:book: the year of the author

note the couple of DUHs in the comment section.

Tags: publishing_industry, publishing, writer, writing, music, industry, natalie_merchant, radiohead on 2008-08-31 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.futureofthebook.org

It is the year of the author, because they will be the ones who drive the paradigm shift. They may begin to use online publishing and distribution tools to bypass traditional publishers and put their work out there en masse.
we are poised at a point where writers could completely transform the publishing industry, if only we would sit up and notice.
a huge ecosystem that supports and is supported by the book.

I am actually suggesting that cutting the middlemen out could have negetive repercussions for authors and artists. Authors could do it now if they wanted. Lots of authors do, but that means they have to find and hire their own editor, proofreader, and designer. They have to get an ISBN number, apply for copyright, get a library of congress number, and a tax ID number (if they plan on selling the book). Then they have to get bids from printers, prepare the manuscript, and pay out of their own pocket to have the book printed. Once it's printed they have to pay for shipping and storage. To sell enough to cover costs they will probably need help with their marketing strategy which might include a book tour (which they will also pay for out of their own pocket), book fairs, ads, articles, interviews, reviews, an author blog, etc... Oh, and if they want to sell to bookstores or even to Amazon, they have to contract with a distributor. If they are lucky enough to sell the books, they might need an accountant to sort out how much they owe Uncle Sam. And they will have to make sure to pay quarterly and in the midst of all this how will they find time to concentrate on writing the next book? Point is, without those "middlemen" the author is stuck doing all of this him or herself. It's difficult, it's a lot of work, and it's not something many authors are willing or able to take on.

The Kindle is the first platform to solve a handful of big problems for the self-publishing author.
that other stuff is old-world dead-tree crap.
love affair

between authors and the audience, which will be

rekindled (sorry, couldn't help myself) by their

return to a relationship of mutual gift-giving...
the solution is _collaborative_filtering._

and i can also understand that some people,

like sara here, will completely and utterly

fail to comprehend it. fortunately, however,

their failure to grasp it has no consequence

bearing on the ultimate success of the tool.

it's not superstition. it will work even if

you don't "believe" in it...

tomorrow's authors won't waste one _minute_

of their time doing "marketing", because it

will be clearly understood as a kiss of death.

Digital Technology and English Pedagogy

The authors suggest the web project serves as a possible example of a transitional pedagogy where two ways of organizing and presenting information — of writing — are used simultaneously and toward mutually enhancing ends.

Tags: literature, fiction, writing, reading, education, teaching, learning on 2008-08-28 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromkairos.technorhetoric.net

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The Future of Blogging Revealed

Tags: writing, social_network on 2008-08-18 and saved by25 people -All Annotations (5) -About

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Make AI and virtual world technologies accessible to artists so that they can create the future of immersive story entertainment | TapBot

intriguing, not necessarily interesting. suspect digital native divide

Tags: fiction, immersive_story, writing, art, application on 2008-07-14 -All Annotations (0) -About

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3 Smart Things About Music

Tags: music, writing, brain, language on 2008-06-18 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.wired.com

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Michael Chabon, fan fiction and comic book culture

Tags: fiction, literature, criticism, lit_crit, writing on 2008-06-11 -All Annotations (0) -About

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The Exploding Planet of Junot Díaz

Tags: writing, fiction, interview, junot_diaz, writer on 2008-04-28 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Young authors embrace the thought process

Tags: writing, academia, intellectual, literature, writer, books on 2008-04-21 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.calendarlive.com

Is it possible to lead a dedicated literary life in the billionaire-filled, media-crazed New York of today? To be heedless of the material world as you burrow into novels and ideas the way the old Partisan Review gang did in the '40s and '50s, to come up with notions that rock the intellectual landscape? And if so, who exactly is still paying attention?
But his war against mediocrity and for seriousness in writing and thought, he insists, does not require living in the past. "I think it's very much a living culture," he said over his Brooklyn ale. "There are a lot of people who really share these values, who were raised on this literature but who have talked themselves out of it."

It's what drove an attack on the website Gawker in the latest issue.

"These are people who were raised on print culture, everything they know they know from print culture, who now say, 'Those values are dead. You and I,' they say, 'believe in them, but those people out there do not.' And I'm telling you, they do! There are a lot of people who believe in this stuff, and they don't think it's a joke. They don't think the only way literature can survive is as this whimsical plaything of the upper class, which is frankly what McSweeney's is doing."

He's aware of the threats, the problems in publishing and elsewhere: Gessen doesn't want insularity and chumminess to kill literature and ideas as they killed poetry, "where really nobody but poets read poetry." The forces antagonistic to intellectualism, he insisted, usually come from inside.
"We were against the New Republic, we were against McSweeney's, we were against the war, we were against exercise," Gessen continued, sitting in a dive bar on the Upper West Side, where he once lived in an illegal sublet before decamping for Brooklyn, like most of the city's other literati. "And to this day we're against many things."
We don't need more creativity, it says, we need more rigorous argument and political commitment
"I always kind of cringe when I hear people talk about literary things as if they're separate from everyday life," said Rich, who's also interested in old movies and indie rock. "Some specialized, rarefied region of the mind or something."
"It was an interesting year to launch a print magazine," Park said. "It's really something you can't get on the Web. The beauty of each issue isn't simply cosmetic -- a 'cool design'; the attractiveness also has to do with a marriage of form and function."

Taryn .'s Bookmarks tagged writing → View Popular

The Smart Set: The Term Paper Artist - October 10, 2008

Geolocating Compositional Strategies at the Virtual University » Writing Prompt 1

Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers: Malcolm Gladwell

The Millions: The Best Sports Journalism Ever (According to Bill Simmons)

What we write about when we write about sportswriting | Sport | guardian.co.uk

Writers urged by ex-poet laureate to defend wildlife

A History of the Future of Narrative: Robert Coover (ELO)

Have We Reached the End of Book Publishing As We Know It? -- New York Magazine

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if:book: a unified field theory of publishing in the networked era

Signs of life | 456 Berea Street

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