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Entries Tagged as 'writing'

Lobsters

May 16th, 2002 · Comments Off

I’m in the middle of reading Lobsters by Charlie Stross and while it’s very enjoying (a kind of superpowered MacLeod without the communism - okay, that doesn’t make any sense, but still) I can’t help but think - does anyone actually talk like this?
“I work for the betterment of everybody, not just some narrowly defined [...]

Tags: sf · writing

Haiku 2

May 11th, 2002 · Comments Off

The folks at New Mars won second place in the Kuro5hin haiku contest for the princely sum of $24! See the reaction at the New Mars forums.

Tags: mars · writing

Garden path

May 10th, 2002 · 2 Comments

There’s an interesting phenomenon in language comprehension called the ‘garden path effect’. Proposed by Frazier and Fodor (1979), it basically meant that when you are reading or hearing a sentence, you split it up into chunks (you parse it), and due to something called ‘late closure’ you keep on adding as many words as possible [...]

Tags: psych · writing

Foreign emoticons

May 3rd, 2002 · Comments Off

Inspired by a post on the Culture mailing list, I was going to write something about the universality of emoticons on the Internet between different cultures and languages here. I then realised that it was far more interesting than I first envisaged and so it deserves a full write up. Expect a new article in [...]

Tags: writing

Writing

May 2nd, 2002 · Comments Off

Something popped into my head today as I was scribbling down some notes during a supervision: does the fact that I write with a pencil (as opposed to a pen or biro) affect my writing style, and on a higher level, my method of thinking?
Pencils provide a much less constrained and linear way of putting [...]

Tags: future · spec · tech · writing