[Links]
[links] Link salad is miserable
The Yellow Test — On nonfiction narrative structures. (Via David Goldman.)
Learn English online: How the internet is changing language — A language belongs to the people who speak it. All of them. (Via Daily Idioms, Annotated.)
Utopian for Beginners — An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented.
Fighting may have shaped evolution of human hand
Holey metal, Batman! Extraordinary optics make it appear transparent — Two wave types contribute to extraordinary optical transmission through metal.
Sound Signature — A forensic database of electrical sounds is thus being developed by UK police, according to the BBC. This is some weird stuff.
Man shot at St. Pete pizza joint had been complaining about slow service — Yep, I definitely feel safer with people walking the streets with guns. Don’t you?
Sixth-grader in Utah brings gun to school to avoid Connecticut-style attack, district spokesman says — Yep. More guns will definitely solve this problem. An armed society is a polite society, right? Ask any Somalian or Afghani.
?otD: I got nothing
12/20/2012
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (chemo brain)
Hours slept: 10.0 hours (9.0 hours solid, 1.0 hour napping)
Body movement: 0.5 hours (30 minutes on the stationary bike)
Weight: 213.2
Number of FEMA troops on my block confiscating firearms and shutting down the Internet: 0
Currently reading: The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks
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Posted: 6:20 am Thu December 20 2012 |
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You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
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Comments
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The “Yellow Test” link, regarding non-fiction writing, seems to be what I call “illustration by anecdote” in my own blog posts and other non-fiction writing. I probably overdo this. Sometimes the anecdote/scene is a bit of a stretch to apply to the point of including it. And sometimes the anecdote/scene is more compelling and memorable than the point of including it.
It’s certainly true that it’s effective to include narrative in non-fiction writing. It engages the emotions and is powerful. It’s also dangerous, as it’s possible to find or invent an anecdote to build a case in any direction the writer chooses. This can be in support of the statistics, or it can represent an exception or outlier that is not representative. People tend to be more swayed by the story than by the facts, especially when the story confirms a pre-existing bias. Some people therefore start believing things that just aren’t true (e.g., it’s safer not to wear a seatbelt, you will be mugged walking down any street at night in NYC, etc.).
As I said a while back, humans are hard-wired to trust anecdote, but have to be carefully trained to accept data.