Garry Rogers's Blog, page 246

How using the Gunning Fog Index improves your writing

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I can never get fairy cakes to rise. They come out the oven, lopsided, and barely peeping over the cases. In short, they are an embarrassment. Is it the sifting, the eggs, the mixing, my oven or simple incompetence?

Garry Rogers‘s insight:

Improving clarity is not "dumbing down." Use short sentences and words.

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Published on October 15, 2013 13:43

The Tradeoff Between Science and Story

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In today’s comments we fretted over the definition of average, oohed and aahed over some DIY costume skills, and (with the help of Gravity’s science advisor) teased out the precise intersection of science and story-telling.

Garry Rogers‘ insight:

When the science is inaccurate the story is no longer science fiction. It becomes fantasy. That’s fine, but even fantasy has rules. Departure from accuracy without new rules can get you bad reviews.

See on io9.com

Filed under: Science Fiction, Techniques, Writing Tagged: Science Fiction, Writing techniques

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Published on October 15, 2013 06:05

Is the Internet Good for Writing? Part 1: Affirmative – Lingua Franca – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Taking this side of the question is Clive Thompson, author of the new book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Thompson says he is “regularly astonished by the quality and length of expression I find online, the majority of which is done by amateurs in their spare time.”

The length part, at least, is inarguable. Thompson, a journalist who has specialized in covering technology, asserts, “Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college.” Now, according to his back-of-the-envelope cyphering, people compose about 3.6 trillion words a day via e-mail, blogs, and social media—the equivalent of 36 million books, give or take.

So, does frequent writing provide beneficial practice and improvement regardless of length?

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Filed under: Writing Tagged: Writing techniques

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Published on October 14, 2013 11:15

Fast Fact Attack: Endangered Species No. 50 - The Javan Leopard

Reblogged from Mungai and the Goa Constrictor:

Description

The Javan leopard inhabits one of the most densely populated and richly bio-diverse islands in Indonesia. Given the amount of attention by visiting biologists and conservationists over time, it is surprising there is so little information available about this and other island species.

Most of scant data written has come from those observed in captivity or those captured in the wild and returned with radio collars, or caught on camera traps.

Invading species can extinguish native plants

Invasive Plants

Nature Conservation & Science Fiction: #EcoSciFi

Ecologists at the University of Toronto and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) have found that, given time, invading exotic plants will likely eliminate native plants growing in the wild despite recent reports to the…

Creating native enclaves might save a plant species from extinction, but the species’ decline over a large area will have tremendous negative effect on the species’ herbivore/detritivore and sheltering associates (GR).

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Filed under: Invasive Plants, Nature Conservation, Nonfiction Tagged: extinction, invasive plants