Category Archives: Language

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These links should be self-explanatory. Less self-explanatory is this witty little website, a kind of web-text narrative created to introduce a book called, “No One Belongs Here More Than You,” by Miranda Joy. If the book is half as cleaver it’s worth finding.

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

Samuel Beckett, from Brainy Quote

“Play it (again), Sam”
Saturday, March 3rd, 2007

Samuel Beckett has only nine quotations, most of them from Waiting for Godot. We miss his remark about what it will be like in the afterlife: “We’ll sit around talking about the good old days, when we wished that we were dead.”

Read the full article By Louis Menand on the Yale Book of Quotations, edited by Fred Shapiro at The New Yorker

from Zacappa

Here’s a blog that compiles “a collection of quotes, anecdotes, trivia, top 10 listings and other noteworthy messages that surround the world of fiction -and its writers.”

The title, by the way, is apparently a misspelling of the name of a town in Guatemala, as well as a kind of rum made in the region. (“Zac,” the author of the About page, claims to have the correct spelling, but I don’t know why.)

It’s a good idea but it doesn’t seem to be updated as often as it might. Still, it’s a fun place to visit now and again. I am not sure that the quote I found on Brainy Quote is included in the Yale Book, but it should be.

To most people, the word “writing” means words on paper, prose in sentences and paragraphs. And from this perspective, computers (or any technology) are incidental to writing, simply a means of producing it but not actually part of the art of writing. But not to us. Not to folks in the field of rhetoric and composition and especially not to folks in the field of computers and writing. We reject the idea that writing equals style, syntax, coherence, and organization—meaning at the level of the sentence and the paragraph. And we reject the idea that all writing is the same, whether it is produced with a pencil, a typewriter, or a networked computer.

From Kairos 10:1 “Why Teach Digital Writing” by the WIDE Research Collective

I guess I have lived through enough web revolutions to be a little skeptical whenever someone makes sweeping claims for the impact of new technology. Still, the W.R.C. makes a strong case that writing is becoming more complicated and nuanced than ever before, simply because there is more of it in more kinds of media.

The really interesting uses of these new technologies are the mash-ups, clever scripts that combine a variety of different sources of information into useful new forms or formats. Some are general, others very specific. TechPresident, for example, harvests information from all of the social networking sites related to the presidential campaign.

TechPresident has statistics, for example, on which candidate has the most friends in MySpace, or whose videos are watched most often on YouTube.
If you want to spend a few (hours) minutes exploring reviewing the good, the bad, and the ugly among these new web 2.0 tools you can start at Go2Web20.net.