Letters Remain

Category: writing

  • Ira Glass on Effective Storytelling

    Ira Glass is a master storyteller, as anyone who has ever listened to This American Life can attest. Below, in a series of occasionally hilarious videos and articles, Ira reveals his secrets of effective storytelling: from how to tell when a story isn’t working, to turning the creative process into a polished, finished product. The 13 principles to creating “more, better…

  • What it Takes to Do What You Want

    In an inspired and inspiring essay on “everything [she believes] about writing”, author Elizabeth Gilbert talks about what it takes to do what you want (in her case, write). I believe that – if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression – that you should take…

  • The Benefits of Good Writing

    From chapter 8 of Getting Real, one of the best books I’ve ever read on the subject of application development; the benefits of good writing: If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill a position, always hire the better writer. […] That’s because being a good writer is about more than words.…

  • The Best of Esquire’s 75 Years

    75 years since its initial publication, Esquire shares the 7 greatest stories and the 70 greatest sentences to have been published in the magazine. Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. –Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” 1936 via Kottke

  • How to Take Notes Like an Alpha-Geek

    It’s been a year since Tim Ferriss pressed ‘Publish’ on an article that I find myself going back to whenever I feel disorganised and overcome by endless pieces of paper: how to take notes like an alpha-geek. I trust the weakest pen more than the strongest memory, and note taking is—in my experience—one of the…

  • Eunoia: Beautiful Thinking

    Christian Bok’s Eunoia sounds like an interesting read. The BBC has a review of the book, complete with some (interesting) excerpts: Eunoia is the shortest word in English containing all five vowels – and it means “beautiful thinking”. It is also the title of Canadian poet Christian Bok’s book of fiction in which each chapter…

  • The Elements of Style: Programming Edition

    Strunk and White’s Elements of Style is one of the most popular and influential writing guides available. By replacing a few key words, it can be used as a text on programming style and the craft of software. 2.12. Choose a suitable design and hold to it. A basic structural design underlies every kind of…

  • Words for Reviewing Books

    Think you’ve read that book review before? It’s probably a bad case of reviewers lexicon. In Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing, Bob Harris adds ‘poignant’, ‘compelling’, ‘intriguing’, ‘eschew’, ‘craft’, ‘muse’ and ‘lyrical’ to the ageing—but still achingly poignant—list of words that reviewers and publishers love too much (where ‘achingly beautiful’, ‘darkly comic’, ‘deceptively simple’,…

  • World Wide Words

    Michael Quinion, the British etymologist, documents the meaning and derivation of words and phrases in the English language. Covering etymology, grammar and neologisms (among others), my favourite aspect of World Wide Words (where he “writes on international English from a British viewpoint”) is the front page Sic! section highlighting common—yet amusing—errors: Charlotte Metcalf’s food column…

  • The Declining State of Science Writing

    With the media frenzy over the LHC’s ‘first beam’ eventually abating, Slate looks at the failing of science journalists to write coherent and accurate articles on this and other scientific topics of interest to the general public. No one ever said writing about particle physics was easy—the field of quantum mechanics shares a kind of…