'Transporting' stories change readers' minds Have you ever been lost in a story? Have you ever looked up and found that hours, not minutes, have passed since you turned on your Kindle and that you are in fact in your own bedroom and not at the palace, about to be crowned queen? Have you ever rewritten the end of a story in your mind, so that, say, Nick and Daisy … [Read more...] about Take me away
Archives for June 2015
Get a writing workout with Wylie
Take your story from 'meh' to masterpiece in this two-day creative-writing Master Class In the crunch of writing headlines and meeting deadlines, it sometimes seems as if there's not enough time to pause and reflect on how you're doing. But at Master the Art of the Storyteller — a two-day creative-writing Master Class on July 29-30 in San Francisco — you'll … [Read more...] about Get a writing workout with Wylie
Avoid Institutional Narcissism
You're so vain, you probably think this piece is about you Richard Roll, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies narcissism in CEOs. Turns out the more narcissistic executives are, the more likely they are to overrate their skills and make bad business moves. In one 2010 study, Roll used a simple technique that's been validated by … [Read more...] about Avoid Institutional Narcissism
Hit list
Lists top the list of blog posts that get shared If David Letterman taught us one thing during his tenure as host of Late Night, it's that people love lists. It's no wonder, then, that when Fractl and Buzzstream recently analyzed more than 200,000 articles from June to November 2014, lists topped the list of top 5 types of blog posts that get shared: Lists. … [Read more...] about Hit list
Activate the passive voice online
Write subject-verb-object People understand the active voice more easily than the passive voice. According to Jan H. Spyridakis, author of "Guidelines for Authoring Comprehensible Web Pages," people: Remember active sentences verbatim better than passive ones. (Blount and Johnson, 1971) Read active sentences faster than passive ones. That may be because active … [Read more...] about Activate the passive voice online