Being specific with what you say might seem important in legal writing, essays, philosophy, and other, less fictional formats, but storytelling is less obvious. If you’ve been paying attention to our posts about word choice, though, you can probably see its relevance.
Judging Your Own Work
I write stories so other people can read them, but I’m the one who must be comfortable having written them.
Intentionality in Storytelling
With only a handful of lines, and a few words in each line, each one of them must bear a larger load for the poem. Everything must be intentional.
Causal Complexity
When we ascribe something to chance, it’s a shorthand to express that we don’t understand, can’t identify, or can’t distinguish the actual causes involved.
Identifying Descriptions
Many modern books which intrigue me enough to look up a description, or which I hear or read about, lose me at the description stage because they are not highlighting what I’m looking for in a story.
Next Level Fruit
They propose a “universal limit on technological development” as a solution to Fermi’s paradox based upon a notion of diminishing research returns and increasing civilizational complexity.
Using Stock Phrases
The language we use has meaning and depths we don’t always consciously recognize, and stock phrases often convey meanings and suggestions which we don’t fully recognize and which we probably don’t intend when we deploy them in our writing.
Social Media Fragmentation
There is reason to suppose that such specialization may provide more benefit than it does harm.
The Language of AI
Tailored machine learning mechanisms and large language models can be far more useful, but ideas about AI “going rogue”, and the more revolutionary predictions for the capabilities, are rather overblown and unrealistic. Some of these misconceptions may come from the language we use.
Creativity is Overrated
Lewis asserts that medieval artists would see the drive for creativity and originality in art as, not the pinnacle of artistic achievement, but the scraping of the bottom of the artistic barrel.
IGC Publishing 