It took growing my confidence as a writer, and reflecting on oral storytelling traditions and the performative nature of language, to realize that storytelling isn’t a one-way street, that I am not so much telling a story, dictating it via text, as I am sharing it with a fellow traveler along the journey that the story describes.
Landscape and Memory Review
Art criticism is hardly my usual field of interest, but it was not art that Landscape and Memory prompted me to consider. Instead, it was nature itself.
Definition, Abstraction, and Language’s Limitation
Where I asserted that abstractions result in language’s limitations, my brother argued that language’s limitations cause its abstractions.
Patterns and Poetry in Prose
With poetry remaining, for now, something of a mystery, I've turned my attention towards instead applying certain poetically derived techniques to my prose.
A Not Unactive Post About George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”
Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language" is among my most oft-cited pieces on language and writing, and its lessons and criticisms are as valid today as they were in 1946.
Reflections on the Performative Nature of Language
When we consider the organic and evolving nature of language, it becomes clear that the medium in which we as writers work is at once both a static means of information storage, and a dynamic, independent artform allowing the author to engage in a unique interaction with each reader.
Linguistic Reference Frames
I came across a paper in Science Advances called "Different reference frames on different axes: Space and language in indigenous Amazonians."
Words We Don’t Have
The possibilities of leveraging this idea to render fictional characters and cultures more unique, more interesting, more textured, more genuine, more true, more alive, are veritably endless.
Autocomplete Your Story
Now, tools that leverage artificial intelligence can predict entire paragraphs of writing, rewrite your paper for you, and may one day do the first draft, too.
Definition, Connotation, and the Function of Language
A long time ago, there were no dictionaries, no modern language associations, no Oxford standards. Language is a fundamentally organic system that has been evolving for thousands of years, as complex and intricate as something like the economy, and for most of its existence its rules have not been explicit.
IGC Publishing 