Tag: WRITING

Jonathan Franzen has a new piece in The New Yorker, but you'll have to become a fan of the magazine on Facebook if you want to read the whole thing. Taking its cue from the likes of Lil Wayne and Jennifer Lopez, The New Yorker has published Franzen's piece exclusively on its Facebook page in an effort to engage readers on the social network. The essay covers Franzen's trip to the island of ...

We don't know what the big deal iz, but they're are all these ppl saying Facebook makes our spelling worse. The English Spelling Society says that 66-percent of kidz like us think dictionaries should include "variant spellings" to address common typos. So what do we think? Its whatev. ...

We love you, Joan Didion! Bicoastal grandmother of New Journalism, with your wry eyes and detached verse -- won't you ever debase yourself and blog? "Well, I don't really understand blogging," the writer said at a luncheon for Colin Firth's new film 'The King's Speech.' She told Guest of a Guest, "It seems like writing, except quicker. I mean, I'm not actually looking for that instant ...

Yes. It's people. We get it. It's also a novel way of addressing complex writing problems. Soylent is an add-in for Microsoft Word that crowdsources tasks, like shortening copy and proofreading text, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk marketplace. You pay a small fee to enlist the hive mind to help you out. You can even assign complex tasks, like changing the tense of an entire paragraph. Video after ...

Long before the 30-minute time slot defined the TV show, and the 45-minute LP defined the album, aspiring authors were constrained by how many, or how few, words a publisher was willing to print. Such has largely been the case for our lifetimes, but, if Amazon has anything to do with it, it may not be the case much longer. Today, the company announced that it will begin offering shorter ...

Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. The SEIL Bag backpack concept displays turn signals in Direction Mode, and sends out emoticon visuals when operating in Emotion Mode. [From: Yanko Design] 'q*bert,' the classic arcade hopping game, gets the confectionary treatment. [From: technabob] We reviewed a ...

Yesterday, the Information Architects (iA) team, which you may know from its Web Trend Map, officially released the 'Wrıter' app for iPad. We've seen many attempts at moving writing interfaces away from the toolbar-overloaded interfaces of apps like Microsoft Word, and iA's new project continues this trend with an emphasis on your writing. We fired up the app to write this review, so read on to ...

Remember when everybody used those blue and black erasable where "erasing" mostly meant smudging the ink across your paper? Well, Sharpie may have revitalized the erasable writing utensil market with a new liquid pencil. According to Geekosystem, the Sharpie Liquid Pencil uses liquid graphite, which is erasable for three days after you put it to paper. After that 72-hour window, the marks become ...

Calling all counterfeiters, identity thieves and extortionists! The pen-makers over at Pilot have recently launched a free Web app that converts your handwriting (or, we suppose, anyone else's) into a typeface. Check out the video demo after the break. It makes the process seem simpler than it really is, but we have to say that, whether you'd use it to compose a thoughtful digital missive or ...

Share Once, there were ink-stained Moleskins and typewriter ribbons unfurled, but today's authors and documentarians, even at their most technophobic, keep discs or drives filled with their electronic scribblings. That's even the case for Salman Rushdie, an ingenious author whose work spans nearly four decades, one religious death threat, and several hemispheres. At Emory University's recent ...

Everyone out there has endured writer's block at some point. You don't have to be a novelist, or even a pro-blogger to have smacked up against the wall at some point. Sadly, if you're struggling with a school paper we can't help you, but IBM thinks it has a solution for those bloggers that might be stuck for topics. Blog Muse is a social tool that allows users to suggest and vote on topics ...

Imagine walking along, coming up with a brilliant idea, and -- with a few thoughtful hand twitches -- documenting the notion on a wireless device. Neuroscientist Michael Linderman has released data from an ongoing research project in which he documents the muscular movements of six volunteers writing with a pen, thus establishing the feasibility of an 'imaginary pen.' Outfitting his subjects with ...

digg_url ='http://www.switched.com/2009/04/23/man-writes-400-page-novel-on-cell-phone/'; You know how you spend your commute alternating between sleeping, daydreaming, and refreshing your Facebook feed? Well, Peter Brett does something else: he writes novels... on his smartphone. It's okay, we feel lazy too. Brett wrote the majority of his first novel, "The Warded Man," on his phone during ...