In today’s world, headlines are splattered with same sex marriages, celebrity “bumps” (a slang term used to describe a pregnant woman’s stomach), and women deemed to be “fat” because they gained a few pounds. Whether you’re a writer in the entertainment industry or a columnist for your local newspaper, gender treatment is one of the […]
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The “Fan” Trap: When Writers Write for What they Love
Writers are often naturally curious and flexible, able write about doughnuts in one article and cloud computing in the next. Because of our insatiable need to continue learning on a mosaic of topics, we sometimes fall into one industry or another, because we love it just “that” much. Couple that with our recurring “oh-crap-I-still-need-to-live-in-the-real-world” realization, […]
How Search Engine Technology is Catching Plagiarists
Plagiarism, the very word strikes fear into the hearts of writers everywhere, forcing them to clutch their precious stories to their chests and never show them to a single, living soul. In ye olde days, there was no Google, no MSN, no Yahoo! There were simply two, little gems called “ethics” and “copyright.” If you […]
Is Wikipedia Reliable for your Research?
I remember the days when the encyclopedia salesman would come to the door, selling leather-bound sets of books with gold-dusted pages. In those ancient caveman days, the biggest problem with the encyclopedias, was that they would quickly get outdated. Science, the global political landscape and technology are often always in flux, which caused the print […]
Pros and Cons of Writing Movie Reviews
Since Fridays usually end up being movie night in our neck of the woods, I thought I’d focus on the pros and cons of writing movie reviews and how–especially if you’ve never written one–they can help your writing. When you sit down and write any sort of a review–be it a movie, book or even […]