Category: Language Arts

Letter Spacing and Readability (particularly for dyslexia)

Letter spacing. Read this.

Two European researchers have demonstrated that increasing the spacing between letters help students with dyslexia read faster, bumping up their reading ability by about a year. Their app for testing your best reading spacing, DYS, is free.

Robert Lee Hotz has the details.

Unlike having to use expensive fonts, like dyslexie, letter spacing is very easy to change on a webpage, and anyone should be able to change the preferences on their browser; for Mozilla Firefox you can change the letter-spacing using User CSS (which is not quite as easy as changing it in the preferences).

ᔥ Hotz, 2012.

U.S. Senators’ 10th Grade Speeches

NPR presents the results of a Sunlight Foundation study that showed that U.S. senatorial speeches average at a 10th grade reading level. The maximum is about 16th grade (high school + 4 years of college), while the minimum is about 8th grade. The average is down one and a half grade levels from just 10 years ago.

Note that the U.S. constitution was written at an 18th grade level.

There’s no Becoming a Writer

If … you had asked, “Should I become a professional writer?” the answer would have been No. And why not? The answer would have been that if you were destined to become a professional writer, you wouldn’t have asked the question; you would have known the answer for yourself and to hell with what anybody told you.

— Malcolm Cowley in a letter to Richard Max ᔥ Rebecca Davis O’Brien (2012): Malcolm Cowley, Life Coach, in the Paris Review of Books.

Advice from a writer to a potential writer. A career in writing is a difficult choice: “the rewards come late”; “most writers are failures”. You need to want to write. Intrinsic motivation.

ᔥ Rebecca Davis O’Brien (2012): Malcolm Cowley, Life Coach ↬ The Dish.

Tweeting as Literature

“Not far from the Surulere workshop where spray-painter Alawiye worked, a policeman fired into the air. Gravity did the rest.”

— ᔥ Teju Cole (2012) ↬ NPR.

Teju Cole reinterprets news articles into tweets. The brevity of the tweets intensifies their emotional impact. The story ᔥ NPR.

He’s currently going though the New York newspapers of 100 years ago.

How to Cite a Tweet

  • Last Name, First Name. (User Name). “Entire text of tweet (don’t change the CapitalizatioN)”, Date, Time. Tweet.

It’s essential to give credit where it’s due, especially in academic papers, but it’s good practice anywhere, anytime, and with anything. Thus the MLA has come up with a standard format for citing Tweets.

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:

  • Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.

— Modern Language Association (MLA), 2012: How do I cite a tweet?

(via Madrigal, 2012: How Do You Cite a Tweet in an Academic Paper?)

Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Police Composite

Brian Joseph Davis creates composite sketches of literary characters using the same software used by the police, and the descriptions of the characters in the books.

Composite sketch of Tess from Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Image by Brian Joseph Davis.

She was a fine and handsome girl—not handsomer than some others, possibly—but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to colour and shape… The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word…Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes…a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging straight down her back to her waist.

— description by Thomas Hardy, excerpted by Davis (2010): The Composites.

How Language Shapes the Way we View the Future

Do English speakers, whose language has a clear distinction between things that happen today and things that happen in the future, discount the value of the future in ways that the speakers of some other languages do not?

M. Keith Chen argues [pdf] that syntax plays a role. His analysis suggests that if your language’s syntax blurs the difference between today and tomorrow (as do, say, Chinese and German) then you are more likely to save money, quit smoking, exercise and otherwise prepare for times to come. On the other hand, if you have three dollars in your IRA and a big credit-card balance, it’s a safer bet you speak English or Hausa or Greek or some other language that forces speakers to distinguish present from future.

— Berreby (2012): Obese? Smoker? No Retirement Savings? Perhaps It’s Because of the Language You Speak on BigThink.

If this hypothesis holds up, there may well be significant implications for how different language speakers see and address long term environmental issues like global climate change.

(via The Dish).