Gift Exchange, Conference, and All Caps Style Comments
I'm part of the SS/HG Gift Exchange this time, and the wonderful moderators over there have sent me my prompts. I've found I could do something with all of the choices, and I'm looking forward to writing out the piece.
Last week and weekend, I spent four days at a writers' conference talking with what felt like thousands of authors, poets, editors, agents, and people representing publishing companies of one sort or another. One agent kindly gave me her card. I met up with a couple author friends for drinks, attended a couple literary journal parties, and met some new authors that I admire. I even met one of the big names in my field, and that was exciting. He reminded me of my grandfather in many ways, and at some points he was hysterically funny. The best part about the conference (aside from mingling with all the creative people striving for similar goals) was how inspired I felt during and after.
And now for a few comments on "style": ALL CAPS and a word about underlining
Writers should avoid using ALL CAPS to indicate shouting in work. I know JKR does it, but that doesn't make it good writing, and here's why...
We learn to read by picture recognition. When letters were first invented, way back when, they were invented as representative images for things which eventually were shortened to representative images for sounds. As children, we learn to recognize these letters as pictures for sounds. As we progress, we learn to put the sounds together to form words, and over time we learn to recognize words by sight which is called (appropriately) sight reading. Sight reading happens because of picture recognition. People who continue to progress can learn chunking to recognize groups of words and even whole sentences by sight, but this gets into speed reading.
The reason we can sight read is because our minds recognize the pictures formed by the words by shape. Take the following:
PARTY
This word in all caps has a rectangular shape. No matter how many words you add to it, you only elongate the rectangular shape.
PARTY THIS AFTERNOON
This is difficult to read and slows down the reader in a story. Now, take the same word with upper and lower case letters.
Party
The p, t, and y give the word more contours and an overall easier to recognize shape. Try this with street signs in your neighborhood or on billboards. You'll notice that words using upper and lower case letters are easier to read from further away. I thought this was nuts when I first heard about it, but I tested it, and I'm now quite annoyed with my city for the all caps street signs.
Using all caps is bad form in writing, especially when we have another choice for emphasis such as italics. I suggest avoiding underline because that's old-fashioned (italics has replaced underline now that we have computers - the old typewriters couldn't use italics) and the underline interfers with shape recognition because it collides with the letter parts that decend below the overall bottom line of words.
Party
See what I mean.
Last week and weekend, I spent four days at a writers' conference talking with what felt like thousands of authors, poets, editors, agents, and people representing publishing companies of one sort or another. One agent kindly gave me her card. I met up with a couple author friends for drinks, attended a couple literary journal parties, and met some new authors that I admire. I even met one of the big names in my field, and that was exciting. He reminded me of my grandfather in many ways, and at some points he was hysterically funny. The best part about the conference (aside from mingling with all the creative people striving for similar goals) was how inspired I felt during and after.
And now for a few comments on "style": ALL CAPS and a word about underlining
Writers should avoid using ALL CAPS to indicate shouting in work. I know JKR does it, but that doesn't make it good writing, and here's why...
We learn to read by picture recognition. When letters were first invented, way back when, they were invented as representative images for things which eventually were shortened to representative images for sounds. As children, we learn to recognize these letters as pictures for sounds. As we progress, we learn to put the sounds together to form words, and over time we learn to recognize words by sight which is called (appropriately) sight reading. Sight reading happens because of picture recognition. People who continue to progress can learn chunking to recognize groups of words and even whole sentences by sight, but this gets into speed reading.
The reason we can sight read is because our minds recognize the pictures formed by the words by shape. Take the following:
PARTY
This word in all caps has a rectangular shape. No matter how many words you add to it, you only elongate the rectangular shape.
PARTY THIS AFTERNOON
This is difficult to read and slows down the reader in a story. Now, take the same word with upper and lower case letters.
Party
The p, t, and y give the word more contours and an overall easier to recognize shape. Try this with street signs in your neighborhood or on billboards. You'll notice that words using upper and lower case letters are easier to read from further away. I thought this was nuts when I first heard about it, but I tested it, and I'm now quite annoyed with my city for the all caps street signs.
Using all caps is bad form in writing, especially when we have another choice for emphasis such as italics. I suggest avoiding underline because that's old-fashioned (italics has replaced underline now that we have computers - the old typewriters couldn't use italics) and the underline interfers with shape recognition because it collides with the letter parts that decend below the overall bottom line of words.
Party
See what I mean.