Science News for Writers

blog.lib.umn.edu Confusion looks like this. T he Secret Of Impressive Writing?  Keep It Plain And Simple.  To anyone who is serious about writing, this conclusion is not exactly news.  Except to people new to the task of writing.  And to many researchers and scientists and other experts in the world who feel the more convoluted their language and the higher the syllable count, the more intelligent they appear. Now we can say that a writer writing simply using commonly understood words is on the path to being seen as intelligent.   This is not opinion.  It is confirmed as scientific fact.  The researcher's last-line conclusion is ~ " Write as simply and plainly as possible and it's more likely you'll be thought of as intelligent ." The author states early in his report that, "Writers who use long words needlessly are seen as less intelligent than those who stick with basic vocabular...

gizmodo.com The first thing that occurred to me upon reading this report is that this may have something to do with why so many people fail to vote.  Could it be that your candidate or cause losing de-motivates voters?  According to this research, supporters on the losing side of an election are as disheartened by the loss as a losing candidate. It's seems apparent that Mitt Romney took his loss in the last presidential election hard.  And his supporters?  Will his loss cause any of his supporters to drop out of the political process altogether? For a writer, understanding how people react in the events in their lives helps an author or screenwriter develop meaningful and realistic characters.  Knowing how people cope or don't cope with a loss in an issue they are passionate about helps with this process. Here's the report: Losing Hurts: Partisan Happiness  in the 2012 Presidential Election E lection Day is difficult for many polit...

The London Guildhall.  Note the cantilevered roof line to the left of the door.  Some people, especially grammarians, never know when to leave well enough alone.  Hockey pucks.     The cradle of English?  There have been times in my dubious writing career that I wished some merciful person had killed the language in its cradle.  Or at least stifled those self-important dolts determined to impose Latin grammar on a language derived from middle-German, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, French, Elvish, and a soupçon of about fifty other languages including Martian. Oh, I forgot ig-Pay atin-Lay.  Definitely a healthy dose of that. Okay, so you have to know the rules to break them.  Fine.  But a Latin-based grammar?  Come on, people.  Haven't you got something better to do than spend hours, days and weeks one-upping the working writer who has a hard enough time trying to communicate clearly? N...

Credit: Julie Larsen Maher © WCS   The unusual fangs of a musk deer are used by males during the breeding season. A recent WCS study found a population of Kashmir musk deer living in Afghanistan. Photo shows a Siberian musk deer – one of seven similar species found in Asia. What this has to do with writing, I don't know.  But I couldn't resist the story so here it is.   M ore than 60 years after its last confirmed sighting, a strange deer with vampire-like fangs still persists in the rugged forested slopes of northeast Afghanistan according to a research team led by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which confirmed the species presence during recent surveys. Known as the Kashmir musk deer – one of seven similar species found in Asia – the last scientific sighting in Afghanistan was believed to have been made by a Danish survey team traversing the region in 1948. The study was published in the Oct. 22nd edition of the journal Oryx. Authors inc...

breathmeditation.org Meditation for Beginners  Jack Kornfield Four stars on Good Reads I belong to a wonderful fiction critique and support group with a membership of perhaps 20 aspiring and published authors.  Between eight and ten show up at the typical weekly meeting to discuss whatever.  One constant theme is making time for writing - most members work full time.  Another way to approach the problem of limited time is to use techniques that help you make the most of the time you have.  For example, a short period of meditation just prior to writing to help you clear the mundane and day-to-day out of your cerebral cortex while pumping up your creativity for your writing session. Here's some of the latest research on using meditation to boost your creativity. Meditation makes you more creative, study suggests C ertain meditation techniques can promote creative thinking, even if you have never meditated before. This is the o...

www.flickr.com "A single disgusting image is sufficient to predict a subject's political orientation," says one researcher. "I haven't seen such clean predictive results in any other  experiments in our lab or others." It appears that someone could argue that political orientation is genetically controlled in much the same way  as sexual orientation is.  While this research implies that political orientation is genetically specified, research released earlier this year (see below) shows basic structural differences of the brains of conservatives and liberals. According to this and other research, nurture appears to play a role, but it seems that nature is the controlling factor.  To paraphrase Lady Gaga, "we're born this way."  As to why some people are born liberal or conservative, there is research to do.  Does being conservative or liberal convey an adaptive evolutionary advantage for the individual?  If that were the case,...

favim.com How would you describe the face of Lauren Bacall?  Celebrated writers such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot described characters' faces vividly without going into detail.    How much description of a character's face is enough?  Perhaps another way of putting it is, how much do you describe, and how much do you leave to your reader's imagination? According to this research, "less is more," based on analysis of the facial descriptions in classic literature. Here's the story: Vivid descriptions of faces  don't have to go into detail. C elebrated writers such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot described characters' faces vividly without going into detail about their features, according to a research group led at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. Experts in literature, psychology, neurology and music suggested that vividness can be created not only by describing individual features, such ...