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Showing posts from March, 2021

Essential to Your Writing

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  Sentence outline A sentence outline lists each section of the piece as a full sentence. These sentences aren’t necessarily your headers or the first sentence of each section. Instead, they’re sentences that describe the focal point of each section. For example, your sentence outline might look like: Thesis: Adopting a mindfulness practice is one of the best ways to alleviate daily stress. Topic: Mindfulness has been proven to significantly reduce an individual’s risk of relapsing into major depression. Multiple studies have indicated the link between mindfulness and a reduced risk of depression relapse. Topic: Mindfulness has been demonstrated to lessen chronic pain. The following studies have shown that daily mindfulness alleviates physical pain. In these studies, mindfulness improved practitioners’ immune systems. Topic: Mindfulness therapy can dramatically decrease stress and anxiety levels. Researchers pinpointed the link between mindfulness and stress reduction. These studies ha

Essential of Outlining

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  No matter what you’re writing, outlining is a crucial early step in the writing process. An outline provides the framework upon which your finished piece of writing is built; it provides the template to fill in with your unique insights and ideas. Of the five steps of the writing process, outlining is part of the second: preparing. Whether you’re writing a lengthy research paper, a short essay, a blog post, or a presentation, outlining is a crucial practice that can save you lots of time later. It’s also a roadmap you can refer back to at later writing stages, particularly if you find your writing cruising off course or feel stuck in the mud and unsure of how to get rolling again. Why is outlining important? Outlining is a way to organize your thoughts in a coherent, logical way. There’s a reason why it’s the next step after brainstorming: Imagine a brainstorm as a wild tornado of ideas whirling around in your head. You observe the storm, grab onto the most valuable ideas, then corra

Hidden in Masterpieces

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  JMW Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844) It’s no secret that Turner secreted a sprinting hare in the murky path of the approaching locomotive. The artist himself pointed it out to a little boy who visited the Royal Academy on varnishing day just as the work was about to go on show. But how does this tiny detail ignite the meaning of Turner’s huge meditation on encroaching technology? Why did he feel compelled to point it out? Since antiquity the hare has symbolised rebirth and hope. The emotions of visitors who saw the painting when it was first exhibited in 1844 were still raw with the horror of a tragedy that had occurred on Christmas Eve two and a half years earlier, when a train derailed 10 miles from the bridge depicted in the painting – an accident that killed nine third-class commuters and maimed another 16. By going small in the emblem of the hare, an artist famous for going big transforms his painting into a poignant tribute and meditation on the

Odd Details Hidden

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  What do the greatest paintings and sculptures in cultural history – from Girl with a Pearl Earring to Picasso’s Guernica, from the Terracotta Army to Edvard Munch’s The Scream – have in common? Each is hardwired with an underappreciated, indeed often overlooked, detail that ignites its meaning from deep inside. That, at least, is the premise of my book, A New Way of Seeing: The History of Art in 57 Works, a study that invites readers to reconnect with works that are so familiar we no longer really see them.This story was originally published in January 2019. “Beauty,” the French poet and critic wrote in 1859, “always contains a touch of strangeness, of simple, unpremeditated and unconscious strangeness.” What follows is a brief digest of some of the more extraordinary details – touches of strangeness that invigorate, often subliminally, many of the most recognisable images in art history. The Bayeux Tapestry (c. 1077 or after) The forgotten women who, a millennium ago, embroidered th

Poetry Writing Beginners

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  6. Enhance the poetic form with literary devices. Like any form of writing, poetry is enhanced by literary devices. Develop your poetry writing skills by inserting metaphor, allegory, synecdoche, metonymy, imagery, and other literary devices into your poems. This can be relatively easy in an unrhymed form like free verse and more challenging in poetic forms that have strict rules about meter and rhyme scheme. 7. Try telling a story with your poem. Many of the ideas you might express in a novel, a short story, or an essay can come out in a poem. A narrative poem like “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot can be as long as a novella. “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe expresses just as much dread and menace as some horror movies. As with all forms of English language writing, communication is the name of the game in poetry, so if you want to tell short stories in your poems, embrace that instinct. 8. Express big ideas. 9. Paint with words . When a poet paints with words, they use word choice to f

How to Write Poetry

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  There are no officially sanctioned rules of poetry. However, as with all creative writing, having some degree of structure can help you reign in your ideas and work productively. Here are some guidelines for those looking to take their poetry writing to the next level. Or, if you literally haven’t written a single poem since high school, you can think of this as a beginner’s guide that will teach you the basics and have you writing poetry in no time. 1.Read a lot of poetry If you want to write poetry, start by reading poetry. You can do this in a casual way by letting the words of your favorite poems wash over you without necessarily digging for deeper meaning. Or you can delve into analysis. Dissect an allegory in a Robert Frost verse. Ponder the underlying meaning of an Edward Hirsch poem. Retrieving the symbolism in Emily Dickinson’s work. Do a line-by-line analysis of a William Shakespeare sonnet. Simply let the individual words of a Walt Whitman elegy flow with emotion. 2.Listen

Business Letter Formally

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  A business letter is a formal document often sent from one company to another or from a company to its clients, employees, and stakeholders, for example. Business letters are used for professional correspondence between individuals, as well. Writing an effective, polished business letter can be an easy task, so long as you adhere to the established rules for layout and language. What to Include in the Letter Make the purpose of your letter clear through simple and targeted language, keeping the opening paragraph brief. You can start with, “I am writing in reference to…” and from there, communicate only what you need to say. The subsequent paragraphs should include information that gives your reader a full understanding of your objective(s) but avoid meandering sentences and needlessly long words. Again, keep it concise to sustain their attention. If, for example, you want the reader to sponsor a charity event, identify any overlap with their company’s philanthropic goals. Convince th

Trips with Cheap Prices

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  With the first Covid-19 vaccines hitting the U.S. this week, it can feel like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and life will soon start slowly returning to some type of normalcy. For many, that means travel. Although the total number of airline tickets purchased last week is still down over 70% compared to the same time period in 2019, according to Airlines Reporting Corporation, there are some silver linings when it comes to prices. The average airline ticket cost was just $343 in September, down nearly 36% from the prior month. Before the pandemic, average ticket costs were $478 in January. But while experts predict that travel will bounce back once there’s widespread access to the vaccine, there are some considerations travelers should keep in mind. Here’s a look at what you should carefully consider before booking a trip for next year. Airlines are still being flexible  “The airlines are giving way more flexibility right now than they used to a year ago,” Keyes says. And

Things to Consider

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  Restrictions and Covid procedures are likely to stick around Let’s start with the biggest caveat: Travel — like the rest of our lives — isn’t going to return to normal in an instant. A Covid-19 vaccine isn’t an immediate silver bullet. With different countries operating under a wide range of rollout timelines and issuing different protocols for how vaccines will be distributed, you can expect that many of the Covid safety procedures and restrictions that have been implemented, including mask mandates and testing verification, will be in place until an effective vaccine is widely available. “I would not be surprised at all if for the rest of 2021, to visit the EU, for instance, that you have to either show proof of vaccination or proof of a negative test within the past 72 hours,” Scott Keyes, founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights, tells CNBC Make It. “There is still going to be a bit more bureaucratic rigmarole,” he adds. Domestic and outdoor trips will remain popular The destinations tha

Planet Nine Exists?

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  In 1992, two astronomers who had “doggedly scanned the heavens in search of dim objects beyond Neptune” for years, according to Nasa, discovered the Kuiper Belt. This cosmic donut of frozen objects, extending just beyond the orbit of Neptune, is one of the largest features in the solar system. It’s so vast, it’s thought to contain hundreds of thousands of objects larger than 100km (62 miles) across, as well as up to a trillion comets. Soon scientists realised that Pluto was unlikely to be the only large object in the outer reaches of the solar system – and began to question whether it was actually a planet at all. Then they found “Sedna” (around 40% of the size of Pluto), “Quaoar” (around half the size of Pluto), and “Eris” (almost the same size as Pluto). It became clear that astronomers needed a new definition. An obscure hiding place Of course, all this begs an obvious question – if Planet Nine is really there, why has no one seen it? “I didn’t have a particularly strong appreciat

Has No One Seen it?

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  We thought ‘this is quite interesting – how can this be? In 2006, the International Astronomical Union voted to demote Pluto’s status to a “dwarf planet”, along with the newcomers. Mike Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology – Caltech – who led the team that identified Eris, is self-styled as the “man who killed Pluto” to this day. The ninth planet was no more. A ghostly signature At the same time, the discovery of these objects uncovered a major new lead in the search for a hidden planet. It turns out that Sedna is not moving in the way everyone expected – tracing elliptical rings around the Sun, from within the Kuiper Belt. Instead, this dwarf planet takes a bizarre and unexpected path, swinging from just 76 Earth-Sun distances (roughly 11 billion k/7 billion miles) from the centre of our solar system to more than 900 (roughly 135 billion km/84 billion miles). Its orbit is so meandering, it takes 11,000 years to complete – the last time