Denotative and Connotative and the difference between

Be aware of the difference between denotative words and connotative words. 

A  denotative  word  conveys  information:  "hat,"  "yellow, " "twenty-five, " "book," "cat," "big." Such words speak to the practicalist in us,  to the data bank and statistician. A connotative word, on the other hand, is calculated to arouse emotional  response,  to  give  a  fillip  to  imagination,  to project a mood in our hearts and/or on our senses. To denote a woman,  I can refer to her as  a "female," a "teacher,"  or  a  "customer."  I  can  also  speak  of her  as  a "bimbo," a "maiden," or a "luminous creature," all connotative.

The  distinction  between  denotative  and  connotative, then, is that connotative words express a writer's opinions and  personal  feelings  while  denotative  words  state  the facts.  As  a  careful  writer,  you  will  be  aware  of these subtle,  yet significant,  differences.

For example,  if you  refer  to a person as  being "tired" you  convey  a matter-of-fact,  denotative  message.  If you describe the person as being "weary," the image becomes more personalized, as it does with the terms "drained" or "burned-out."  These  words  are  all  synonyms,  perhaps. Yet each carries a different degree of emotional charge. Be aware of what these charges are and use them knowingly. The following verse provides an astutely whimsical example of just how much connotations count, in life as well as in literature:

Call a  woman a  kitten,  but never a  cat; 
You  can call her a  mouse,  cannot call her a  rat; 
Call a  woman a  chick,  but never a  hen; 
Or you surely will not be her caller again. 
You  can call her a  duck,  cannot call her a goose; 
You  can call her a  deer,  but never a  moose; 
You  can call her a lamb,  but never a sheep; 
Economic she likes,  but you can't call her cheap. 

If you can't find the precise word,  move on and come back to it later.

Most writers discover this trick on their own, especially if they write on deadlines.  Better just to put an  X  on  the problem word, keep writing, and come back later. You'll bring a fresh eye to the decision then, and probably a fine solution.

Which  brings  up  an  important  rule  of  thumb  for writing practice in general: When your writing is going well, don't let anything stop your flow.  Don't get hung up on the grammatical or factual details. Just leave them, get on  with  the  brainstorming,  finish  the  entire piece,  then return to fix  the fine points. 

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And Check out the new site for Noir Stories -- Noir Street -- Tales of Shadow and Lust

Sales vs Marketing

Sales and marketing are closely interlinked and are aimed at increasing revenue. As sales and marketing are closely intertwined, it becomes hard to realise the difference between the two. In small firms, one cannot come across much difference between sales and marketing. But bigger firms have made clear distinction between marketing and sales and they have specialised people handling them independently.

Anki -- Great Program for Students

About Anki

Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it's a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn.

Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and scientific markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless.
For example:

• Learning a language
• Studying for medical and law exams
• Memorizing people's names and faces
• Brushing up on geography
• Mastering long poems
• Even practicing guitar chords!

Features

Synchronization
Use the free AnkiWeb synchronization service to keep your cards in sync across multiple devices.

Flexibility
From card layout to review timing, Anki has a wealth of options for you to customize.

Media-Rich
Embed audio clips, images, videos and scientific markup on your cards, with precise control over how it's shown.

Optimized
Anki will handle decks of 100,000+ cards with no problems.

Fully Extensible
There are a large number of add-ons available.

Open Source
Because the code and storage format is open, your important data is safe.

Catch Glenn on Twitter Noir Writer

And Check out the new site for Noir Stories -- Noir Street -- Tales of Shadow and Lust

Do You Know Your Readership? Do You?

I'm moving back into a day job I had -- part time anyway. This means that I will be picking back up the pseudonyms that I had with the company. These personas havn't put out a new title in over six months. With my Fiction Writers Group I was going to put together a few posts on using Twitter for best effect. I noticed several of the members are on Twitter now fumbling about. In the past I didn't do any marketing for the pseudonyms at all, but the names are cold long enough for proof of concept now. I'm fairly good with Twitter and Social Media I can normally get 3k page views on any given day. In fact I did that on Friday -- again as a proof of concept.

Where you start with Twitter is the hashtags, but not necessarily in the "trending" ones.  What you are  looking for is a set of Hashtags that are frequented by people who would be your readers. Once found you get involved, post interesting news, facts, jokes, and help people with problems they might have. You make yourself a resource. But first, you need to find those tags, which means Demographics.

Writers on the Worst part about Writing

My personal is listening to non-writers tell me what I should never do.

Al Hunter Ashton	Being on your own. I’m a party animal.
Ali McNamara	Sitting still so much, definitely. I used to be a fitness instructor so I was very active all day. Writing involves too much sitting down at a desk – not good for the fitness levels or the figure!

Fake Twitter

You’re not as popular as you think you are. That’s the lesson that Twitter users are figuring out as news of how many fake Twitter followers celebrities like Lady Gaga, politicians like Mitt Romney, and companies like Twitter have. Yes, even Twitter is the victim of fake Twitter followers.

The problem is far-reaching and the business of buying Twitter followers has helped the fake Twitter followers problem grow very quickly. It’s estimated that the average cost to purchase 1,000 Twitter followers is $18, and it’s easy for people to purchase fake followers online. Ads for fake followers can be found on eBay, Google Shopping, and numerous other popular websites. The more the fake followers cost, the more real they seem. In fact, fake follower dealers are continually looking for new ways to make fake Twitter profiles harder to detect.

No Words in English, but there should be

Some emotions and situations which English doesn't have a word for - but should

Age-otori (Japanese): To look worse after a haircut

Arigata-meiwaku (Japanese): An act someone does for you that you didn't want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favor, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude

In The Beginning Starting with a Start

Where to begin with your writing. Some suggest outlines, or mind maps or stream of consciousness, or carrying a note book around to jot down ideas for several weeks. 

The Bible begins at the logical place-—the beginning. The very first verse starts:

Genesis 1:1. In the beginning . . .

The phrase “In the beginning" is a translation of the Hebrew word bereshith. In the case of several of the books of the Bible, the first word is taken as the title of the whole (much as Papal bulls are named for the two Latin words with which they begin.) The Hebrew name of the first book is, there, Bereshith.

The first book was named “Genesis,” which means, literally, “coming into being.” It implies a concem with births and beginnings which is appropriate for a book that begins with the creation of heaven and earth

Now, let's not jump to the conclusion that I'm a good and kind Christian, but the Bible does offer some keen ideas about the creative aspect of us humans. So, let's start there -- In the Beginning...

Wake

Wake...

Do you remember who you are?   Do you recall your power?   You and I, We have created Gods. We have frozen oceans, filled jungles far and wide with beasts of great wisdom and immorality.   We have conjured suns, pulled moons from their orbits, and snapped the wires suspending Heaven, just to hear the enraged coiling as they spiral and whine across the sky.   We have bathed in moonlight and Consumed the Nectar of starshine -- then washed the world clean with rain. Do you remember?

On our off days we created kings, crowned their heads, then removed their heads with guillotine -- just as an exercise -- a proof of concept. And when the God we created became unworthy, we diminished his followers to madmen and extremists, then executed the God.

Did you forget Lilith? Ashera?... the poets of Sumer?

A chariot of pine-wood, a litter of box-wood.A bunch of fruits, a garland growing luxuriantly.A phial of ostrich shell, overflowing with perfumed oil.

Have you fallen so far that your powers are only dreams of  another era?. look around you, listen to the ether. We will be needed  to rebuild their myths, to set right their temples, and pull their humanity from the ash and skulls.. We are the wizards The story must not die...

...wake

Forensic Blunders #001 The Bleeding Corpse

The Bleeding Corpse: Your MC comes down the wooden stairway, that was old when he was born, and into the cellar of the house. He descends into musty smells, feeling layers of dust and dank as he submerges into the thick air. A single naked, low watt light-bulb hangs over the laundry area to the right, On the smooth cement floor inside that lonely pool of light lays the body of Mrs. Katt. Blood is dripping out of her eyes like tears...

Your character better rush to the phone and call Emergency help. Now! Go! Because Mrs. Katt is still alive!

FramingA Useful Tool For Fiction Writers

The Meaning of an Event 
Is Based on Where
We Experienced The Event

Framing has become an In-Demand field of study since 2000. While it has enjoyed  steady level of interest from researchers since its conception, the field has a  stronger following now, as enough studies have been performed to develop practical applications in:

• Persuasion, 
• Marketing, and 
• Decision Making 

Academic fields interested includes Psychology, Sociology, Neurology, Neuro-Psychology, Leadership Theories and any Behavioral Study area you can think of.

The quick n dirty explanation of what Framing covers, is :
Meaning depends on Context. So -- Control the Context.

Sumptuary Laws

“sumptuary”
― Elizabeth Fremantle, Queen's Gambit Free 1st Chapter

The earliest sumptuary regulations in Christian Europe were church regulations of clergy, distinguishing what ranks could wear which items of vestments or (to a lesser extent) normal clothes on particular occasions; these were already very detailed by 1200, in early recessions of canon law. Next followed regulations, again flowing from the church (by far the largest bureaucracy in Medieval Europe), attempting to enforce the wearing of distinctive clothing or badges so that members of various groups could be readily identified, as branded criminals already could be.

The Stroop Effect

In psychology, the stroop effect is a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task. When the name of a color (e.g., "blue", "green", or "red") is printed in a color not denoted by the name (e.g., the word "red" printed in blue ink instead of red ink), naming the color of the word takes longer and is more prone to errors than when the color of the ink matches the name of the color. The effect is named after John Ridley Stroop, who first published the effect in English in 1935. The effect had previously been published in Germany in 1929. The original paper has been one of the most cited papers in the history of experimental psychology, leading to more than 701 replications. The effect has been used to create a psychological test (Stroop test) that is widely used in clinical practice and investigation.

1922 A Single Year to give Deniers another Stupid Idea

 Imagine  Going to these lengths to deny an absolute fact. You can tell by language that  the false article meme are from a 1922 reporter,, but I went ahead and did the research. I found the "reports" of the record High Temp in Death Valley(denied at that time as a mistake by the new guy) and  Libya which was probably accurate. But -- again -- when doing research you can't stop just because you found something that fits your view of the world. You need to look around. Find out what else was going on. 

The Ever Changing Zen of the Fiction Writer

Has Your Zen Changed without Your Permission? That happens with zen things. If you have discovered that your needs are changing and the style of your writing is also changing, such as – You started as a Pantser, and now you find you need Outlines and Research Notes -- Don't worry, you'll alter that perspective several times before you come to a "workable theory"  of how you work best as a writer. That is, if you ever do. Writers and other Artists use the mind in ways that other efforts do not. But that doesn't mean that this needs to cause strife.

Let there be Light

Light is both waves and particles, but is also something that can not be truly imagined. Physicists have noted that light tends to behave more like a classical wave at lower frequencies, but more like a classical particle at higher frequencies, but never completely loses all qualities of one or the other. Visible light, which occupies a middle ground in frequency, can easily be shown in experiments to be describable using either a wave or particle model, or sometimes both.

The McGurk effect

The McGurk effect is a perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception. The illusion occurs when the auditory component of one sound is paired with the visual component of another sound, leading to the perception of a third sound.

It was first described in 1976 in a paper by Harry McGurk and John MacDonald titled "Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices".

Conservative Talk Radio

Do you listen to Talk-Radio? Any kind of talk radio?  The ratings suggest that Sports Talk is popular, and everything else is falling hard and fast. This is across the board. Conservative Talk Radio is the hardest hit. Show like RUSH simply don't attract audiences any longer -- but more than this, they don't attract the audiences that support the advertisers who continue to use Talk Radio as a medium for marketing. 

Indianapolis' WIBC has broadcast Rush Limbaugh's show for 22 years. Despite this long history, parent company Emmis Communications announced April 13 that they are dropping Limbaugh's show from WIBC's lineup.