Save the Date

Coming this October: the Month of Writing Challenge. 

Challenge yourself to write as many words as you can. Your words will count toward a scholarship for the DePaul school of your choice. Check back for more details--including a brand-new website--in September. 

Until then, feel free to contact snlwriting@depaul.edu with questions. 

Free Writing Class at StoryStudio Chicago

StoryStudio Chicago is an organization dedicated to providing a supportive community for writers of all levels, and on Wednesday, August 27, StoryStudio is hosting an open house and free class:  

Join us for coffee, tea, and conversation with other writers, and then stay for Your Life As Fiction, a fun, all-levels free class that will explore what happens when you combine personal experience with your imagination.

What: Open House and Free Class

Where: StoryStudio Chicago, 4043 N. Ravenswood, Chicago, IL 60613 

Cost: Free!

Click here for more details and to RSVP.

April Is National Poetry Month

Yesterday marked the beginning of National Poetry Month. The celebration's organizer, the Academy of American Poets, has hundreds of suggestions for ways to celebrate. Here are a few highlights:   

• Sign up for Poem-A-Day to receive a new poem via email each day.      

• Choose an activity from the "30 Ways to Celebrate list," such as Poem in Your Pocket, recording your favorites in a commonplace book, or gathering friends to play the intriguingly named Exquisite Corpse. 

• Browse poems by topic: love, teaching, parenting, and more--including sharks.

• Listen to readings of the site's most popular poems. (Click here to listen to the site's most popular recording, Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night."  

• Explore the rich history of poetry here in Illinois. (Distance students, click here to find information about your state.) On each state-specific site you'll find biographies and the work of local poets, lists of "poetry-friendly bookstores," event calendars, information about local literary organizations and publications, and poems about the state, its cities, and its people. 

  

A New Use for Google Books

The English language is a living thing: words become obsolete, others become popular, and new ones are created. We’re all aware of this process, but have you ever thought to yourself, “I don’t remember using or hearing that word very often, but now it seems to be everywhere overnight.”

Has the popularity of the word truly skyrocketed? Or were you just not paying attention before?

With Google’s Ngram Viewer, you might be able to figure it out. This nifty application—which really should come with a procrastination warning—uses texts from Google Books to graph word usage over time. You can trace a single word or phrase’s written frequency over time (hipsters got a lot of attention in the 1960s and were all but ignored in the 1980s) or you can compare several words (you’re unlikely to see either these days, but tell your friends that verily was always more popular than forsooth).

Lexicographers, linguists, grammarians, and people who simply like a good dictionary were all atwitter when the venerable Oxford English Dictionary announced its decision to add a new definition of tweet: “to  submit a post to the microblogging service known as Twitter.” (Ironically, microblog hasn't yet made the cut.) The Ngram data set only goes back to 2008, so we can’t see the jump that has almost certainly happened in the last five years and which prompted the OED to break its own rule about only adding a word after ten years of documented popular usage. Still, it was interesting to find out that tweet also experienced a heyday around 1810 but that apparently no one had much to say about birds in the 1850s.

Google Book Ngram Viewer

See What Shakespeare Has to Say About Your Writing

And not only Shakespeare: you could have Dickens, Poe, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Dickinson weigh in as well. This nifty little tool from Google Docs gives writers the chance to experience, for better or worse, what it would be like to collaborate with the greats. As you type, Google uses its search algorithms to insert edits based on words, phrases, and passages regularly associated with these authors, thus allowing each to leave his or her stamp on your work. Here's one author's test run, in which Poe and Dickens express some strong opinions about an apple seed.