Month of Writing Challenge Website Is Live!

Registration is open for the SNL Month of Writing 2013 Writing Challenge! 

Please visit our new Digication site for more information about signing up, the Challenge itself, upcoming events, and more. 

Coming This October: SNL's Month of Writing Marathon

Get ready for SNL's annual Month of Writing Marathon! This October, accept the challenge to write 50,000 words in one month, working with fellow students, alumni, staff, and faculty toward a collective goal of 1,500,000 words. More information will soon be available on the Writing Guide; also feel free to contact SNLWriting@depaul.edu for more information on how to participate. 

Also this October, instructor Steffanie Triller Fry is offering a course in conjunction with the Marathon: AI 196 - WriteNow: SNL Writing Marathon. This is a late start (10/3) course that students can take for one competence (A2X, A5, FX). 

An Imaginative Reading List for Writers

When BrainPickings.org’s founder Maria Popova was asked by the New York Public Library to curate a selection of books for its bookstore, she decided to create four reading lists: books on NYC, books on pets and animals, books for young readers, and, last but not least, a collection of wisdom on writing. But rather than simply gather books for a tabletop display, Popova partnered with artist Kelli Anderson to construct a papercraft diorama showcasing each title in painstaking detail. The resulting installation is both beautiful and a fantastic resource for anyone looking to be re-inspired before Autumn Quarter begins.

Click here to see Popova’s write-ups of each book and the full list of titles, which includes works by Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, Henry Miller, and Susan Sontag, as well as several edited collections of essays.

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