Shout out to all the ‘slow-typists’ out there! A study from the University of Waterloo shows that typing slowly may improve the quality of your writing. Particularly, a slower speed seems to augment the sophistication of one’s vocabulary, as writers have more time to think about and be selective in choosing a word when they take longer to type it.
Category: Interesting Reads
Interesting Read: Exclamation Points
Linguist Geoff Lunberg investigates the varying (and sometimes extreme) opinions surrounding the exclamation point. According to his research, women actually use the punctuation more than men, and both corporate and educational codes generally ban its use with little justification other than prescriptive rules of taste. Lunberg makes an argument for why we should all be more generous with our written exclamations. Essentially, he argues that whereas the written word can become a muted translation of our lived experience, the exclamation point is a way to revive our writing–it is a way to reinsert the vibrancy of the spoken word into the realm of the written. Where do you stand on this point? It may be time to rethink your disdain for the effusive, over-the-top exclamation point.
Interesting Reads: Screens Versus Paper
Do you find that you engage differently with material based on how you encounter it? Do you think that “internet reading” is caused by screens themselves, or can we train our minds to engage onscreen text with the same “deep reading” that is traditionally associated with the “paper brain?” Read this brief article and examine your own reading habits!
Interesting Reads: Writing Down Your Goals
Feeling stuck in your academics? Simply writing down your big picture and specific goals can help you develop day by day strategies to accomplish those goals! Read more about it from NPR here.
Literary Landmarks
If you could be transported to the location of your favorite novel, where would you go? What would you love to see in person, not just in your mind’s eye?
In Writing America: Literary Landmarks From Walden Pond to Wounded Knee, author Shelley Fisher Fishkin looks at just that — literary landmarks and how the places authors wrote about shaped their writing.
Inside Higher Ed recently interviewed Fishkin. In her initial research, she was “struck by the absence of sites on the National Register of Historic Places with a direct connection to many authors and works that I especially valued and I found that even sites that were linked to literature often failed to make the importance of that connection come truly alive. Might paying more attention to these relationships — and finding connections that hadn’t been made before — help us appreciate and value both the literature and the landscape more fully? I wrote the book to find out.”
From Mark Twain’s home in Hartford, Connecticut to the woods around Walden Pond, Fishkin hopes “readers of the book to leave with an appreciation of the special ways that literature can bring a place to life and etch it into memory.”
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Learn more about some of your favorite literary landmarks from The Literary Landmark Association.
Finding Focus
With spring break right around the corner, focus can be hard to find this time of the semester. If you find you’re spending 5 minutes on Facebook for every two minutes spent studying, these tips are for you!
Most Read Book
With spring break right around the corner, you might be looking for a good book or two. Check this out!
Missing Out
Yesterday we shared a post from our archives about whether or not it’s best to take notes by hand or by computer.
As a follow-up, we wanted to share an article from the Harvard Business Review about what exactly you miss when you take notes by computer – it turns out, you might miss out on a lot.
“But is longhand dead? Should you be embarrassed bringing a pen and paper to your meetings? To answer these questions, I did a little digging and found that the answer is no, according to a study conducted by Princeton’s Pam A. Mueller and UCLA’s Daniel M. Oppenheimer. Their research shows that when you only use a laptop to take notes, you don’t absorb new materials as well, largely because typing notes encourages verbatim, mindless transcription.”
From the Archives: Laptop or Longhand?
We’ve recently come across a few articles that speak to the technology-age old question: pen and paper or computer?
Should I fill notebooks and binders with my handwritten notes? Or maybe I should click away on the keys during a lecture?
A recent study found that students remembered lectures better when they took notes by hand instead of on a computer. From their study, researchers concluded that
“Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.”
“Mysterious Origins of Punctuation”
We all know that punctuation saves lives, but have you ever wondered where the comma came from? What about the history of the semi-colon? The BBC recently shared an interesting article about the Mysterious Origins of Punctuation and it’s definitely worth a read.
“The comma, colon, semicolon and their siblings are integral parts of writing, pointing out grammatical structures and helping us transform letters into spoken words or mental images. We would be lost without them (or, at the very least, extremely confused), and yet the earliest readers and writers managed without it for thousands of years. What changed their minds?”