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POPSAwesome research/ Homework resource I only found this the other day and mostly I'm clipping it for my own uses; however, it's a great resource and I thought I'd share. The site itself has pretty cool info too. 'Hope you guys like the clip.
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POPSDon't Write Like An Idiot This is a reclip of an older clip that Invictus made. His original exceeded the current clip limit so I couldn't revive it. Refresher everyone.
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POPSWhy The Loudest are Often the Most Wrong This classic paper by Kruger and Dunning, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments , examines the psychological reasons for the unfortunately common correlation between ignorance and confidence. We argue that when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine. As Miller (1993) perceptively observed in the quote that opens this article, and as Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted over a century ago, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." ( PDF here .)
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POPSWE ARE ALL WRITERS NOW "True, much of what is written online is quotidian, informational, ephemeral. But writing has always been so: traditional newspapers line bird-cages a day later; lab reports describe methodology in tedious detail; the founding fathers wrote what they ate for lunch. And the quality of many blogs is high, indistinguishable in eloquence and intellect from many traditionally published works." an important read
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POPSMapping Kerouac: The Grammatical Artwork of Stefanie Posavec Posavec dissects every word, phrase, sentence, and subject of Kerouac's On the Road to invent new ways of looking at the familiar masterpiece. The diagrams make for beautiful art in their own right. (See source for high-res pictures.) In her structure analysis, each chapter explodes in a color-coded starburst of topical breakdowns. At a glance, you can see Kerouac's focus wander from the sketches of local life in the beginning, to depictions of work and travel in the middle, with women and the subject of love dominating the latter chapters. The comparative sentence diagrams are what really drew me in. It's fascinating to behold an entire literary work all at once on one page. What's more, Kerouac's casual prose style can be differentiated immediately from the stately, grandiose writing of Faulkner, not to mention the terse, claustrophobic style of Orwell's fiction. Literary reductionism at its most fun and beautiful.
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POPSBrain's Speech Center Finally Talks In a study in the journal Science, researchers analyzed the inner workings of Broca's area, long known as the brain's speech center, in pre-op brain surgery patients.
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POPSCopy Editing America I applaud this man. I think he hits the nail on the head when he said that mistakes breed mistakes. I realize that a language is an evolving entity, but it still irks me when a word gets added to the dictionary (thus legitimizing it) because it becomes overused incorrectly.
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POPSEnglish Lanugage quizzes in my experience, even some native speakers would do well to take some of these quizzes to raise their awareness for the English language! great collection - generally a useful site for English language teaching and learning. loads more at source.
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POPSA predetermined morality Surprisingly, our emotions do not appear to have much effect on our judgments about right and wrong in these moral dilemmas. A study of individuals with damage to an area of the brain that links decision-making and emotion found that when faced with a series of moral dilemmas, these patients generally made the same moral judgments as most people. This suggests that emotions are not necessary for such judgments. These studies suggest that nature handed us a moral grammar that fuels our intuitive judgments of right and wrong. Emotions play their strongest role in influencing our actions—reinforcing acts of virtue and punishing acts of vice.
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POPSThe Elements of Style - William Strunk, Jr. The entire 1918 edition — online, searchable, and beautifully laid out. This impeccably-written English usage book is as much fun to read for its lively tone and witty examples as it is for its timeless advice. Strunk approached grammar not as a rigid rule set to be followed, but as a craft to be mastered and enjoyed. It's no accident that "Strunk & White" (as the reference is now known) is still read, essentially unchanged, in classrooms and newsrooms to this day. Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. ( The Elements of Style . III. 13.)