Fall reading list: The Lowland
October 5, 2013 § Leave a comment
The start of fall weather has me ready to throw on a sweater and cozy up with a good book. Lucky for me, a few of my favorite authors have new titles out this year. (Good for my bookshelf and the book shop around the corner, not so good for my wallet.) Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about a few of the books I’m looking forward to reading this fall.
The Lowland
I don’t read many novels these days, but reading Jhumpa Lahiri reminds me why I should. Newsweek once said of Lahiri that she “writes such direct, translucent prose you almost forget you’re reading.”But I feel the opposite: I feel hyper-aware of reading, in the best way possible. I find myself rereading sentences, paragraphs, scrutinizing and savoring them as long as I can. I’m not exaggerating.
I had my calendar marked for this book’s September release. And I’m about halfway through The Lowland now (an autographed copy—thanks, A Cappella Books!). Lahiri’s first novel, The Namesake, will always be an all-time favorite, so Lowland has some stiff competition—but as always, I’m loving being transported to the world of Lahiri’s characters, feeling their desire and heartache and grief. Then feeling it over and over again.
An excerpt from The Lowland novel, titled “Brotherly Love,” was published in The New Yorker in June (major spoiler alert). For another introduction to Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies, the author’s first short story collection, also has my seal of approval (oh, yeah, and a Pulitzer).
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to reading.
What’s on Your Mind? – NYTimes.com
September 3, 2013 § Leave a comment
Love this article on the writer’s quest to understand the mind. (also love that she’s from Hudson, Ohio, where I lived as a kid.) I think writers, more often than those in other professions, are forced to think about how thoughts work. How ideas form and how they “feel” in the brain. How to lead a reader through an argument as you progress from one point to the next.
Writers don’t do science, of course. But understanding the little quirks and limitations of our minds can help us better understand—and communicate with—others.
Why emoticons & emoji are good news for English (well, maybe)
August 27, 2013 § Leave a comment
This article, published on Wired last week, makes me beyond excited. At first, I thought “The ‘Mood Graph’: How Our Emotions Are Taking Over the Web” was going to be another one of those “social media is rendering us incapable of human interaction/turning us into unfeeling device-addicted automatons/ruining our lives/etc.” pieces.
Instead, author Evan Selinger (a Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology) takes a totally different stance. His argument: The written word, whether it appears on a postcard or in a tweet, is already a step removed from spoken communication. Whenever we write, we’re essentially translating our thoughts into the words and phrases available to us. (We do this when we speak, too, of course—but in writing, we usually strive to be more brief and linear than in casual speech.)
So what if digital communication’s latest little embellishments—emoticons, emoji, and the newly available Bitly for Feelings—could actually help us understand each other’s written musings better? Personally, I’ve come to think of these as a kind of punctuation, adding meaning to otherwise ambiguous statements.
Says Selinger, “How many times have you heard, for example, people observe (or console others) that ‘Oh, well, you can never really read tone in email?’”
Yes, forcing users to choose from a drop-down menu of a few dozen grinning and grimacing smileys might limit or simplify the ideas we can express. But wait, doesn’t language do the exact same thing? It’s well-known that there are many emotions for which English has no words.
Selinger explores the social and political implications of confessing our emotions to a blinking status bar. (There’s no doubt a company like Facebook will use its growing “mood data” to its advantage.) This is the first I’ve heard a writer frame emotional (pictorial?) communication this way. But I have a feeling it won’t be the last.
As sharing new aspects of our lives becomes more commonplace, I’ll be interested to see how these add-ons to our language shape and inform the way we communicate.
SEO Sucks When You Have a Common Name. Here’s What to Do About It.
August 20, 2013 § Leave a comment
When I was in high school, I dressed up as Where’s Waldo for Halloween. Little did I know it would be, like, a metaphor for how I’d later feel on the Internet. I’m deliberately NOT alt-tagging this with my name though, because this is actually kind of embarrassing.
Sometimes, I’m glad my name is a timeless classic. I’m thankful my parents didn’t brand me with something impossible to pronounce. Or embarrassing to write on a resume (I’m looking at you, Diamond and Princess). But there are times when I envy the Adriannes, Zoeys, and Clementines of the world.
Trying to achieve personal SEO is one of those times.
SEO is tough for anyone. But if you’re a Matthew or a Kate, or, God forbid, you had the misfortune of being born a Jones, fighting your way onto page 1 of Google is a serious uphill battle.
In a way, this feels kind of inevitable.
It starts in kindergarten. You become known as “your name-plus.” You answer to your full name or a nickname while everybody else is on a first-name basis. I had a teacher in elementary school who, unsure how to distinguish between two of my peers and I, settled on “Mary 1,” Mary 2,” and “Mary 3.” (If that doesn’t screw with a budding sense of self, I don’t know what does.)
Then came the screen name era. As anyone with a blah name will tell you, you can forget about scoring a username with any iteration of the words in your name, sans a string of numbers and random underscores. And there’s no chance you’ll get to use the same handle on AIM that you have on Hotmail.
I’m sure this is the only explanation for the idiotic usernames I kept using until way after it was cool.
Now, Mary 2 is expected to stand out in the wide world of Google—a pool just a teeny bit bigger than my third-grade classroom. If you’re like me, chances are somebody’s already snapped up www.yourname.com. (In my case, that domain’s lucky owner is a photographer from Nova Scotia who specializes in weirdly colorized semi-nudes. Go figure.)
If you’re just starting to stake your claim on the Web, there’s not much you can do about others who got there first. But there is hope, sort of.
Here are a few resources I’ve found helpful on personal branding and SEO:
- 3 tips for personal SEO, Marketing Sherpa
- 14-point checklist to Dominate Your Personal Brand on Google, KISSmetrics
- Seven Ways Writers Can Build Online Authority with Google+, Copyblogger
Basically, follow general best practices when it comes to personal SEO. But do it better than your name-clones.
As far as special tips for the plain-named, my teachers may have been right all along: tack on something to make it unique. Add your middle initial, a suffix, or a title to refer to yourself professionally. Grammar Girl is the first one that comes to mind (though I’m not sure why Mignon Fogarty uses it—she hit the unique-name jackpot).
I’m just starting to implement some of these guidelines, like adding my name to site meta titles and images and optimizing my social profiles. Check back with me in a few months. I’ll let you know how it all works out.
Or better yet, just Google me.
[UPDATE: I just wanted to add a link to this article published on Mashable last week. Another way to narrow the results Google returns for your name? Get hitched. “By adding a married name to your maiden name, this will create more search results from Google and keep the original SEO relatively intact. Even if you hyphenate the two last names, search results will go hardly unaffected if the maiden name is still next to your first name.” ]
MARY GABLE 