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Nobel judge quits with a blast at winner's writing By Julian Isherwood, Scandinavia Correspondent (Filed: 12/10/2005) The Swedish Academy was shaken yesterday after one of its members resigned, describing as a farce the committee that awards the Nobel prize for literature. This year's winner will be announced tomorrow, but the selection of the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek last year was a huge blow to the prize's credibility, said Knut Ahnlund. "It has done irreparable damage to the Nobel Literature Prize, both those who came before Elfriede Jelinek and those who come after her," said Mr Ahnlund, 82, until yesterday Chair...

My aspiring career as a political cartoonist on FR seemed to be cut short last month when, inexplicably, my scanner quit on me. I had posted 3 toons altogether, but my fourth was not being scanned. Saddened, and confused, I seemed defeated. Just when I was getting responded to: my first two toons went completely unnoticed. But now, joyously, my scanner is up and running again, and now my FReeptoons will be back in action. Look for my next this coming Friday, at about 6 PM. In the meantime, here is the last toon I drew, in a follow-up of...

My Pitch Meeting With Steven Spielberg by J. Neil SchulmanHere's a picture of Steven Spielberg with E.T. (Spielberg is the one on the right.)In 1982, when E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was released, six-year-old Brian Herzlinger first got a crush on its young co-star, Drew Barrymore. Twenty-three years later, with a video camera obtained under morally ambiguous circumstances and $1,100 prize money he won on a game show, Brian decided to make the charming, inspirational, and laugh-out-loud funny movie, My Date with Drew, in which he documents his campaign to get a date with his crush. Strategic to Brian's campaign to...

NEW YORK - Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record), the Delaware Democrat who has already expressed interest in running for president in 2008, has taken another step that signals a White House candidacy: He's writing a book. "Biden, in writing his first book, will tell the story of his remarkable 30-year career in the United States Senate — from journeyman days as a 29-year old Senator too young to be sworn in, to his rise to become one of the most powerful Democrats," publisher Random House said Thursday in a statement. Biden's planned book follows in the tradition of...

MY STRAIGHT LINE LEARNING CURVE Learning can be a slow process for me. It never ceases to amaze me how amazed I can still get when some factoid finally manages to bore a hole in my skull and jump in. I mean, not to sound too self-congratulatory or anything, but when you're nearing the end of your sixth decade, you start thinking there aren't too many surprises left. So imagine my surprise when one of those surprises that had been lagging for 58 plus years decided to finally show up. The occasion was the Monday morning writers' group I regularly...

Benedict XVI Points to Spiritual Side of Vacations Pope Benedict XVI smiles as he arrives prior to the Angelus prayer in Les Combes d'Introd, near Aosta, Italy, Sunday, July 17, 2005. 7/17/2005 ES COMBES, Italy, JULY 18, 2005 (Zenit) - More Time for Prayer, Reading and Meditation, He Says at Angelus. Benedict XVI proposed a holiday program which predisposes the heart "to receive more easily … the light of Truth and practice it in freedom and love." The Pope delivered that message today before praying the midday Angelus with some 6,000 people who came to the Alpine chalet where...

Back in March, I received an e-mail from a stranger. He identified himself as Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s producer. He explained that they were planning for her to do a one-woman stage show. Although the second act would consist entirely of Dr. Laura’s answering written questions from the audience, they wanted a funny script for the opening act. Would I be interested in having a meeting? Sure, I’m game for just about anything that doesn’t involve heavy lifting or getting on an airplane. So it was that a couple of weeks later, I drove up the coast to Schlessinger’s home in...

My hometown newspaper is hardly a liberal or conservative rag, as some critics from either side sometimes call it. The San Diego Union-Tribune is a pretty good regional newspaper. Its editorials are mostly middle-of-the-road, maybe conservative only by contrast to some other newspapers. Its op-eds are from a wide range of political viewpoints. Its news columns try to blend newswire stories to achieve more completeness and balance. Yet like most newspapers, it too often fails to meet basic journalistic standards. This can result in unfairness, imbalance or incompleteness, and sometimes in a functional equivalent of bias by failing to present...

Yesterday that recently vanquished cliché, the Arab street, returned to remind us that there are some things that even the most enlightened Westerners don't get about Muslims -- their fanaticism about the Koran. Newsweek, which had only a few months ago been jubilantly celebrating the new People Power rising up in the Middle East, apparently ran an article in which it was alleged that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, in order to annoy the Muslim inmates, had deposited copies of the Koran on or in the toilet bowls of the prison facility. There was even a rumor that a copy of...

OP-ED COLUMNIST The years between 1950 and 1965 were the golden age of American nonfiction. Writers like Jane Jacobs, Louis Hartz, Daniel Bell and David Riesman produced sweeping books on American society and global affairs. They relied on their knowledge of history, literature, philosophy and theology to recognize social patterns and grasp emerging trends. But even as their books hit the stores, their method was being undermined. A different group rejected this generalist/humanist approach and sought to turn social analysis into a science. For example, the father of the U.S. intelligence community, Sherman Kent, argued that social science and intelligence...

Don't use no double negatives. Don't never use no triple negatives. No sentence fragments Corollary: Complete sentences: important. Stamp out and eliminate redundancy. Avoid cliches like the plague. All generalizations are bad. Corollary: All statements must be specific. Never listen to advice. Take care that your verb and subject is in agreement. A preposition is a bad thing to end a sentence with. Anarchy should be the law. Corollary: I will establish democracy by dictatorial decree. Everyone should be a non-conformist. People who insult others are jerks. Always be sincere, even if you don't mean it. Death to intolerance. Down...

This transition seems to be overused, at least to me: having said that and its variations that said, that being said, that having been said, etc. Now my problem is this. I'm not a particularly good writer and I've always had problems with transitions. Can anyone offer help to me and others on the use of transitions without falling back on the previous examples? Also, do you think I was right in referring to the aforementioned transition as being overused. And while we're at it, is transition the proper term?

Continue The Story: It Was a Dark and Stormy night. Attention Writers, Wouldabee’s, Wannabee’s, Amateurs, Hacks, etc. etc. Now is your chance to perceive, pen and publish your punishing purple prose planetwide. Just take the last line from this, or any post/comment and add your prose. No need for this turkey to come out linearly. Any genre, any style. And without concern if it’s bad, it’s SUPPOSE to be. Comments and Groans are welcome. It was a dark and stormy night. The wind howled out of the north like a bereaved banshee, roaring over the moor, funnelling its fuming ferocity...

Well, Oscar Night is upon us again. And if Chris Rock is nearly right, I might be the only straight white man who watches the Oscars for both the pretty women almost dressed plus the primetime fun of making rude comments as the awards are handed out. I think I seen about every Academy Awards when I've been able to since my folks got a television set in 1955. It was always in the back of my mind to one night walk up and accept one of those small golden guys. I tried the acting route, even obtaining a SAG...

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. - R. Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing here, received an anguished e-mail message recently from a prospective student. "i need help," said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. "i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you". Hundreds of inquiries from managers and executives seeking to improve their own or their workers' writing pop into Dr. Hogan's computer in-basket each month, he says, describing...

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. - R. Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing here, received an anguished e-mail message recently from a prospective student. "i need help," said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. "i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you". Hundreds of inquiries from managers and executives seeking to improve their own or their workers' writing pop into Dr. Hogan's computer in-basket each month, he says, describing...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

In January 1999, when Philosophy and Literature announced that Rhetoric professor Judith Butler had won its fourth annual Bad Writing Contest, nobody was much surprised. Many had pointed out the solecisms of Butler, runner-up Homi Bhabha, and previous awardees, and the abstract, twisting grandiloquence of critical theory with a progressive slant was already well known in academic circles. But the contest did have an unusual fate outside the academy. It became news. Philosophy and Literature editor Denis Dutton wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (February 5, 1999), a startling forum for the treatment of academic prose. Articles in...

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I've been an avid fan of young Worldnetdaily columnist Kyle Williams for years. The 15 year-old columnist writes better than most pundits twice his age. Unfortunately, in recent columns, Kyle has begun a steady downward spiral into despair. A few weeks back, he wrote a column that sounded like the book of Ecclesiastes. His despair cumulated with this week's column where he listed various topics that he could write about and then concluded: "But I won't, because that would be terribly boring. It's all been hashed and re-hashed by the hundreds of columnists and cable news talking heads. In reality,...