Free Republic

This is the initial Righters Ping List, in alphabetical order. Normally, a ping list is used to alert folks on FR to articles that would be of interest to them. While this ping list will be like that, I'm hoping that as time goes on it will become more. What I would kind of like to see happen is have this thing turn into a kind of writer's workshop, a place where folks could come to learn from each other. I know I could use that kind of help. If anyone has any good ideas to that end, or any...

The Chinese are rapidly becoming big net users Tests have been carried out to see if spelling internet domains with non-English characters will disrupt the smooth running of the net.The tests are a step towards the formal use of non-English character sets such as Chinese and Arabic in domain names. Internationalised domain names will make the net easier to use for the majority of net users who do not have English as their first language. The work to introduce these character sets should be finished by 2008. Dummy run The tests were carried out by the Internet Corporation for...

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

Most will end up in piles of remaindered copies or lie unread in the rooms of students. As literature, they have few redeeming qualities, while their relationship to reality is often questioned, as is their true authorship.But the presidential candidate's book has become as much part of the race for the White House as the wooing of wealthy donors in Manhattan, trudging through the snows of New Hampshire and endless stump speeches in Iowa. With the 2008 election arguably the most open contest since 1928 – the last time no sitting president or vice-president ran for their party's nomination –...

I'm gonna list what I consider to be the Greatest Weaknesses of Modern Authors, their writings, worldviews, methods of working, work produced, etc. 1. Little or No Real World Experience: Too many modern authors, writers, screenwriters (not to mention artists of all kinds) have little or no real world experience. They go to school to learn how to write, they spend their lives obsessing over writing, they spend most all of their free time writing or learning to write. Yet they never lived and have nothing to write about except what is spawned within their own imaginations. They spend all...

The computer keyborad helped kill shorthand, and now it's threatening to kill off longhand. When handwritten essays were intorduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

Subject: Why English teachers die young? Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country. Here are last year's winners..... 1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master. 2.. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free. 3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like...

Ancient civilisations in Mexico developed a writing system as early as 2,000 years ago, new evidence suggests. The discovery in the state of Veracruz of a block inscribed with symbolic shapes has astounded anthropologists. Researchers tell Science magazine that they consider it to be the oldest example of writing in the New World. The inscriptions are thought to have been made by the Olmecs, an ancient pre-Columbian people known for creating large statues of heads. The finding suggests that New World people developed writing some 400 years before their contemporaries in the Western hemisphere. ...... "I think it could...

Johns Hopkins is mostly known as a staid old Baltimore institution famous for the breakthroughs of its medical researchers but the university’s alumni magazine shows a campus that is more new age than old guard. President Bush did speak there, a rarity in an academy that loathes the Republican chief executive, but the appearance did not sit too well with students and alums. “The sheer narcissism, risk-aversion, deference, and partisanship of the event and its report in the magazine betray the intellectual and political standards Johns Hopkins values,” Sayres Rudy, a visiting scholar at Amherst College writes. “I know that...

I may disagree with what Ann Coulter says but I will defend to the death Oscar Wilde's right to say it. Describing the same kind of widow that set Coulter off, he quipped: "Her hair turned quite gold from grief." Wondering what life in America would be like if Coulter used a stiletto instead of a sledgehammer is a tempting but futile excursion into dreamland. Suppose, for example, she was confronted, like Jennie Churchill, with a pompous young man who boasted that his financée's virtue was "priced above rubies." Without missing a beat, Jennie said, "Try diamonds." But if the...

The academic left has painted itself into a peculiar corner. They urge the rejection of traditional grammar as chauvinistic, or, more frequently, “hegemonic.” Unfortunately for them, they eventually have to read papers by students who have previously been taught by teachers who also share this outlook. One of the seminal texts that promotes the “grammar is dead” thesis is Preparing to Teach Writing by James Williams. “Ironically, the third edition of Williams’ book Preparing to Teach Writing appeared in 2003, the same year the National Commission on Writing made public its discovery that ‘Recent analyses indicate that more than 50...

"Universal Pen" creator Wang Jiang is a product of Microsoft's Research Lab in Beijing. Wang was a reluctant convert to the MS lab. He had to give up his position as a professor of psychology at Zhejiang University. In the end he developed the handwriting software used in Microsoft Tablet PCs; it can instantly take writing from a piece of paper and put it on a computer screen.... My dad used to say my writing looked like Chinese to him...but when I went to China, the Chinese couldn't read it either. Is it really possible a PC could read what...

Silenced Trappist struggled with obedience while trying to lead the church on peace By Father Robert Nugent5/7/2006 America (www.americamagazine.org)NEW YORK (America) - Thomas Merton spent almost half his life in the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. Strict silence was an integral part of the Trappist way of life when he entered in 1941. Merton took readily to the rule of strict silence, but circumvented it when necessary. By the mid-1960’s the Second Vatican Council’s renewal of religious life reached even contemplative orders, relaxing the rigorous observance of silence. During that time, Merton experienced a...

We spend our working days tapping into computers. We communicate with each other via email rather than letter. And today, as chip and pin technology becomes compulsory on the high street, even our signatures have become obsolete. Could it really all be over for handwriting? Stuart Jeffries reports Patrick McGoohan's words are becoming less and less true as technology extends its cheerless remit. "I am not a number," he declared in The Prisoner, "I am a free man." But increasingly we are numbers - digitised and quantified, rewritten as algorithms and asked for our personal codes to confirm who we...

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley. What’s the most important thing most of us will do? The answer is, obviously, raise our kids. And that’s what New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in his New Year’s Day column, but believe it or not, he caught all sorts of grief. Brooks was responding to a recent piece in the American Prospect by Linda Hirshman of Brandeis. She criticized the idea that “staying home with the kids is just one more feminist option.” For Hirshman, “the family—with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks— . . ....

  A writer's life: P J O'Rourke (Filed: 20/12/2005) The author and essayist tells Christopher Bray he'd rather clean the fridge than write.  "America has to act. But, when America acts, other nations accuse us of being 'hegemonistic', of engaging in 'unilateralism', of behaving as if we're the only nation on earth that counts. We are." Who wrote this? That's right. It's P J O'Rourke, letting another poor booby tire himself out by bouncing pompously around the ring until such time as our man deems it fitting to deliver one of his knockout, two-syllable blows. No big words for...

Rodney Whitaker, Writer, Is Dead at 74; Best Known as Trevanian Sign In to E-Mail This Printer-Friendly Reprints Save Article By DOUGLAS MARTIN Published: December 17, 2005 Rodney Whitaker, a writer best known by one of his many pen names, Trevanian, who was the only writer of airport paperbacks to be compared to Zola, Ian Fleming, Poe and Chaucer, died on Wednesday in the West Country of England. He was 74. The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his agent, Michael V. Carlisle, said. Trevanian's international best sellers, mainly thrillers, include "The Eiger Sanction" (1972), which was made into a...

Posted on Sun, Nov. 13, 2005 Research on ancient writing linked with modern Mideast conflict BY RON GROSSMAN CHICAGO - Professorial colleagues think Ron Tappy has made a landmark breakthrough in our understanding of the world of the Bible. He himself is waiting for the other shoe to drop. This week, Tappy will formally unveil his discovery at the meetings of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Normally a presentation titled "The 2005 Excavation Season at Tel Zayit, with Special Attention to the Tenth Century BCE" would hardly be noticed beyond the scholars who will gather at the Hyatt Penn's...

Though copy editors and popular writers have known it for long, an experiment by a psychologist establishes the key to impressive writing - keep it plain and simple. Writers who use long words needlessly and choose complicated font styles in print are seen as less intelligent than those who employ basic vocabulary and plain text, according to new research from the Princeton University in New Jersey to be published in the next edition of Applied Cognitive Psychology. In the study titled 'Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly', Daniel Oppenheimer based his findings...

'Help! Mom!' casts liberals as villains By Cheryl Wetzstein The Washington Times Published October 16, 2005 WASHINGTON -- Katharine DeBrecht, a married mother of three, wanted to make a point about the importance of conservative values. So, she penned a children's book -- "Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!" -- to stand up to the "liberal agenda that's being thrown at our kids from the left." **SNIP** Liberals have lambasted the book as "brainwashing" and "Nazi propaganda." The Democratic Underground Web site listed Mrs. DeBrecht as one of its "Top 10 Conservative Idiots" last month. "If ever there...