Archive for October, 2009
October 30th, 2009
By: Julia H. Jackson
Leanne Milway Chabalko is a copywriter in San Francisco whose career achievements and professional background echo the trajectory of the online journalism and advertising boom. Now an established copywriter at Oglivy West, she has developed campaigns for clients such as Yahoo!, Cisco, Wells Fargo, and the San Francisco Department of the Environment. She got her start at USA Today.com, where she first learned how to write for the web, a skill that can be applied to marketing, advertising, development, and business. Forget Mad Men – Leanne and her compatriots go beyond the print world to find creativity in advertising. She agreed to share some ideas with us here at Eduify for our next installment in Writing Careers: Real Tips from Real Writers.
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October 28th, 2009
By: Garin Kilpatrick
“A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.” -Marianne Moore
There is a scene from the Academy Award Winning movie A River Runs Through it where a young boy brings his paper to his teacher, repeatedly, for review. Time after time, the burly teacher hands young Norman back his paper and demands “half as long!” Eventually, after several frustrating fails, Norman’s teacher is satisfied with Norman’s paper. Norman’s final paper is only a fraction of the original size, yet tells the same story, and Norman has received the editing lesson of his life. While we’re not Norman’s teacher, we do have a few tips to help you edit your own writing more effectively.
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October 26th, 2009
By: Julia H. Jackson
“I believe in putting the horror in the mind of the audience and not necessarily on the screen.” – Alfred Hitchcock, in an interview with BBC reporter Huw Wheldon, May 5, 1965.
In 1954, notable director Alfred Hitchcock and screenwriter John Michael Hayes sat down to adapt the Cornell Woolrich short story “It Had to Be Murder” into Rear Window, what later became one of the most renowned films in American history. The original story featured only three characters: injured journalist L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries, his girlfriend Stella, and Lars Thorwald, Jeff’s neighbor, who he suspects has murdered his wife. Hitchcock and Hayes expanded Woolrich’s world to include a star-studded cast (featuring Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly), a complete Greenwich-style apartment complex, and a minimal score by Franz Waxman. Somehow, Hitchcock and his team created a suspense-driven universe that played on themes of isolation, voyeurism, and romance. Just how did they do it? In today’s Write Like You Mean It, we’ll share some of Hitchcock’s own personal philosophies for creating a Window of your own.
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October 25th, 2009
By: Garin Kilpatrick
The following five short stories are Halloween classics and are certain to send chills down your spine. From vampires, to skeletons, and headless horsemen, this post has it all. Once you’ve read it let us know what your favorite Scary Short Story is in the comments below! Happy Halloween from Eduify!
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October 23rd, 2009
By Adam Krause
One of the great things about the English language is the way it is constantly evolving (for instance, the phrase “Schwing!” was all the rage in the early ‘90s, and hardly anyone says that anymore. Ask an older sibling – or Wikipedia – if you’re unsure of the definition.) Sometimes, however, terrific words get swept aside in favor of shiny new ones. In this series, we will look at words that have fallen into disrepair, and try to patch them up by showing their modern equivalent. Sometimes a word has been replaced by a compound word that is more specific to today’s world, and sometimes the exact same word has a completely different meaning than it carried in another era. Most often, though, there is no longer an exact term that brings the same succinctness and zing to what it is describing as these antiquated words do. In our effort to bring back words from the past, here’s Eduify’s first installment of 5 old words.
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