Source: World War I and the Relation of Myth to History – America and the Great War – Medium
Category: Narrative
Last Week’s Links
Here are some of the articles I’ve been reading around the web lately.
Protecting Your Digital Life in 7 Easy Steps
Some suggestions for how to make your personal data”more difficult for attackers to obtain.”
What’s the Use of Regret?
Gordon Marino, a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College, contemplates the meaning and function of regret, especially the type that he calls “moral regret.”
How Exercise Might Keep Depression at Bay
For those of us who need yet another reminder of how important physical exercise is:
Exercise may be an effective treatment for depression and might even help prevent us from becoming depressed in the first place, according to three timely new studies. The studies pool outcomes from past research involving more than a million men and women and, taken together, strongly suggest that regular exercise alters our bodies and brains in ways that make us resistant to despair.
Is Grief a Disease?
Common wisdom advises us that there are no right or wrong ways to grieve, that all people handle grief differently and in their own way. This article takes a long look at grief, including a new approach to something called “complicated grief”:
complicated grief is more chronic and more emotionally intense than more typical courses through grief, and it stays at acute levels for longer. Women are more vulnerable to complicated grief than men. It often follows particularly difficult losses that test a person’s emotional and social resources, and where the mourner was deeply attached to the person they are grieving. Researchers estimate complicated grief affects approximately 2 to 3 per cent of the population worldwide. It affects 10 to 20 per cent of people after the death of a spouse or romantic partner, or when the death of a loved one is sudden or violent, and it is even more common among parents who have lost a child. Clinicians are just beginning to acknowledge how debilitating this form of grief can be. But it can be treated.
What I found most interesting here is that this approach to helping people cope with grief involves storytelling:
Grief is a problem of narrative. A story, in order to be told, needs a narrator with a point of view who offers a perspective on what happened. But you can’t narrate if you don’t know who you are… . Plotting out the story restores the narrator and the narrative. Then, you can begin to imagine a new story, a new plot for yourself.
© 2016 by Mary Daniels Brown
On Writing
Lawyer takes ‘adult timeout,’ writes novel
A lot of people would like to be able to do what debut novelist Kenneth Zak, a San Diego attorney, did:
Q: You started working on this book during what you’ve called “an adult timeout.” Tell me about that.
A: I had a private practice in law and I had a big house and a pretty good bank account, but I needed more time. So I sold the house and took off for three years. I spent some time on the island of Crete, I went to Bali, I went back to Greece. I spent the three years primarily traveling, surfing, writing and getting back in touch with what it means to live my life. I had a need to dive into a more meaningful existence.
John Wilkens, the interviewer in this piece, describes Zak’s novel, The Poet’s Secret, as a mix of romance and mystery.
What I found most interesting in this interview is Zak’s discussion of how he found the story’s structure. Even though I don’t write fiction, I’ve always thought that the first question a novelist has to answer is “Whose story is this?” When I read a novel, I’m always primarily aware of who is constructing the narrative and how the narrator or point-of-view character shapes the story. Think of Nick Carroway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, or the different sections of narrative in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.
Zak says that when he began his novel, he had two “images” in mind: One was a poet about to commit suicide, and the other was a young woman seeking love. Zak didn’t know how these two story lines would fit together. He also didn’t know, at the beginning, how the book was going to end:
About two-thirds of the way through the book, I had an idea of what the last line would be. That’s when I realized whose story it was going to be. I swapped chapters one and two and everything crystallized.
20 Common Words You Could Be Using Incorrectly
OK, I admit that the former English teacher in me is a fool for this kind of article. Here Jeff Haden discusses 20 words often used incorrectly. Since the article occurs on a business-oriented site, many of the terms he talks about occur most frequently in that context (e.g., arbitrate, collusion, libel). But there are also several words that all of us could use some help with, such as literally, total (or totally), and, one of my own personal pet peeves, irregardless, which is NOT a real word.
Added bonus: This is a follow-up to an earlier article. By clicking the link at the beginning of the article, you get two tutorials for the price of one.
Study: Superlative use by media overhypes medical research
Snappy headlines with flashy words work well to gain interest with readers.
In the case of health reporting, however, the overuse of superlative terms such as “breakthrough,” “game changer,” and “cure” was found in a new study to be widespread and may create unrealistic hype about unproven drugs, researchers said.
UPI reports on an analysis of how news sources describe cancer research. Dr. Vinay Prasad, assistant professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University’s School of Medicine, warns that journalists may not have the expertise to assign commonly used superlatives. “Because patients and their families turn to media for research and information, we need to raise awareness on this issue,” Prasad said.