KILUVU

Press releases are still one of the most powerful promotional tools when it comes to building a buzz for your business. Never done one? Here are some hints

We're already more than a week into January, but I'm still slowly working my way through all the "best of" year-end lists out there (there are so many of them!). Combing through these recommendations may be time-consuming, but it's worth the commitment, I've found, as sometimes you turn up an absolute gem you missed earlier in the year.

Take the post titled "The Two Minutes It Takes to Read This Will Improve Your Writing Forever," by marketer Josh Spector, for example. As short as it is useful, the piece is one of the most recommended posts of 2016, Medium informs me. It's not hard to see why.

Spector offers five dead-simple changes you can make to basically any piece of writing in a matter of seconds that will make it more forceful and compelling. We'd all enjoy reading a bit more if more writers followed his tips.

While Oscar Sharp was thinking up ideas for a film submission to Sci-Fi London's 48-Hour Film Challenge, he read a lot of sci-fi screenplays. In fact, he read all of the sci-fi screenplays he could find on the internet. That's when he had the idea: why not feed an algorithm these scripts—ranging from The X-Files to Ghostbusters toInterstellar to The Fifth Element—and let the movie write itself?

Sharp contacted his long-time collaborator Ross Goodwin, an AI researcher at NYU, who put a certain AI bot called Benjamin to the task. Benjamin is an LSTM recurrent neural network, which is often used for text recognition. It worked by ingesting the screenplays, dissecting them down to the letter, and learning to predict which letters, words, and phrases were likely to appear together. Eventually, Benjamin even learned to write in screenplay format with stage directions and dialogue. 

"As soon as we had a read-through, everyone around the table was laughing their heads off with delight," Sharp told Ars Technica. The resulting screenplay and film, Sunspring (which you can and definitely should read), is dramatic and absurdly funny. The characters speak in enigmas befitting of the film's futuristic world. (One of the stage directions Benjamin wrote: "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor.")...

Editor's Note: In the next five years, most of America’s most experienced teachers will retire. The Baby Boomers are leaving behind a nation of novice educators. In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. Less than three decades later, that number had fallen to just five years leading a classroom. The Atlantic’s “On Teaching” project is crisscrossing the country to talk to veteran educators. This story is the second in our series. Read the first one here.

“I want to say something important about writing,” Pirette McKamey told 25 seniors in her English class at San Francisco’s Mission High School one fall afternoon in 2012. It’s incredibly hard, and always incomplete, she explained. “I’ve reread some of my essays 20 times and I still go, ‘I can’t believe I made this mistake or that mistake.’”

• Careful editing can make such a difference to your writing, as there is so much more to think about than just spelling, grammar and sentence construction.

You have greatness in you. Cultivating it often takes role models, mentors, and loads of hard work. This fun quiz will help you find out which famous world leader you most resemble in your writing and may help you find an inspiring role model.

If you live in America, chances are you've heard (or used) the phrase "Don't put all your eggs in one basket."

Most of us know it means, essentially, that you shouldn't make all your plans based on one possible thing happening. But it's kind of a weird phrase, right? Have you ever stopped to wonder where it originated?

Its use in print has been traced to the novel "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes in the early 1600s, although it possibly was mistranslated to an inexact English idiom from the original and may have other roots in Italian phrases.  

Different cultures around the world all have their own similar sayings — proverbs, if you will — that make sense to those who've grown up speaking the language but sound downright odd to anyone who hasn't.

James Chapman is fascinated by these sayings and how they translate across languages and cultures....