Ocean State Libraries

As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: "For centuries there's been one path through fiction we're most likely to travel-- one we're actually told to follow--and that's the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides . . . But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculosexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature,...

"There's a crisis of trust in politics across the Western world. Public anger is rising and faith in conventional political leaders and parties is falling. Anti-politics, and the anti-politicians, have arrived. In Enough Said, president and CEO of The New York Times Company Mark Thompson argues that one of the most significant causes of the crisis is the way our public language has changed. Enough Said tells the story of how we got from the language...

"In The Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane H. Hill explores the myth that White racism is fading in the western world. Instead she reveals it to be a pervasive and highly adaptive cultural system, one that has endured in various forms for hundreds of years. Hill's incisive analysis of everyday talk and text shows how language that purports to be anti-racist is framed almost entirely by a folk theory of racism, one that continues to contain overt...

Explains what personification is, how it is used, and how to use it yourself.