They make sentences; look smarter.
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"Who's the cutest little listicle? You are! You are!"
But it goes beyond turning everything into surprising lists of badass
mind blowers. Indeed, if you yourself have learned how to write comedy
articles or novels or even just really great text messages, you'll have
experienced the same thing -- the surprising ways learning to write
changes your life."Who's the cutest little listicle? You are! You are!"
#4. Regular Conversations Sound Banal
Conversations in movies and books are filled with snappy banter, people constantly telling razor-sharp jokes or perfectly capturing their character in a few words. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of writing dialogue-heavy pieces in my time here at Cracked, which has the same issue: people talking in a funny but horribly unbelievable manner.
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"Forsooth, this is a pretty unlikely way to begin a sentence."
Conversations in the real world are nothing like this, filled with
awkward pauses and words like "um" and "uh" and "derrr." People mishear
things all the time, or misunderstand them entirely. Awful jokes are
commonplace, and nearly everything uttered is completely banal. Listen
to a conversation someone else is having on a bus sometime. The most
trite, straightforward observations are repeated as if they're great
pieces of wisdom, and everything is dramatically oversimplified. I don't
know if I've ever heard anyone say something about politics that wasn't
completely wrong, and I'm constantly having to interject and correct
them."Forsooth, this is a pretty unlikely way to begin a sentence."
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"Sorry to interrupt, but ACTUALLY, a single-payer health care system has a number of advantag-"
The weird thing about this is that the same must apply to
conversations you yourself are in, even though you don't notice it.
There's something about being invested in a conversation, trying to come
up with your own jokes and clever insights, that must distract you from
how trite everything you're saying is, and you're generous enough with
your friends to overlook the same missteps when they make them. Or you
see but choose to ignore them, like laughing at your boss's jokes for
the sake of professionalism."Sorry to interrupt, but ACTUALLY, a single-payer health care system has a number of advantag-"
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#3. You'll Read a Ton More
I've always read, in the sense that I could find out what I wanted to watch on television hours in advance and could navigate train stations without having to resort to hand gestures. I'd even occasionally read books, rather a lot when I was a kid, but then trailing off to two or three a year by the time I became a grown-ass man whose cultural tastes leaned more toward modern artistic forms.
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"Yeah, video games used to be made mainly for 8-year-olds, but they're a lot more mature and dark now. Like for 14-year-olds at least."
Even the books I did read came from a pretty slim selection of
genres. I'd typically find one science fiction or fantasy author I
really liked and read everything he or she wrote, which I gather isn't
an uncommon pattern for elbowy young men to fall in to."Yeah, video games used to be made mainly for 8-year-olds, but they're a lot more mature and dark now. Like for 14-year-olds at least."
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Even if it did lead to my regrettable Star Wars novel phase.
But in the years since I started writing seriously, I've been reading
a ton more, something like 15 to 20 books a year, of a much broader
variety.Even if it did lead to my regrettable Star Wars novel phase.
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The main source for this newfound interest in reading is to see how
different writers working in different formats do things. One of the
most humbling experiences of learning to write (or learning anything,
really) is how not easy any of it is, how every detail conceals
thousands of smaller details. Now I'll read short stories and
translated works and books that have crazy things like footnotes or
subtext in them. (Which are totally different things, I was
surprised to learn.) I've even reread a lot of those terrible books they
made us read in school, and it turns out that a lot of them are
actually really good and interesting and not boring at all like they'd taught us.
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This is basically the worst possible environment for instilling a love of literature.
A non-trivial side benefit of this is that it's super useful for getting references certain people like to drop in conversation.This is basically the worst possible environment for instilling a love of literature.
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"AHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAA! GODOT! Hehe hehhe heh heh. Heh."
-seconds-long silence-
"I Godon't get it."
"AHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAA! GODOT! Hehe hehhe heh heh. Heh."
-seconds-long silence-
"I Godon't get it."
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