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INTRODUCTION TO WEB GRAPHICS AND DESIGN

INTRODUCTION · SYLLABUS · TUTORIALS · CLASSLIST

Writing

  • There are six ways to organize and structure a narrative sequence.
  • They are:
  • Moment to moment
  • Action to action
  • Subject to subject
  • Scene to scene
  • Aspect to aspect
  • Nom sequitur

Taken from: Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, p.17

It was Johnson who speculated that "mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically except in narrative." As he well knew, big books mean long labor. With the aphorism, a writer can, as Mark Twain once put it, match "a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense."...

A good aphorism, as Mr. Geary sees it, fulfills five requirements. It must be brief, anywhere from a few words to a few sentences. It must be definitive, and personal. It must have a twist. And it must be philosophical. The following example from Chateaubriand fulfills all of the above: "An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate." So does Karl Kraus's acid observation that "lots of knowledge fits into a hollow head."

Aphoristic writers tend to be cynical. Even the noncynical ones, like Confucius or Buddha, challenge and disturb. "If they don't give you a little shock, something isn't right," he writes.

William Grimes, Published: November 12, 2005, NYT

'A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare'. —The Oxford Book of Aphorisms