All posts by Ben Barber
How Psychoanalysis Can Fix Your Content Marketing
How often do marketers talk about appealing to someone’s subconscious desires, or suggest that a person’s impulse buy is the result of an unexpressed, or repressed, emotion?
Or, how often do we — when noticing that someone is making assumptions about the unarticulated desires of others — explain someone’s claims as an instance of the speaker projecting their interests or aims onto someone else?Continue reading
Don’t Be Yourself. No, BE YOURSELF.
It’s difficult to overestimate the influence that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay “Self-Reliance” has had on subsequent creative minds.
For contemporary writers struggling to generate an original idea, Emerson’s advice to “learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across [your] mind from within” can still provide validation of their unique creative instincts.
According to “Self-Reliance,” you shouldn’t need validation from anyone else.
The crowd, it would seem, should have no bearing on how we understand the world: “the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
Be Nice to Your Reader
As writers, we should always be careful when making assumptions about the comprehension of our readers.
One of the first lessons any composition student learns is the importance of considering his or her audience. Who are they? What level of knowledge and comprehension are they bringing to their reading of your work?
When we ask ourselves to identify this hypothetical reader, we start by making our own, sometimes faulty, assumptions. Broadly speaking, these assumptions pertain to our readers’ abilities, which are typically assessed in terms of their level of education and their specialization in skills and knowledge.Continue reading
A Very Brief Guide To Citing Sources in a Bibliography
You’ve been hard at work creating an original nonfiction book. You’ve come up with new ideas, and your labors have resulted in a unique contribution to knowledge, which will inform and guide readers as they encounter challenges you’ve experienced, thought hard about, and researched.
It’s clear to you how much you owe to your sources of knowledge, and you hope your readers will go on to deepen their understanding of the topic by looking to some of the exemplary resources you’ve drawn from.
In order to do this, you’ll need to provide them with a clear path to finding these resources. To this end, you’ll cite your sources and create an organized bibliography, works cited, reference list, or notes section.Continue reading