English 50 Exercises for Story Writers English 50 – Intro to Creative Writing: Exercises for Story Writers Basic Theory: What is a short story? As soon as someone delivers a definition, some good writer will write a story that proves the theory wrong. Short stories have a narrator; that is, someone tells the story; have at least one character in them; have some action occur (or perhaps fails to occur); take place somewhere; that is, there is a setting for the action; and someone either learns something or fails to learn something (theme).With these five characteristics in mind, we can create an almost endless supply of exercises to help sharpen our techniques of story telling. Narrative Voice Twenty or so years ago, voice was the "rite of passage" into a successful writing career. Nevertheless, a narrative voice that sounds like it could be anyone's voice or is bland and boring, or riddled with pointless clichés will fail to capture and hold the reader's attention. If you've written a story in third person, try it in first.
Gender Guesser The words you use can disclose identifying features. This tool attempts to determine an author's gender based on the words used. Submitted text is evaluated based on two types of writing: formal and informal. About Gender Guesser In 2003, a team of researchers from the Illinois Institute of Technology and Bar-Ilan University in Israel (Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Fine, and Anat Rachel Shimoni) developed a method to estimate gender from word usage. A simplified version of this work was implemented as the Gender Genie. This Gender Guesser system is heavily based on the Gender Genie. (Oh yeah, and Gender Guesser is completely implemented in JavaScript. A few quick notes: The system generates a simple estimate (profiling). Future Hacker Factor is currently developing a variation of this system that can estimate an authors age, type of English used (for narrowing down nationality), and whether the speaker uses English as a second language.