Part of being a writer is expanding your knowledge of our craft. A better vocabulary about the technical aspects of writing can help you to become a more proficient wordsmith. It’s very difficult to speak intelligently about something if you lack the proper words.

I found these definitions via a tweet from Jenn Flynn-Shon (@jennshon), and I thought I’d share the best of them with you.

It’s well worth checking out the original article for the full list, especially since they’ve got more useful writing posts in their menu.

https://www.butte.edu/departments/cas/tipsheets/style_purpose_strategy/definitions.html

Alliteration: The repetition of the same sound in successive words, usually, but not necessarily, at the beginning of words: Blown buds of barren flowers…

Apostrophe: A figure of speech in which the absent is addressed as if present, the dead as if alive, or the inanimate and abstract as if animate and concrete: Come, Sleep; O Sleep!

Just about to sign off – been trotting around for eighteen hours – cool looking eyeballs though – when this wonderful email from my most amazing friend popped up. Thank you for the smiles beautiful Eleanor – you are awesome!MWAH and LOVE!

If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.
(Hardly seems worth it.)

If you farted consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas is produced to create the energy of an atomic bomb.
(Now that’s more like it!)

The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to squirt blood 30 feet.
(O.M.G.!)

A pig’s orgasm lasts 30 minutes.
(In my next life, I want to be a pig.)

A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death. (Creepy.) (I’m still…

On 28 October 2015 the space probe Cassini, which has been orbiting Saturn for the last 10 years, will pass within 50 km of the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. This is an extremely close approach by an interplanetary spacecraft (by comparison the New Horizons mission only got as close as 12,500 km above the surface of Pluto) and will help us understand more about this icy moon.

Image from NASA

This post discusses this flyby and explains why, in many ways, Enceladus might be a better bet than Mars for finding life in our solar system.

Early views of extraterrestrial life

Throughout most of the twentieth century many scientists thought that there could be life on Mars. Indeed the famous American astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) claimed to have seen through his telescope  a large network of canals built by an intelligent civilization  and even produced maps of the Martian canal network. These  canals certainly provided great material for…