Wednesday, March 1, 2017
ΛNOMΛLY by Jan KriwolThis mystique series was shot in... crss
ΛNOMΛLY by Jan Kriwol
This mystique series was shot in association with design office Lange & Lange, showcasing their work for the clothing brand Pajak Sport. This barren, cosmic-like landscape, just above the clouds is the top of the Polish mountain Śnieżka and it’s abandoned meteorological station.
Editorial work from Danish artist Andrea UciniFollow us on... crss
Why We Ignore The Obvious
Is it indeed possible to put the past behind you?
Editorial work from Danish artist Andrea Ucini
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crossconnectmag: WHAT A RACKET - (Danielle Clough) Does this... crss
crssWHAT A RACKET - (Danielle Clough)
Does this count as being interested in sport?
Recent works from the Cape Town, South Africa native.Posted by: RS | Follow: Cross Connect Mag
Illustrations of beautiful London from Polish native Slawek... crss
Illustrations of beautiful London from Polish native Slawek Fedorczuk.
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crssThe Reef by CuisinArtAnguilla’s newest upscale hotel, The Reef...
The Reef by CuisinArt
Anguilla’s newest upscale hotel, The Reef by CuisinArt offers sustainable luxury in a magnificent beachfront setting on Merrywing Bay.
Rooms are designed in a fresh, contemporary style, with tasteful Caribbean touches and state-of-the-art technology, all wrapped in a marine inspired color palette. Most of them offer dazzling sea views, and the suites feature glorious terraces or furnished balconies.
Decorated with Italian ceramic tile floors and designer furnishings, the open-air Lobby Bar offers live entertainment in a refined, yacht-like setting, while Breezes, the resort’s delightful beachfront restaurant, serves up delicious roasted fish by the sea.
How "Stealing" from Great Writers Makes You Write Better And Think Bigger
We all have that day where your idea pool run dry and you just cannot find the suitable word to describe things in your mind. You then remember all those great lines from Ernest Hemingway and wonder why you never been able to form those brilliant sentences in your brain, while slowly fall into the abyss of self-deprivation.
Actually, it is not that hard to write like Hemingway. You just have to steal from him.
When you are reading some fascinating pieces from great writers, you may imagine yourself becoming a writer. You can, in fact, get one step closer by “stealing” something from them. Of course you are not plagiarizing their work, but learning some important writing skills from the masters.
Francine Prose shares how we can learn to write better by reading intentionally — outstanding writing is dressed up with language styles.[1] It is all about putting the right word in the right place, and this is exactly what you can learn by reading someone else’s passages. Here are the tips to boost your own writing skills.
Think about why they use those words
Choosing the correct words can elevate the standard of writing. In Prose’s book, she mentions that words are “raw material out of which literature is crafted.” Readers could read every word and analyze word choices. You will have questions such as, “Why do writers use these words?” and, “What do these words imply?” After all, you can learn and use them to improve your own work.
Think about how they phrase an idea
Good writing pieces not only contain interesting ideas, but also contain phrasing with constructed sentences. Prose discusses how “the well-made sentence transcends time and genre.” She thinks that a writer who is concerned about what constitutes a well-constructed sentence is on the right path. You may learn sentence patterns and word usage from great writers and then use them in appropriate ways when phrasing your own ideas.
George Orwell said his work was influenced much by the style of W. Somerset Maugham. Writing is the same for everyone and no different from every other skills that you can learn, the best way to improve is to learn it from the masters.
Read more, and think beyond the words
So, start reading now. Instead of just going through a book or any article word by word, think beyond the words.
Revisit the books that you love and be a bit more analytical this time. Mark it down if you come across some great sentences or ideas. Make a list of the sublime words used by great writers and learn from them.
I’ve been keeping a notebook with all my favorite sentences and phrases since I was small. It’s like my little dictionary and it has helped my writing a lot. Just imagine a book with all the greatest writers’ greatest words and ideas! Oh and you can actually expand it to some of the best quotes you’ve seen or the amazing movie lines you’ve heard about.
When you have a notebook like that, you’ll never lack an idea or ways of presentation because you already have a pool of thoughts that you can just take out any of them any time.
Let’s start with your favorite book or favorite piece of article! Pick that up and write down all the amazing ideas, words and sentences in it!
Featured photo credit: Ignitum Today via google.com.hk
Reference
| [1] | ^ | Francine Prose: Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write them |
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Workout Your Brain By Learning A New Word Every Day, You Will Get Smarter
Have you ever had the feeling of speechless because you are running out of words to speak your mind? Or have you ever read a word that you are familiar with but suddenly cannot recognize its meaning? Sometimes there also might be the case that you have a word in mind but you forget how to spell it right. These situations do not prove you are not intelligent enough but somehow show that your brain needs some more training.
Workouts aren’t just for your body, your brain needs that too.
The brain, anatomically speaking, cannot be called a muscle, though it is partly composed of muscle tissue.
There’s a very good reason though why experts use the analogy of exercising your brain as if it were a muscle. In both cases, you can be sure that if you don’t use it you’ll lose it. Evidence suggests that mental stimulation improves brain function[1] whilst also reducing the risk of cognitive decline and related diseases.
So what kind of exercise does a brain need? Probably learning more words.
Your body needs exercises, your brain needs new words.
Learning new words stimulates our brains in more than one way; it activates the brain’s visual as well as auditory processes.
We learn words by simulating how they sound and visualizing the concepts to which they are attached. Instead of taking time to sound out the words that the eyes see, the brain trains itself to recognize the words that are frequently seen together. [2] That’s why sometimes when a word is misspelled yet you can easily recognize it.
Whenever we read a word, the visual cortex of the brain is stimulated to help us recognize a word. With a continuous practice, our brains will get used to associating images and concepts. This helps to improve our memory because it becomes easier for our brains to recall the previous concepts with the existing stimuli.
Research also suggests that the brain is a dynamic organism.[3]
“The brain changes as we learn more vocabulary, no matter the age, as vocabulary is learned at all ages.”
When we try to acquire a new word, the gray matter density increases as a result of learning, despite the age.
Researchers have performed a brain image analysis to show that people with similar verbal IQs can have different verbal knowledge levels when they try to increase the gray matter density through vocabulary acquisition. In other words, learning a new word is a practice for our brains to grow so as to improve our intelligence.
Putting new words learning to another level and explore new realities.
So you see how learning new words has helped you train up your brain. What about putting new words learning to another level?
Learning a new language is, of course, an unsurpassable method for acquiring a huge amount of new vocabulary in a short amount of time. Aside from stimulating our brains though, a language also teaches us new concepts, and new realities.
Jay Rubin, the English translator to famous Japanese author Haruki Murakami, has illustrated this point finely:
“It’s still fascinating to sit back and realize that my brain is working in a totally different way when I’m functioning in Japanese. I very often feel I’m writing original -almost original- fiction. What’s on the page is Murakami’s prose, not his language.”[4]
Japanese and English are vastly different; aside from containing very different sounds, they are composed of completely different grammatical structures. According to Rubin, Japanese also contains what he refers to as “intangibles,” words that express concepts that don’t exist in other languages.
These “intangibles” can of course be found across many languages. They illustrate the importance of having a high competence in the native language if you’re living in a different country and want to truly immerse yourself in its culture.
Apart from those foreign concepts, new words in our own language can also teach us new concepts, even as adults. Need to learn something technical that you know almost nothing about? It is very likely that you will have to learn a whole set of new vocabulary.
Learning new words will not only improve and increase our brain function, but also give us the ability to open up new worlds we may not have known existed.
Kickstart with your brain workout schedule!
The way we use language is closely associated with our brain activity. Maintaining a large vocabulary is a sign of intelligence, and it also helps us with our mental health. So start from today, try to learn new words every day.
There are easy ways for you to learn new vocabulary anywhere anytime. Whether it’s through doing the daily crossword in the paper or trying out a fun new app like Dictionary.com. Just one click, you will see the word of the day with clear explanation and examples which allows you to fully understand its meaning and usage. Learning new vocabulary is a great way to spend your time (no matter how you use it).
For those who like to take on challenges, learning an entire new language might also be your option. You can try out some apps like Duolingo which provides word quizzes for you and motivates you to stay on track by keeping a learning record. If you have some more spare time, you can also take a language class to practise more with fellow classmates.
But my favorite way of learning new words and phrases is always from watching movies and listening to different types of songs. When I see or hear anything I’ve never come across before, I’d immediately put that down in my note (well it’s handy because I’m just jotting that down in my phone’s note app.)
One single new word every day will eventually make up a big list of words. Start from small and you’ll end up big!
Featured photo credit: Stocksnap via stocksnap.io
Reference
| [1] | ^ | Havard Medical School: Can brain stimulation aid memory and brain health? |
| [2] | ^ | Time: Your Brain Learns New Words By Seeing Them Not Hearing Them |
| [3] | ^ | Academia.edu: Vocabulary and the Brain: Evidence from Neuroimaging Studies |
| [4] | ^ | The Rumpus: THE RUMPUS INTERVIEW WITH JAY RUBIN |
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If You Want To Be More Productive, You Need To Stop Work From Expanding
Have you ever decided to refresh your resume, only to see what should be a 30-minute job take weeks? Believe it or not, this has little to do with the nature of the challenge itself, but more your outlook and the amount of time that you allow for completion.
In this post, we will talk about the importance of mind-set and how you can become more productive when completing non time-sensitive tasks.
Parkinson’s Law: work expands when your give it too much time
The key to improving your productivity and avoiding procrastination is to understand Parkinson’s Law, which is an old adage which declares that ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’. It is a psychological principle that has inspired numerous studies and pieces of literature, and one that underlines the potential dangers of setting arbitrary time-frames that have little or no bearing on the task in hand.
In practical terms (and expanding our previous example), this means that you may allow yourself a week to complete the task of editing your resume. This is despite the fact that the majority of the required information is already included in the document, while tasks such as refreshing dates and proof-reading should not be particularly consuming.
Of course, you may set the arbitrary deadline of a week in order to alleviate any pressure that you are feeling, or simply because you need to submit a job application at this time. Affording yourself this unnecessary amount of time is actually counter-productive from a psychological perspective, however, as this increases the perceived complexity of the task and makes it seem more daunting. As the work expands to fill the time allotted, the task becomes harder to complete and in some instances this may even have a detrimental impact on the quality of your input.
Set time box for your every task
The main principle of this law is that the work expands to fill the allotted time, so the establishment of time limits and deadlines is the most effective. This is a process that must starts before tasks are started, as you analyse the requirements of each one and determine a reasonable (but time-frame for completion. As prominent life coach Karen Strunks says,[1] you need to be proactive and determine precisely how long individuals tasks are going, as “if you allow yourself two hours for a task, it will take two hours”.
This is an important mantra to remember, and in practical terms it should encourage you to establish clearly defined time boxes for every task that you have to do each day.[2] This will help you to instantly accomplish more within a shorter space of time, making your more organised and productive as a result. If you find that some projects are too large to complete within the predetermined time-frame, you should compartmentalise these into smaller tasks that are allotted their own time box.
When it comes to time-management, we have a tendency to allow more time than in necessary to complete relatively simply tasks. There are numerous potential reasons for this, but Parkinson’s Law suggests that this causes the work to expand and fill the allotted time, becoming more complicated and unmanageable as a result.
Understanding this is the first step to becoming more productive, however, as from here you can be more tenacious when setting time boxes for specific tasks and allow yourself to accomplish more within a short space of time. With this in mind, who knows what more you can achieve in your everyday life simply by adhering to a simple, but often overlooked, psychological principle.
Reference
| [1] | ^ | Bootbcamp Media: Interview with experienced life coach- Karen Strunks |
| [2] | ^ | Medium: The Secret to Getting More Done in Less Time |
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