It Was A Dark And Stormy Night ....

Good to know about fuzzier grounds.
Yes, it does look mean to use that phrase not give credit.

 

Recap: Things I have learnt from this thread

PART - I (Warm-up)

(1) Watch Robert Bolt's Man for All Seasons
A Man for All Seasons (1966 film) - Wikipedia

(2) Travel to Amazonia in Brazil to explore the South American Indian languages and learn a bit of imitation of yodaspeak in the language "Nadëb".
An Unusual Way of Speaking, Yoda Has

(3) Bowlby's evolutionary theory of attachment which suggests that children come into the world biologically pre-programmed to form attachments with others, because this will help them to survive.
John Bowlby | Maternal Deprivation Theory | Simply Psychology

(4) To stay lithe, practise Tolasana (or Utpluthih)

(5) Bend it like Japanese wood joinery
Japanese wood joinery
Traditional Japanese Wood Joinery - Architizer

(6) Then sokanasanah did a Maloof in the thread by choosing topics for this thread and aiming for a rocker that doesn't throw you back or tip you out, and somehow usually right on.

Maloof: Introduction
Beautiful hand-made furniture designed by one of America's finest woodworkers

(7) Essays on language

Politics and the English_Language - George Orwell
The American Scholar: Writing English as a Second Language - William Zinsser

(8) Digital Holdouts

James Patterson:

This is headquarters for the publishing empire The New York Times called "James Patterson, Inc." -- the creative roost of a writer who's produced 73 #1 best sellers and sold 325 million books. And he does it all by pencil.
James Patterson's reading revolution

JK Rowling:

Unusually she was without pen and paper and was stuck for four hours with her big idea and nothing to write it on.
From the dole to Hollywood

(9) Why longhand and cultivating good handwriting is still essential?

Using advanced tools such as magnetic resonance imaging, researchers are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development. It’s not just children who benefit.

Other research highlights the hand’s unique relationship with the brain when it comes to composing thoughts and ideas. Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, says handwriting differs from typing because it requires executing sequential strokes to form a letter, whereas keyboarding involves selecting a whole letter by touching a key.

Handwriting trains the brain


PART - II (Core workout)

(1) Writing

Evernote
OmniOutliner
Ulysses
Scrivener
Mind Mapping - How to Mind Map
XMind: The Most Popular Mind Mapping Software on The Planet.

(2) Research

The Easiest Paper Filing System in The World — Paper Tiger

(shush ..gossip)
Elon Musk's divorces and remarriage, current girlfriend

(3) Editing/Proofing

Mendeley
Mendeley - tutorials
EndNote

(4) Chipping away

There is an unlikely tale about the brilliant Renaissance artist Michelangelo. He was asked about the difficulties that he must have encountered in sculpting his masterpiece David. But he replied with an unassuming and comical description of his creative process:

It is easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.

Chip-away

In preparation for the fourth edition, Whitman left scarcely a page of the text untouched, deleting material, adding new poems and lines, changing lines, and altering the order of the poems.

More chip away

(5) Not plagiarism but research.

Gary Provost, mentioned earlier in this thread: “… steal small, not big, and don’t steal from just one source. Someone said that if you steal from one writer it’s called plagiarism, but if you steal from several, it’s called research. So steal from everybody, but steal only a sentence or phrase at a time.”

(6) Sokanasanah's (rarely witnessed) childhood memoir. Will he share more in IL ? Only time will tell.

You could almost hear the theremin in the background portending danger [mind, a theremin]

At 10:30 am on Friday in English composition: “Can our friend the squirrel escape the ravages of global warming and climate change? Or is he doomed to extinction like the Tasmanian devil, the dodo, and the dinosaur before him? Only time will tell”. Three hours later in a history essay: “Can Indian democracy survive Ambedkar’s push for universal adult franchise? Or will the illiteracy of the majority lead to mob rule? Only time will tell.”

(7) Editing/Proofing continued

Dictionary.com
Thesaurus.com
Oxford English Dictionary
Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary
Power Thesaurus
Wordnik

(8) Then sokananasah introduces us to Robo-graders.
Robo-grader

I mean the stupid Robo-grader.

The e-Rater’s biggest problem, he says, is that it can’t identify truth. He tells students not to waste time worrying about whether their facts are accurate, since pretty much any fact will do as long as it is incorporated into a well-structured sentence. “E-Rater doesn’t care if you say the War of 1812 started in 1945,” he said.

Mr. Perelman found that e-Rater prefers long essays. A 716-word essay he wrote that was padded with more than a dozen nonsensical sentences received a top score of 6; a well-argued, well-written essay of 567 words was scored a 5. Gargantuan words are indemnified because e-Rater interprets them as a sign of lexical complexity. “Whenever possible,” Mr. Perelman advises, “use a big word. ‘Egregious’ is better than ‘bad.’ ”

Robo-Readers Used to Grade Test Essays

PART - III (Cooldown)

(1) Indices for lexical density and readability

Flesch–Kincaid_readability_tests
Gunning-fog-readability-formula

Why Fog? Much of this reading problem was a writing problem. His opinion was that newspapers and business documents were full of “fog” and unnecessary complexity.

(2) Some more tools

Grammarly
Word_Counter
Analyzemywriting
Textalyser

Recap so far — embarked with the Purple Baron and ended at Valley Girl.

 

sokanasanah,

I assumed this would be a thread with copious injections (in the form of your assignments and homework) to inoculate us against the grammar disorders and verbal deficiencies. But time and again you lay out creativity which grows beyond the seed of imagination you playfully sow. Who would have thought our Purple Baron, a high-flown language nerd, will pass the baton all the way from Robert Bolt to Robert Gunning. I read about Wilhelm von Humboldt somewhere and this exchange stuck me where he proposes a character-building educational model.

In a letter to the Prussian king, he wrote: "There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life."

Why language polishers?
Why writing tools?
Why analysers?
Why lexical densities?

On the outset your ninja guidelines resemble a ruthless playbook to train cadets for the next English Olympiad. But as Humboldt would have it, any form of education is to 'first cultivate a mind and character that nobody can afford to be without', so regardless of the efficacy of your tips to improve one's "writing", your methodology and thoroughness in quantifying and tackling this need is in itself a worthy takeaway.

Thank you.

 

Thank you for inviting me to write.

Wish I could but this is the time for me to say “no” because I know I will not be able to do full justice in presenting the information.
Numerous demands on my time are stretching me extremely thin.

At the end of the work day this is how I am


and I never make the mistake of looking in the mirror. I know I will see this:


So please ignore my query as a whim; no compulsion on your part whatsoever.

 

Why do you doubt his disclosure? See: Gallery of Arcimboldo

 

Now that the tutorials are wound up, can we leverage this thread to spot practice?

Bad: By virtue of informality, no boundaries are drawn which includes no agreement on how much science can be pushed into a conversation.

How can the above clumsy construct be improved to convey that if an exchange is informal, on that account alone no boundaries in which agreements are cast exist, therefore, the state [formal/informal] does not constrict the topic.

How to express the mouthful elegantly and crispy? If you know what I mean ...

sokanasanah, can we use this thread to inspect our own writing? If we struggle to express something, can we bring our self-assessed "bad" still pending/published posts for proofing or improvement here? Not for you to revise but style guidance from anyone to bust the writer's clot.