Find the latest sports news and articles on the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, NCAA college football, NCAA college basketball and more at ABC News. Get a Crash Course in Writing from 2. Journalists. I only remember one practical writing lesson from my three years as an English major Whenever you can, put the best bits at the end of the sentence. Put the next best bits at the beginning, and put the rest in the middle. This trick works in every kind of writing, and I wish Id spent my college years learning more tricks like it, instead of pretending to read The Brothers Karamazov. Writing is one of the easiest skills to learn without paying college tuition. You could get a pretty solid start just from this collection of writing advice from twenty prominent journalists. Metafilter user notthewater gathered the advice from articles, online courses, podcasts, live talks, and a drinking game. Some highlights The Orchid Thief author Susan Orlean on finding story ideas The percentage of ideas you pursue, vs. In fact, its great to practice following an idea and saying, Not gonna work. Pulitzer winner Anne Hull on writing about a culture as an outsider Be conscious of the distancing language that inhabits most newspaper stories. Set a goal for intimacy. Game of Thrones latest season premiers tonight on HBO and you know what that means. HBO Go will crash, you wont get to watch it tonight, and your Twitter feed. James Cameron has never been a filmmaker to do things by halves. Known for his sprawling, often threehourplus movies, hes one of the few directors out there. Initially, it appeared that the recent HBO hack was most impactful for the theft and possible leak of Game of Thrones data. The digital thieves also allegedly. I only remember one practical writing lesson from my three years as an English major Whenever you can, put the best bits at the end of the sentence. Put the next. As a reporter, be physically present to witness and absorb, if even for three hours. The Girl in the Window writer Lane De. Gregory on finding secret editors Finding people you admire, whether writers or editors or not, is important, especially if you dont trust or respect the person who was assigned to you. New Yorker Talk of the Town contributor Lillian Ross on expressing opinions Your point of view should be implicit in your choice of facts and quotes in your report. If you have anything to say, about the world, about life, look for a way to say it without making a speech. Slouching Towards Bethlehem author Joan Didion on editing as you go along When I finish work at the end of the day, I go over the page that Ive done that day, and I mark it up. And then I make the corrections in the morning, which gives me a way to start the day. Criminal justice reporter Beth Schwartzapfel on anecdotes in dry factual stories I think of them as raisins in oatmeal, or the signs people hold on the sidelines of a marathon. Theyre little surprises or jolts of pleasure to remind people of what theyre reading and why it matters. Certain themes run throughout Narratives need character and tension. Collect story ideas everywhere and keep a file. Get your subjects comfortable around you and let yourself into their lives. Find the interesting details that can double as iconic examples. Write like youre telling the story to a friend. While the advice is especially targeted at journalists, just like that old sentence structure trick, it applies to all kinds of writing. And unlike my English major, its free. My debut novel, The Biographies of Ordinary People Volume 1 1. May 2. 3, 2. 01. 7. Read more Read. RIP, Microsoft Paint. MS Paint, the first app you used for editing images, will probably be killed off in future updates of Windows 1. Paint 3. D. Microsoft lists the 3. Windows 1. 0s next autumn update, a little X marking the end of an era. The app is certainly a relic, from a time when the casual computer user couldnt crack open Photoshop or Skitch or Pixelmator or thousands of web apps. MS Paint cant save image components as layers or vectors its for making flat static images only. It doesnt smooth lines or guess at your best intentions. It does what you tell it and nothing more, faithfully representing the herky jerky motion of drawing freehand with a computer mouse. Its from a time before touch, a time before trackpads. As more sophisticated options appeared, Paints janky aesthetic became a conscious choice. Paint became the metonym for that aesthetic, even if an image was actually created in another app. TV Tropes lists major limitations that came to define a certain look the wobbly freehand lines, awkward color handling, and inappropriate export settings that give Paint its distinctive look. In 2. 01. 4, Gawkers Sam Biddle noted Paints influence on conspiracy theory images, calling the form Chart Brut. In amateur detectives attempts at identifying the Boston Marathon bombers, the simplicity and jaggedness of Paint evokes the crazy wall aesthetic of red string and scribbled notes, apparently without irony. The same year, internet historian Patrick Davison explored Paints influence on the last decade of meme culture, particularly Rage Comics. The outsider art aesthetic feels appropriate to the relatable everyday content, and makes the art form unthreatening. Of course, Paint offered a few features to smooth things out, like the circle and line tools and the fill tool, all used in the stoner comics of the early 1. Crucially, those circles still had jagged curves. Free Alternative To Adobe Pagemaker Tutorial there. The bright colors of stoner comics are flat, as MS Paint didnt support gradients without an elaborate hack. Contrast those pixellated lines with the slick, stylish face from this art tutorial This slickness is built into Paints successor, Paint 3. D. From the moment you start sketching, Paint 3. D smooths out your art. It also supports automatic selection tools and content aware fill to rival Photoshops. By automatically improving art, Paint 3. D hides the process behind the image. Paints sloppiness is probably why rage comics got so popular. Looking at a rage comic, you can tell exactly how it was drawn, and how you might draw one yourself. By delivering exactly what the artist draws, MS Paint forms an image that the viewer can mentally reverse engineer and imitate. Unless you go absolutely nuts with it. Reddit user Toweringhorizon painstakingly assembled the drawing To a Little Radio using MS Paint tools like the oil brush, stretching the medium while maintaining a pixelated look. Its one of the top submissions to MS Paint subreddit, a beautiful collaborative art gallery. Scrolling through this art feels like flipping through the sketchbook of the most artistic kid in high school. Theres an accepted roughness, a desired minimalism. For example, the exquisite raindrops in the work above are reflected in a flat, featureless tabletop. Like a transistor radio, Paint might be showing its age, but this tenacious little gadget should not be underestimated. To a Little Radio doesnt even come close to testing Paints limits. As we say goodbye to the app that shaped an era, let us watch this bizarrely soundtracked time lapse of drawing Santa Claus in MS Paint on Windows 7 over the course of 5. We can only believe this is real because faking it would be even harder.