A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another […] One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing
(via nogreatillusion)

mrbutts:

It’s so irritating when a recipe makes presumptions about what equipment you’re working with

Oh, combine the ingredients in my stand-up mixer? Put them in my breadmaker? Why don’t I just mix them together with a jewel-encrusted stirring spoon from atop my enormous golden cooking throne??

“Where Robespierre was driven by intellect and inquiry, Danton was motivated by passion. Where Robespierre spoke with a calculating tone, Danton delivered spontaneous drama. History presents him as so diametrically opposed to Robespierre that you wonder whether their relationship has been devised by a Hollywood screen-player writer. The result would be Bruce Willis as Robespierre, Danton played by Jim Carrey, and a trailer that began “Max liked the Social Contract – Georges liked social drinking. One was incorruptible – the other was irredeemable. But they were stuck with each other in "Georges and Max’s wild weekend in Paris” Then we d’see them yelling at each other, then Robespierre saying “I feel so ashamed at what I did with that tart” and Danton replying “I have that feeling every night, you will get used to it”

Vive la Révolution, Mark Steel
(via desmeowlins)

piratescarfy:

weissruby:

luthienebonyx:

cadarnle:

karabraden:

martainducreff:

writers of the world: please stop using epithets in your writing, trust me “the blonde army doctor”, “the curly haired detective”, “the blue-eyed man” etc. do not sound as good in writing as they may sound in your head

instead, use the characters’ names, they’re there for a reason and it’ll make your writing much more crisp, tight, to the point, and still entertaining

Names, along with common words like “said” and “asked”, become invisible. The more invisible your words, the deeper your reader will fall into your writing, to the point where the reader will forget that there are words at all and just become part of the story.

When your words aren’t invisible, there’s the unfortunate potential that people will turn them into a drinking game instead of reading the story.

Just about the only time that epithets work instead of using a name is when the POV character doesn’t know the other character, and so the physical description is pretty much all the POV character has to go on. You don’t think of people you know as “the tall man” or “the blonde woman”. Your POV character shouldn’t, either.

Yo I actually wanted to make this post a while back and I think a lot of this stems from when you have two characters who use the same pronouns interacting (which happens in fanfic). There’s this fear that the reader will confuse who the characters are referring to, so that’s why epithets are used. Instead of using epithets, use syntax, which is word order, and carry your subject through multiple sentences and actions. So, Imma teach you how to do this under the cut. (It’s a bit of a grammar lesson tbh)

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