8 . 选词填空

I’ve been writing for most of my life. The book Writing Without Teachers introduced me to one distinction and one practice that has helped my writing     1     greatly. The distinction is between the creative mind and the critical mind. While you need to employ both to get to a final result, they cannot work in     2     no matter how much we might like to think so.

Trying to criticize writing while it is still in progress is most possibly the single greatest

    3     to writing that most of us meet with. If you are listening to that 5th grade English teacher correct your grammar while you are trying to seize a fleeting (稍纵即逝的) thought, the thought will die. If you capture the fleeting thought and simply share it with the world in raw form, no one is likely to understand. You must learn to     4     first and then criticize if you want to make writing the tool for thinking that it is.

The practice that can help you pass your     5     bad habits of trying to edit as you write is what Elbow calls “free writing”. In free writing, the     6     is to get words down on paper non-stop, usually for 15－20 minutes. No stopping, no going back, no criticizing. The goal is to get the words     7    . As the words begin to go smoothly, the ideas will come from the shadows and let themselves be     8     on your notepad or your screen.

Now you have raw materials that you can begin to work with using the critical mind that you’ve persuaded to sit on the side and watch quietly. Most likely, you will believe that this will take more time than you actually have and you will end up staring blankly at the pages as the deadline draws near.

Instead of staring at a blank screen, start filling it with words no matter how bad they are. Halfway through your     9     time, stop and rework your raw writing into something closer to a(n)     10     product. Move back and forth until you run out of time and the final result will most likely be far better than your current practices.

What they’re finding is that regional variation in the use of common phrases produces predictions that don’t always reflect the local state of well being. But removing from their analyses just three specific terms -- good, love and LOL - greatly improves the accuracy of the methods.

“We’re living in a crazy COVID-19 era. And now more than ever, we’re using social media to adapt to a new normal and reach out to the friends and family that we can’t meet face-to-face.” Kokil Jaidka studies computational linguistics at the National University of Singapore. “But our words aren’t useful just to understand what we, as individuals, think and feel. They’re also useful clues about the community we live in.”

One of the simpler methods that many scientists use to analyze the data involves correlating words with positive or negative emotions. But when those records are compared with phone surveys that assess regional well-being, Jaidka says, they don’t paint an accurate picture of the local zeitgeist(时代精神).

Being able to get an accurate read on the mood of the population is no laughing matter. “That’s particularly important now, in the time of COVID, where we’re expecting a mental health crisis and we’re already seeing in survey data the largest decrease in subjective well-being in 10 years at least, if not ever.”

To find out why, Jaidka and her team analyzed billions of tweets from around the United States. And they found that among the most frequently used terms on Twitter are LOL, love and good. And they actually throw the analysis off. Why the disconnect?

“Internet language is really a different beast than regular spoken language. We’ve adapted words from the English vocabulary to mean different things in different situations. ” says Jaidka. “Take, for example, LOL. I’ve tweeted the word LOL to express irony, annoyance and sometimes just pure surprise. When the methods for measuring LOL as a marker of happiness were created in the 1990s, it still meant laughing out loud.”

“There are plenty of terms that are less misleading,” says Jaidka. “Our models tell us that words like excited, fun, great, opportunity, interesting, fantastic and those are better words for measuring subjective well-being. ”