Ana Dinescu
Biography
Freelance journalist and communications consultant, PhD in history, passionate about languages, travel, books and writing. Author of several books, articles and many other writing contributions.
Books
Ana Dinescu’s tag cloud
Smashwords book reviews by Ana Dinescu
- From words to brain
on Feb. 25, 2011
(no rating)
Do scientists need to write in a sophisticated and cryptic language, automatically limiting automatically their target audience? It is always a (risky) choice of style. At the end of the day, you can say intelligent words without dadaistically mixing together various fancy expressions.
Livia Blackburne is writing about words from the point of view of the ways in which we are inserting them in the usual daily mechanisms. In other words, about what's going on with our brains during reading.
This is a taft question. The author is starting the journey - as I deeply believe that this book will have sooner or later at least one continuation - of mapping our reading reflexes and the stimuli - verbal and visual - we need not only for reacting to a word, but for integrating stories with the rest of our knowledge and daily life. Despite the post-modernist assumptions, we need stories: coherent, well-told and memory-persistent ones. At the beginning of the human history (or what we kept in words about this till now)and long time thereafter those able to skilfully use their words enjoyed a special social status within the society, being often attributed various "magical" powers. What I think after reading this book is that, as our reading habits are not innate, for some, the love for stories made up of words is a long-life affair and an ability created in the early childhood. The choice of the example - the story Little Red Riding Hood - is a good reminder of a possible genesis of our love for books: the luck of starting your active reading life with a good story. The language in which the story is written is important as, says Blackburne "Experience with a written language does indeed shape the brain's response to that language".
This first (I hope) episode of the story of the brains is also a visual memory, as the discoveries of the author are revealed to the reader little by little, as in a short movie. Overall, the book is also a successful aproach of raising the interest for narratives with the same subject.
- Smashwords Style Guide
on March 07, 2011
(no rating)
A very useful and interesting guide, written in an accesible form - including for those not too familiar with the mysteries of various publishing programs. Sometimes we, the writers, are too cloudy brains, but such guides are helping us to navigate through the right clouds (of the publishing industry, of course).
