Daily Links 3-7-14

Here are a few links to help start your weekend off right: the importance of inerrancy, reading with your eyes shut, more on buying your way onto the bestseller list, and more.

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Dr. Albert Mohler discusses a new book on inerrancy in an enlightening interview. Here's his take on the importance of inerrancy for a robust pulpit ministry:

It makes all the difference in the world. It may not appear at first that it necessarily would, because there are a lot of preachers in this day and age who reject the inerrancy of Scripture and still feel like they have something to say. No doubt, they still have something to say, but that’s really not the issue. The issue is: what are we able to tell people the text of Scripture is and what is its demand upon us? The question is not whether the preacher has something to say, but whether God is going to say something through the preacher and through his Word. And, if the preacher has any question whatsoever about the truth status of the Word of God, it will inevitably shift to the preaching. The shift from “I’m going to preach the Word” to “I’m going to find something in this witness worthy of my attention and preaching.”

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The SAT is about to go through some pretty dramatic changes. The big news is that the essay requirement will disappear. Also the fact that they are willing to partner with Khan Academy to provide free prep materials is pretty big news, too.

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Reading with your eyes shut: a collection of audiobooks for kids. I would also add the following titles to this list: A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (read by Tim Curry), The Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer (read by Nathaniel Parker) and Framed by Frank Cottrel Boyce (read by Jason Hughes).

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Good news for bloggers: Getty Images is allowing their library of photographs to be used for free.

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This is interesting: why highly successful people crave mistakes.

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As if I didn't have enough things on the Internet to waste my time on: a website that allows you to virtually play the best golf courses in the world for free.



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Homeschooling for higher education: a proposal that makes a whole lot of sense (Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds)

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A review of the new Roku streaming stick. I don't know how well this works but I love my Roku.

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Following up on yesterday's story, five reasons that it's wrong to buy your way onto the bestseller list. Some good food for thought here.

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Growing up in North Carolina as a Tar Heel fan and as a student at UNC, Dean Smith was a hero to Tar Heels everywhere. His basketball teams were a joy to watch for many reasons. Sadly, Coach Smith is battling dementia. This article at ESPN provides some insight into what life is like these days for the man folks called Coach.

Daily Links 11-22-13

Five for Friday: a roundup of links today on writing (plus a bonus recommendation on how to deal with rejection).

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From Brain Pickings: Ernest Hemingway's advice for aspiring young writers. This includes a great excerpt from Ernest Hemingway on Writing. Be sure to scroll to the end of the post for links to more writing advice.

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How to write things the people you lead will want to read. This is a great article including three common mistakes people make and how to fix them.

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Since 2005, the SAT has included an essay section. What's the key to doing well on this part of the test? Make stuff up!

This essay, which was added to the SAT in 2005, counts for approximately 30 percent of a test-taker’s score on the writing section, or nearly one-ninth of one’s total score. That may not seem like much, but with competition for spots at top colleges and universities more fierce than ever, performance on a portion of the test worth around 11 percent of the total could be the difference between Stanford and the second tier. So it’s not surprising that students seek strategies and tips that will help them succeed on the writing exercise. Les Perelman, the recently retired former director of MIT’s Writing Across the Curriculum program, has got a doozy. 

To do well on the essay, he says, the best approach is to just make stuff up. 

“It doesn’t matter if [what you write] is true or not,” says Perelman, who helped create MIT’s writing placement test and has consulted at other top universities on the subject of writing assessments. “In fact, trying to be true will hold you back.” So, for instance, in relaying personal experiences, students who take time attempting to recall an appropriately relatable circumstance from their lives are at a disadvantage, he says. “The best advice is, don’t try to spend time remembering an event,” Perelman adds, “Just make one up. And I’ve heard about students making up all sorts of events, including deaths of parents who really didn’t die.” 

As a result, the SAT is helping us create bad writers.

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A related problem is that college graduates don't know how to write.

Our graduates lack writing skills. While adept at crafting bullet points, they often have difficulty writing in declarative sentences and complete paragraphs – thus impeding the effectiveness of their business communications, including memos, letters, and technical reports. 

A 2004 Conference Board survey of 120 corporations in the Business Roundtable concluded that most companies take written communications into consideration when making their hiring and promotion decisions and implied that many current or prospective employees lack the requisite skills. This conclusion was reinforced by a 2006 Conference Board survey of 431 human resource professionals, which cited writing skills as one of the biggest gaps in workplace readiness. 

Recent graduates also frequently commit basic grammatical errors, such as using an improper pronoun (e.g. “between you and I”) selecting the wrong homonym (e.g. “compliment versus complement”) or employing incorrect diction (e.g. “appraise versus apprise”). Not coincidentally, these kinds of errors are difficult to catch with spell-check. 

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But there is hope. Here are 10 tips how to write less badly.

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As an added bonus, a great quote from Barbara Kingsolver on dealing with rejection: