#how about you apply some of your own nuance for literature to like. actual human beings.

[bedcorpse]

but yeah to piggyback off that post y'all have to understand that if you're not usamerican or got lucky in regards to english teachers, even writers like myself got so sick of being handed boring, surface-level interactions with media and being discouraged from anything else that ofc we hated having to explain why the curtains are blue. because it wasn't a discussion of "okay is this meant to set a tone? tell us something about the character, like is blue their favorite color? or is it meant to symbolize something deeper? what are the different ways we could interpret this?" it was "the curtains are blue because the main character is sad. we don't have time for anything else bc public schools are wildly underfunded and overcrowded depending on the district and i make like 40k a year so any differing opinions will be shrugged off at best and punished at worst."

[3liza]

hey im not gonna spread your weird social media-mediated brain infection on my blog, instead here are some cool studies to look at about how the "beautiful people have an easier life, every day, all the time" is a simplistic view, and is also patriarchal as fuck. more recent studies on "beauty privilege" are finding that the issue is complex, and that perceived beauty acts as a negative pressure in some/many social situations. i have always wondered why my experiences varied so much from the apparent wonderland the pop-science concept of "beauty privilege" paints, and more recent studies (often designed by women this time, imagine) are getting into the complexity there.

you personally may want to think about not reading my social media accounts if they are making you feel and act like this. i think i am not going to interact with you anymore if i can help it because i feel bad about what it is doing to you. anyway.

the short version is that beauty is beneficial in heterosexual social situations when dealing with the opposite sex, but detrimental when dealing with the same sex. this aspect of the research is usually ignored because who needs nuance in their pop psychology, right? not this guy (pointing 2 self)

very simply put, a beautiful woman can flirt her way out of a ticket from a heterosexual male cop. if she tries it on a person who doesnt consider her a potential romantic partner, there may be (and apparenly often are) negative consequences.

similarly in my own life i find that 99% of the apparent opportunities i'd been given for being young and fuckable were predicated on me actually fucking* the person who "offered" them, and most of them turned out to be fake/insincere opportunities anyway. tumblr refers to this as "grooming" when applied to child subjects (which i was, for much of it) but the behavior persists into the target's adulthood, middle age, and even old age if certain conditions are met. i can't find any studies on this because you can't put a Sleazy Guy in a lab setting and ask him "hey were you actually going to hire this woman on hte up-and-up, or were you going to 'hire' her and then spend 16 months making increasingly deranged sexual harassment attempts before reporting her to HR for made-up reasons and then finally firing her or hamstringing her career? just wondering".

i always think about that episode of Always Sunny where Mac goes nuts because every kid in his class was molested by the gym teacher and he imagines this to be some sort of privilege, even though charlie was one of the victims and is clearly devastated by it. thats what this conversation feels like every time it gets to the level of anons making fake tumblr accounts to KEEP pestering me about this stuff. remember that thing i said earlier about blood in the water, and how i dont post about bad shit that happened to me because it attracts the wrong kind of attention??? hehuehueheuheuhuehriuhgfidsrhru

actually thats a whole other realm of study: why victims of sexual assault and abuse are often re-victimized. until recently it was assumed that the victims were making bad decisions in who to trust, and this is sooorrrrtt of true, but doesn't tell the whole story. i read a study once that i am trying to find and will post later if i find it, that took video of adult women study subjects (who had agreed to be filmed) walking normally just down the street publically, and showed this video to male test subjects. if im remembering the study correctly, which i may not be, the male subjects who scored higher on psychopathy indices were better able to indentify the women in the test footage who had been sexually assaulted at some point in their former lives.

something to think about is a lot of "attractive" qualities (including proccupation with physical appearance leading to altering that appearance to be more beautiful), especially in the manic pixie archetype, are very strongly represented in trauma victims, especially sexual assault survivors (as is the opposite, intentionally trying to be "unattractive" to avoid further victimization). this includes "seductiveness", one of the adjectives used to diagnose child sexual abuse victims before the verbiage in the literature got cleaned up. obviouly a child cant be "seductive" and thats pretty offensive and fucked up to say. what they meant is that the childs behavior has been altered by trauma to become sexualized to appease attackers. this is part of the "fawn" sector of emergency responses in humans (along with fight, flight, and freeze).

so when we talk so cavalierly of "beauty" and "attractive people" vs "unattractive people" we are simplifying an issue that is so complex it is difficult even to think about. this complexity makes me go "hmm" every time theres a study on it, much less a popular belief. a lot of it sort of doesnt square with easily-observable phenomena: if physical beauty is so correlated to success, why are the 1% of wealthy people, politicians, actual power-holders, hell even the CEOs of normal companies, very very rarely what you would consider physically beautiful, even when they havent aged out of what the culture thinks is the maximum span of time someone can be "hot"? some of this is just personal preference, and it's real hard to study any of this because of how complex that issue becomes. but where are all these hot successful people i keep hearing about? are they all trophy spouses and retired from the public eye? you can definitely cherrypick examples of "influencers" etc but thats an extremely narrow line of work, and not representative.

anyway! lot of the "do beautiful people get more stuff" research is from quite a while ago, wasnt designed well, and was based on a work and social culture that was quite a bit different than it is now. but even older studies document this effect. ive spent like many minutes typing about this stupid bullshit so im bored and annoyed now and i dont want to type about it anymore

1. Effects of Self-Esteem Threat on Physical Attractiveness Stereotypes

2. Does being attractive always help? positive and negative effects of attractiveness on social decision making (cant find the sci-hub version, alas, but documents a negative effect we're actually seeing an anecdotal example of in my inbox rn)

3. Is beauty a gift or a curse? The influence of an offender’s physical attractiveness on forgiveness

* often it wasnt even just a sex thing. it's very very often a romance/relationship that is desired by the perpetrator. it's a misapprehension of the public that sexual harassment/grooming is "just about sex" or even less accurately "just about power", it isnt

[comicteaparty]

February 26th-March 3rd, 2020 Reader Favorites Archive

The archive for the Reader Favorites chat that occurred from February 26th, 2020 to March 3rd, 2020.  The chat focused on the following question:

What generally makes the pacing of a comic too fast or too slow for you?

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

My favourite comic style are those large sized, panel and dialogue heavy European comic books, line Blacksad and Asterix. Since every 80 page book tells a complete story, every page is progressing the plot significantly, and the whole thing is pretty compressed and the rate splash page has an impact you don’t get in a more lose, decompressed comic. I love that kind of stuff and I look for similiar pacing in webcomics - heavier on the dialogue but without choking the art, low on wordless scenes (they tend to make me skim), taut and tight story-telling, every page asks and answers a question. I know it‘s a matter of taste and got told more than once that I am too dumb for comics because I don‘t have the patience to read through six pages of wordless, plotless mood-setting; but eh - that kind of stuff just doesn‘t work for me. I firmly believe comic‘s big enough a field that mood pieces and tightly plotted stuff can happily co-exist and find their own readership. I‘m just gonna be in the „plot, all the time!“ corner.

sagaholmgaard

The a comic starts focusing on minor characters that don't hold much importance for the plot I'll find it to be wayy too drawn out. While One-Punch Man is one of my favorite comics, some fights are pretty unimportant for the overarching plot, focusing only on random small-fry heroes fighting random small-fry monsters and it's just... a million action panels for be too read through while waiting for the main cast to return (this turned out to be pretty specific, oops!)

Ash🦀

Honestly, coming from a writing/literature background, I feel that most comics are too fast-paced for me;; I love the slow build up, it makes everything much more rewarding at the end, and the mood-setting that just lets you breathe and stare at the page, yes, a thousand times yes. I guess this is why I don’t like reading or writing actions scenes... so fast-paced and they feel more like “this is action for interesting action and the hero needs exp and not because it’s a necessary battle” ;; but this is more of a personal preference than anything, and... yeah, I definitely blame the books I used to read xD

Capitania do Azar

I'm a little confused with the filler concept introduced here, given that most webcomics are made by individuals (not teams)... What would they even be filling for? I think it's fair to talk about less interesting b-plots or when the scenes are focused on characters we don't like as much, but I would hardly call anything a single artist decided it was worth enough to spend hours drawing by their volition "filler"

As for the pacing question, it is sometimes hard to combine the two facets of webcomics: that they're published on a page-to-page basis but they are often read in bulk, when digging through archives. I don't know if it's possible to find the perfect balance between these two, which makes it possible to think that certain scenes are too slow (oh no, we've been at this wedding for three months now!) but when read in the archive are suddenly too fast... I think breathing room is necessary every now and then, even for faster-paced comics.

RebelVampire

I think you need to consider that just because an artist doesn't see something as filler, doesn't mean readers won't. I've known a lot of comics where the creator created a scene that they loved, but in the bigger scheme of things it served absolutely no purpose to the plot and felt super out of place

So while the filler wasn't intentional as a "I need filler", to the readers it comes off as filler

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

I like long paced, slow- burn type stories where there is an obvious carefully crafted plot with each stitch placed intentionally for a bigger reveal and payoff. Much how i like any relationship shown in stories, i love it when an author almost makes readers work for that payoff. It makes the re-read value go way up, and to catch on to the subtle nuances of plot reveal on the second or third go at the story is very rewarding both as a writer and reader!

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

You can easily have slow burn relationships in a faster paced comic. I actually like that better, because that usually requires the characters to have actions and interests outside of the relationship of interest, which leads to more well rounded characters.

A good example is the novel Clockwork Boys and it‘s follow up - slowburn romance, and while the characters figured THAT one out, they solved a huge mystery.

renieplayerone

Im a big fan of stories that are able to turn the pacing up to 11 on a dime without it getting old or lowering the stakes at all. It takes such talent to be able to tell compelling stories with high flying action at the same time, so I appreciate anyone that can manage that balance

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

My personal approach to writing pacing is that each page has to do at least two of three: further the plot, introduce/deepen story-relevant world building, deepen the characterisation. I aim for all three at once; if there‘s only two, there better be a good reason to keep that scene around, if there‘s only one, it gets cut and/or merged with another one. Eg. I have a scene where the character cook (food‘s relevant because there‘s a famine) and a scene where they argue about their plans, those can easily be combined.

Some scenes are still slower or faster than others, but they all matter to the story.

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

Def agree with Renie on that point too!

Ash🦀

Chalcara makes a good point too, and it’s something I definitely try to keep in mind in my own pages. I try to answer a question and ask another with my pages and pull as much double duty as I can wrench out of it. Now, whether I succeed every time? Absolutely not. But this is a good reminder when I’m going back to edit issue 3- keep the push and pull of questions and answers in mind.

RebelVampire

Ok so at this point I do want to jump in and remind people that as per Rule #1, this chat should mostly be about your experiences as a reader vs. your experiences as a creator. So just want to make sure the convo doesn't delve too far into that realm.

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

My answer to this question is very much based on specific situations in comics. Pacing is SUCH a complex thing, and it's not always easy to see the impact in the grand scheme of things. To make a story seem too slow to me, a few things have to happen: the pages/ panels don't further the plot, don't deepen the characters/world-building, or the tension remains consistent for too long. Coming from a theatre background, I sometimes like to refer to this idea as beats. I focus a lot on the importance of every line having purpose. If a character says something, and it doesn't add anything to the experience, then perhaps the dialogue shouldn't be there at all. Or if a panel without dialogue doesn't add anything to the reader experience, the same thing applies. There should be no wasted space. Honestly, I am kind of a sucker for slow build-up (as long as there is actually build-up at all). So I'm not against slow-burn stories. To me, slow-burn shouldn't feel like it's dragging along, or like "nothing is happening," which is a common trap stories fall into. But we as readers need to see those slow moments in order to understand the fast moments too. Which brings me onto pacing that is too fast... Honestly, this is a much bigger problem to me personally. There is this influx in fiction of wanting to have the quickest jump into the action at the beginning of the story, and it always makes me want to stop reading. If the writer doesn't want to have ANY exposition at all or introduce the characters in any meaningful way, how am I as a reader going to give a shit about the characters? That's pretty much an instant story-killer to me. I don't mind if characters are introduced as we go, but completely glossing over them in favor of the biggest explosions never keeps my attention. All in all, I read comics (and fiction in general) for the human experience (which doesn't mean that your characters must be human, lol, fantasy and sci-fi writers).

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

@chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa] Thank you for mentioning that comics are big enough to accommodate all kinds of tastes. What I find to be too fast might be just right or even too slow for another person, and honestly, it's all valid.

FeatheryJustice

I like a coherent story. It doesn't matter if it is slow paced because I get to absorb the information. I don't mind if it is fast paced as long as I can understand it. If the story itself doesn't make sense because you want a slow paced story with weird inserts in the middle, you have lost me. If your story is too fast to the point of skipping scenes and details you lost me.

spacerocketbunny

I love slow building stories with larger payoff. Making sure that characters are fleshed out and given the chance to breathe while still facilitating the plot is a tricky thing to pull off but I've definitely seen it happen in comics like Shaderunners, TINF and Tiger Tiger for example. Shaderunners does an incredible job of showing a multifaceted inner conflict with characters while never missing a beat with super fun and high stake heists. TINF is one of my favourite romance stories that carefully builds up and constructs the characters and their feelings for each other while still maintaining that significant information on every page. Tiger Tiger is a slower paced story but keeps me on the edge of my seat every update. Petra utilizes space beautifully and I never feel like there's a need for condensing on pages. I boost these comics a lot but I personally find that pacing is a huge factor in my enjoyment for a comic, and I love these ones so much bc they suit my preference quite well!

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

There was a Korean professional webcomic (on Naver, though I don't think it ever got officially brought over to Webtoons) that I read, that had this interesting situation: seemingly fast pacing, very high tension, yet slow. It was a thriller that pitted a serial killer against the surviving wife of his latest victim. Once she got an inkling who the killer was, the tension skyrocketed, and it was a big game of chase. Problem was the chase part. It LOOKED fast paced if you just looked at like, one chapter of it. But they kept repeating the same scenario, just flavored differently. It was a rinse-and-repeat of this: "the wife found a new evidence; now everyone will believe her!" "oh no, the killer is about to catch her!" "the new evidence is lost" "wife finds another new evidence" etc. (It's been a while and my memory may not be accurate, but the idea is there) Nothing really changed throughout the repeated cycles. So yeah, repetition can be a problem.

Capitania do Azar

Haha, @keii’ii (Heart of Keol) I understand your frustration, but I feel like that kind of story is just aimed at a different audience... It almost feels like watching an episodic Tv show where everything has to come back to the starting point by the end of each episode

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

That is certainly a type with its own audience. Though if that's what they were going for, they probably could've benefitted from a different way of starting the story so readers would've known what they were in for. And there were lots of things that really felt like could have gone somewhere, but never did.

Hmm, I guess that's another thing that could affect how pacing is perceived: loose threads?

RebelVampire

IDK I think there's a difference between something being episodic and something being annoyingly repetitious. For example, Detective Conan is arguably episodic. Each situation in the larger scheme of things is largely the same: Crime happens -> There are red herrings and twists -> Conan solves it. As a mystery comic, it's never gonna deviate from that formula. But if literally every crime had the basic same plot flow, like if the red herrings and twists were the same everytime, then it ceases to be episodic and just becomes bland and repetitive.(edited)

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

OH and speaking of Korean webcomics, I wanna talk about a pacing-related concept that gets brought up a lot in their comment sections: yam vs sprite (they call it "cider" bu they really mean sprite/ 7-up). Baked yam is a common wintertime treat. It fills you up, it's delicious. But it's notorious for making you thirsty. It kind of clogs up & dries up your throat. Whereas sprite is a thirst quencher. So, the idea is you can't eat yams forever. You need sprite to balance it out. Yams are a metaphor for frustrating build-ups. There is a sense that you (and/or the protagonist) are being wronged. e.g. It's a sports comic, and the leader of the opposing team keeps trash talking, even cheats and gets away with it. Sprite is a metaphor for satisfaction. In the same sports comic example, the arrogant, cheating leader finally gets what they deserve. Most stories need its share of yams. But if the yam portion of the story goes on for too long, the comment section will be filled with "where's my sprite!!!" "I feel like I ate 1,000 yams and now REALLY need some sprite" etc.

spacerocketbunny

Ahh that's an interesting concept!

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

There are certainly stories that are big piles of yams by design. But I think when done well, readers who like a lot of sprite can tell what it is, and walk away pretty early on. So those comics attract readers who are into piles of yams.

(Of course, there's always gonna be That One Person who walks into a yam party and loudly demands a 5-gallon bottle of sprite... )

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

In that case, I definitely avoid yams! No matter how much I love a character or cast, I tend to go crazy if we stay in one location too long, or in one slow storyline for too many pages, or if I find myself going "COME ON, DO IT, DO THE THING, WE KNOW YOU'RE GONNA." To me, something new should happen on every page, even if it's a tiny plot progression or a tidbit of character info. I very much appreciate when a story takes time to breathe - and I find it's those quiet, cute, or slightly-unnecessary moments that are most memorable when I think of a comic - but too much of that will make me fidgety. I really need alternating paces to be happy.

kayotics

I think for me, it’s easier for a comic to go too slow than too fast. I’ve definitely seen comics go too fast, but the slow pace is more frustrating for me. What makes a comic slow for me are a few things: too MUCH focus on atmosphere (like multiple hand shots that don’t have dialogue), repeated events, too much buildup for an event, and the last thing is technical ability (like speech bubbles that are too large or in vertical scroll comics the panels being way too far apart). I’m pretty ok with letting things breathe, and I actually love that, but I need something to keep my interest, and those things above don’t do it.

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I don't think yams are about repetition, though it can certainly involve repetition. It could be a new level of frustration on every page, revealing something new about the characters. But those would still be yams.

Deo101 [Millennium]

I'm also of the mind that its way easier for comics to go too slow than too fast. However, I think that its also really easy for a comic to introduce too many things too fast, without giving me the time to get to know anyone (contradictory, I know, hear me out) I think a lot of comics will start in a boring setting, before the initial action. It takes a very long time to ramp up to the ACTUAL story, because they want to get me to a baseline of knowledge before we get to all the action. This is really slow though because essentially nothing is actually happening, plot wise, and I think that the creators know this and so they try to do it all as fast as possible, so by the time we get to the action there are 10 characters and a ton of lore I don't actually know.... So I think there are two kinds of pacing, the actual plot/events of a story, and the introduction of new ideas. For me, the plot/events need to be relatively fast, but the introduction of ideas needs to be slow. I can't start a story with 6 people, it will feel too fast no matter what, and I can't start a story with slow action or it will feel like it's dragging. I don't know if this makes sense or not

kayotics

I think I agree with that pretty wholeheartedly. I want a comic to get me into the action pretty quickly, but introduce new characters and concepts slowly. Give me, like... 3 characters tops to start with.

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Yeah, too slow AND too fast is definitely a possibility!

kayotics

Fantasy and sci-fi are both genres that can fall into that trap easily, and I think the comics that bring me into the world building best is the ones that don’t explain things IMMEDIATELY, but explain things over time as I need to know them

Deo101 [Millennium]

^ yes I feel this too. I think there is also a certain respect for a readers ability to suspend their disbelief that is oftentimes not taken into account... I think that, for the most part just being told something exists is fine, and learning how it works is what needs to take time. But, a lot of stories may try to justify things existing, which feels like overexplaining

kayotics

It’s like explaining why trees exist. Sometimes they just... do. I don’t question why they’re there

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

Agreed, I think stories set in the real world have the advantage of starting with a bang, without much need for explanation - there's always a need for some explanation upfront in a fantasy/sci-fi setting, even if it's done through visual shorthand. You don't need to overexplain, but you definitely have to explain... more. Or at least make it abundantly clear that A) this is a different world, B) this is the general event that's happening, and C) this is how you should feel about it, even without living in that world.

Deo101 [Millennium]

Yes exactly I feel like I see it most commonly in scifi/fantasy, like you said, where someone wants to explain why their magic exists immediately. This will sound rude but at this point I don't care why it exists, maybe way later you can tell me but I don't care when I'm only just starting .. it feels like reading someone's worldbuilding essay idk

kayotics

Yeah... that’s definitely a thing that can affect pacing negatively. I don’t need a world building essay on how the magic works right away. As long as the logic is consistent in magic I’ll figure it out as a reader. Then you can explain details later and I’ll be into it.

Deo101 [Millennium]

Yeah cause later on it feels like connecting dots, almost like revealing the answer to a mystery

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

Yes yes! I love that sense that as a reader, you're being trusted to learn - not so much that you're being fed information, but that you're given enough to put the pieces together. Even done slowly, it's very satisfying.

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

I like my storys with some unexplained mysteries. I mean, how many people know exactly how the internet works, and yet we use it daily? Dumping down a dissertation on how x works more often than not kills pacing for me.

kayotics

I think it can be done well to keep the pacing going, but it needs to be combined with something. Sometimes you need to provide that info dump so the story keeps working

I can’t pinpoint any exact scenes but I seem to remember Gunnerkrigg Court doing that pretty well. There’s a lot of unusual concepts in that story that need to be explained, but it usually doesn’t feel like a slog

Deo101 [Millennium]

Yeah for sure. I do think it can also be used either in tandem with or as an instigator to moving things forward, if done right. Its not illegal to reveal information about the world

I think people tend to do this kind of thing better with Characters than the world. Because with Characters, we want to get to know them and this comes more naturally, but with worldbuilding... It often feels like worldbuilding should be a baseline knowledge rather than also a storytelling element I guess

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

One thing that really annoys me with pacing is when a single story beat that should be relatively simple takes way too long in real time. Like in one comic I read, the villains tell the heroes to urgently meet them at some location. And, like, the heroes are talking back and forth, deciding who they should send and such. But, like... it's been six months, and they still haven't left the house yet. I guess the urgency feeling is probably there if you're binging the comic? But, it really doesn't encourage me to follow along with the comic if it's such a slow read. I'm not saying that these sorts of authors need to update faster, but if your update rate is to the point where it takes months to finish an urgent conversation, maybe some things should be cut out? Or they should at least be walking out the door while they're talking? I guess it's just sort of a general "something should happen each page" thing though. Like if the conversation is just going in circles, there's really no need for it, and it can be annoying to follow along when it's seemingly so urgent.

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I know it's not the same thing, but that reminded me of all the gaming comic strips out there that poke fun at "it's final dungeon time, the stakes are higher than ever, and the player spends the next 80 hours completing the minigames"

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

I have a rule that if any piece of dialogue isn't either directly advancing the plot, giving the reader new information about the characters speaking, or is funny, it should be cut

Definitely agree with what people have said, that big infodumps right off the bat are not enjoyable. I honestly don't ever want the author to sit me down and explain something to me. It's much more interesting to see parts of the worldbuilding in action, or to see things that arent explained and have to theorize about what it is or how it works before the mechanics behind it are shown

Capitania do Azar

I very much second that notion, @sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD) , that's my rule of thumb when I'm writing

Deo101 [Millennium]

I have a similar rule with my pages, but with dialogue I like to have more fluff so we feel like we're spending a bit more time with them

Capitania do Azar

if the info is not something I need the reader to know (and character development is) then what's the point of forcing myself to draw more stuff

but @Deo101 [Millennium] , fluff IS character ;D

Deo101 [Millennium]

Yeah! But it's not always new information is all

You gotta reestablish stuff, let some things marinate, and repeat things for them to really settle in I think, so it can't ALWAYS be new stuff, even if the page as a whole is introducing something new. I mean usually you can do it alongside other stuff but yeah

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I think sometimes it's the same for the characters. e.g. The same characters can have multiple conversations about the same topic, but their understanding/ feelings toward the topic can change as things marinate.

Deo101 [Millennium]

Yeah for sure

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

Meaningful conversations where you get to know the character’s personality would fall in the 2nd category

Sometimes its hard to judge whether dialogue will be interesting to someone who’s unfamiliar with the characters

Shadowmark Productions

Someone once told me that dialogue should reveal character and action reveals plot. If done correctly, both work in tandem to advance the story without exposition. I’ve found that to be very useful.

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

Ooh. True!

mirandalorian

That's a good way to put it. And it seems like that idea is pretty important in comics.

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I think it's 100% fine if dialogue isn't interesting to people unfamiliar with the characters -- as long as it's compelling to people who have been reading from the beginning?

I live for the kind of scenes where like... character A just smiles... it's an ordinary smile to people who don't know A, but it means the world to people who know the context and the character

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

Action can reveal character too

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

I‘d say it‘s even more important, I for starters love characters that say one thing and do another; it‘s a good way to show conflict!

(Inner conflict, I mean)

RebelVampire

For me whether I think the pacing is too fast or too slow are actually two different things. In regards to finding the pacing too slow, I generally base this on a character's progress for their goals. While I like to see characters face setbacks and don't expect everything to be solved immediately, I expect some progress to be had. So if I wind up reading a comic and it's basically taking more than 100 pages for any progress to be made in the protagonist's goal and growth, that's just way too slow for my personal tastes. It kind of just ruins my investment in their goal since it doesn't feel like they're actually working on it, and that kind of defeats the point of a goal. In a similar but different vein, pacing is too fast for me if the comic never stops to breathe to exposit or showcase character emotions. Obviously, expositing a whole bunch is bad, and you don't want to take 20 pages to show a character crying. However, these moments where you take a step back and say "Hey look this character is struggling and here is a hint of their backstory" are super important for creating a bond between the reader and the characters. Without them, it just feels like you're sprinting from Plot Point A to Plot Point B. In relation to this, another element that would make it too fast is if characters are getting over things way too fast because plot is to be had. When something emotional happens, such as a character dies, I should still be able to feel those affects much later even if its not at the forefront. Of course, these are clearly just to my personal tastes, which pacing generally is a subjective thing in most cases.

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

For sure that thing about needing space after emotional events

not a webcomic but some of my favorite parts of One Piece are the crew goofing off after ever major arc

I feel like webcomics can fail at this sometimes, because things that feel tediously slow when writing week -by-week can feel fast when read back all at once

[script-a-world]

This only loosely falls into the theme of worldbuilding but it's worth asking anyway. How do you get an audience to treat fundamentally absurd ideas seriously? I'm devising a cyberpunk fantasy story which has many illogical and ridiculous concepts within it (such as a Mongol semi-nomadic khanate full of cyborgs centred around robotic horses, and a steel dragon that breathes superheated neon) but it's not supposed to be a comedy.

Bina: To encourage and maintain "suspension of disbelief," you have a few options. One is to just play it straight. Own it and show people you've thought things through. Showcase the real consequences and dangers of these concepts. Have your characters treat these absurd ideas seriously because to them, they are serious. If you show that you're treating your narrative tools seriously, readers are more apt to buy into them. Taking an out-there idea and going deep into it, expanding on it, making it feel real, is one of the draws of fantasy. For some, the more absurd and out-there, the better!

Acknowledging some of the ridiculousness might help too. Letting the reader know that you know things are ridiculous can make them more willing to buy into the nonsense. It doesn't have to be to a comedic effect. Just something to show the reader "look, I know it's pretty off-the-wall, but bear with me and I'll show you where this is all going."

(btw, a steel dragon that breathes superheated neon sounds awesome)

Tex: Absurdity is not restricted to comedy. As a genre, absurdist fiction often tackles satire, nihilism, and irrationality - especially in relation to the world the characters are interacting with. You've already picked out a genre - cyberpunk + fantasy - so the structure of stories in those genres will act as a guide for you, and presumably readers who would be attracted to your story will already be familiar with the notes of both genres.

There may be some dissonance between cyberpunk and fantasy, as the former is a critical look at society while the latter originated from oral history and folklore (so is inherently tied with society), but so long as the nuances of these genres are acknowledged, I don't see very many issues arising while plotting. As Bina said, the easiest way to encourage readers to take things seriously is to treat things seriously - what parts of your story are you considering illogical or ridiculous? Why? Just because it hasn't been seen before, or the particular iteration you've decided upon, doesn't necessarily mean that it'll be difficult for readers to accept.

You've already got a system of government with your khanate, and having your characters being cyborgs and robots and made of steel (in the case of your dragon) does not necessarily negate the khanate. You have two genres to lean on with your story: cyberpunk would focus on the breakdown of social order in your story due to technological advances, and fantasy would focus on the bending of reality to fit how magic functions in a medieval-esque society. How you choose to blend them together will give your story structure, as well as drawing readers to your story.

Internal consistency helps a lot with convincing readers of a thing's legitimacy and logic - no matter how nonsensical things may appear at first, so long as there's a consistent cause and effect, readers can be taught the nuances of your world. Plot helps a ton with this, because if x or y idea can further the story in a productive manner, it's more likely to be accepted.

Every classic genre and plot device was once new and absurd for a writer's audience, so it's only illogical if its only value is to be illogical - that would also mean it doesn't contribute to your story in a meaningful way, so you would need to consider what weight you're attributing to your ideas in relation to your plot, and how you plan on handling these aspects.

Further Reading 

 A Very Short History of Cyberpunk by Marcus Janni Pivato (PDF) 

Do You Have a Purpose? The Absurd in Literature 

Absurdity in Literature: Definition & Concept 

Saphira: To build on what Bina was saying, your characters are native to this. This scenario is not alien to them. It's as common law as gravity is to us- so showing us what your characters expect, or how they react to the world around us, educates us readers on how the world is consistent with itself. Suspending belief is not about "oh yeah, this could be real", it is about "oh yeah, this is real to them".

What might help is pinning down the core laws of the world you have built. For my novel, in which a planet is shattered and held together with magic, there were a few things I had to pin to get everything else to make sense. First, the world was dying. Second, magic was something that was flowing through the atmosphere, and thus anything that interacted with the atmosphere (breathing it, passing through it, reacting with it). Third, all the bodies of earth and water floated, unconnected, swirling around the core from where the magic comes. These three laws cannot be broken, because it would defy the world itself.

These laws allow me to explore thoughts like how does magic influence chemical reactions like fire? Or just as fun, what happens if you leave the atmosphere? Once you have these laws in place, do not consider yourself boxed in. That is not the purpose of them. Instead, you are grounded, like a live electrical wire. This makes your world tangible, and thus you can play with your character's expectations through their experience. Once you can do that? Well, playing with your readers and their expectations falls together.

Constablewrites: It might be helpful to think of your concept less as "absurd" and more as "surreal." A lot of times surrealism refers to a world that's ours but somehow off in a way that's treated as entirely normal, but it can still apply to more obviously SFF settings.

MareeB: Ok firstly this isn't a question that only loosely falls into the theme of worldbuilding, it's actually a fundamental worldbuilding principle. ie a question we should all ask ourselves when creating a fictional world.How to get people to accept a world with whatever is going on as 'believable' is a foundation problem and something I think we all struggle with from time to time.

You can make almost anything feel believable if you apply enough internal logic. If you're not already a fan I'd suggest checking out the works of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. Both of those authors wrote ridiculously absurd concepts, and yes it was framed as comedic, but if you look closer there's rock solid world building in the consistency of details. And the portrayal of familiar human faults. The humanity of the characters, and how they react to the absurd situations makes the whole world feel believable.

Mod Miri Note: The team has added this topic for consideration as a future master post. It’s a good question!

[massistocchifontana]

Engagements, Culture, Knowledge and the Evolved Man

Engagements, Culture, Knowledge and the Evolved Man

 A topic that comes up time and again is the subject of what does a man speak about when he meets new people or women. This brings up a number of factors that need to be taken into consideration in the process of betterment and evolution.

 1.     Confidence 

2.     Commanding attention 

3.     Mastering your vocal ability 

4.     The connection between language and thinking 

5.     Your presence in another’s presence 

6.     What interests you 

7.     Can you take interest in another 

8.     General knowledge 

9.     Accepting and acknowledging when you don’t know 

10.  What is the overall purpose of being-with-another human being.

 I’ve outlined 10 topics for this post; because these seem to be the fundamental elements to personal enhancement that come up time and time again. However, when combined they fuel and inform extraordinary discussion which more often than not leaves the other person desiring more from you. It adds to our magnetism as men, and feeds into our overall sense of wellbeing. 

 Confidence:

Lets begin with confidence. This in simple terms is “a choice”, and when attached to the right experiences and emotions reinforces our self-belief system and makes us more resilient as men.  By making a choice we keep moving, and it’s this movement that allows us to develop momentum and start experiencing life. A foolproof way of conditioning confidence is using fear as a prompt to propel you towards the fear rather than against it. The second, when fear or anxiety comes up for us, command yourself to face whatever it is even if you don’t know what it is yet. Ensure there is continuity in these experiences and choices and you will minimize fear and anxiety forever.  You will eventually out-condition fear and anxiety and create a new and confident you.

 Commanding Attention:

Commanding attention is a phrase I use very often with others and myself. People in general respond to the individual commanding attention. There are however more effective ways of doing so and in my own head this is done with charisma and charm even when angry to the max. Conduct your own personal social experiment and observe how others command attention. A bar is usually a great place to see this—watch how barmen respond to this type of power. Decide on what you feel your commanding of attention needs to look like and work on it every day in every situation, until you have mastered this technique.

 Mastering your vocal ability:

Mastering your vocal ability is such a simplistic yet vital tool we all need to take ownership of and master. Our tone of voice changes in various contexts and can be dependent on the state of mind and emotional state we are in. Personal reflection, observation and practice makes for the perfect ingredients to own this process. If you don’t create the experience and be reflective with how you reacted, how you felt and how you acted then you’ll get stuck in the fear response cycle and simply disable yourself entirely. 

 The connection between language and thinking:

The connection between language and thinking. I call this critical thinking. This is very similar to debating, where you are given 30 seconds to deliver your point in the most succinct and precise manner so that you conquer your challenger. The same principle and analogy should be applied to every discussion. How can you master your argument skills and method of delivery so that there is no time lag between thinking and speaking. This is largely connected with belief in what comes out of your mouth. When we tell a woman she is beautiful—most women will respond to ones sincerity and spontaneity and immediateness of their delivery, and will no doubt see straight through a thought out, over analyzed, unconfident and generalized action. 

 Your presence in another’s presence:

 Emotions are transferable from person to person and something we need to be more conscious of. When you walk into a room filled with people there is a natural equilibrium that is reached on an emotional level, and your emotional state could either be the same or conflict with this. Keeping this in mind, when you encounter another’s presence, there will be a transfer of emotions until equilibrium is reached. Depending on the strength of each individual, this can be controlled and manipulated by the “most energetic” person, regardless of if the energy is manic or depressive in feel. This is something we all can train ourselves to be conscious of and the more mindful we are of these experiences and encounters the more able we become in dictating the mood and how we want the experience to unfold. This is immensely powerful and it is a very beneficial tool for any context in relation to other people. 

 What interests you?

In relationships we are pre programmed to think that we need to have interests in common, whereas I believe that we need to have interests and be passionate about things on our own accord. It is this passion, curiosity and interest in life that triggers a connected response in others. You could be the biggest geek in the world and have a passion for programming or science, but as long as you can show passion you already become magnetic to others. 

Practice this phenomenon by testing this out… When you are dispassionate about something and observe the reaction of others Vs when you are extremely passionate about something and see how others respond. This is a key ingredient in enhancing your ability to attract and iron out predisposed beliefs and preconceptions about yourself. 

Can you take interest in another?

Next time you have a conversation with someone, see how engaging you can be by not actually verbalizing anything. Be present in the conversation and actually take into account the nuances and manners in which the person in front of you is expressing themselves. Formulate an argument in your mind for or against the topic of discussion, but learn to surrender to the urgency of needing to verbalize your opinion. By doing this you will be far more attentive to the true details of the discussion and the person will feel more contained by your attentiveness and presence. 

 General knowledge

I don’t believe there is a short cut to this one unfortunately. Don’t take me wrong, you're always free to use any news feed to acquire some form of general knowledge, but I feel that the true means of growing ones general knowledge is through an active curiosity with life. Delve into literature and explore the great Dickens, or top off your understanding of cars or motorbikes so you have a greater understanding of what an engine does. The key ingredient here is curiosity and if you don’t have it you will eventually become stunted in your growth because your reliance will be fixated on the limitations of your own mind. Someone dear to me commented in response to when I challenged them on not intentionally reading any books: they stated that they are only interested in their belief system and the way in which they saw the world. I was highly disappointed to hear this statement and I took it upon myself to engage them in an in-depth debate about simple general psychology challenging them on their perception and view of the world. As you can imagine he did not win that argument and was prompted to up his game. Imagine sitting at a table with the 10 greatest people that inspire you, what would you discuss with them? And would you have enough general knowledge to keep them engaged and interested in you? If your answer is no, then clearly you need to do more work!

 Accepting and Acknowledging when you don’t know

One of the most effective means of learning new things in life is through trial and error—however when it comes to conversing with people we seldom are willing to simply acknowledge, “I don’t know”. Surrendering to ones limitations in a constructive and all embracing manner shows strength of character and a burning desire to acquire new knowledge by indicating that there is a need for further enrichment of information. The ability to be at peace with not knowing/feeling like a failure/failing/embarrassment is essential for ones personal success and growth and enhancement in life. Always keep in mind that the class clown derives a great sense of fulfillment by being made a joke of—he has altered the perception of others to see his flaws and limitations as perfectly normal, which ironically strengthen his position.

 What is the overall purpose of being-with-another human being?

The answer to this question will provide you insight into the meaning of relating with others. You need to establish what relating means for you in your personal world. Relating in my view is the essence of what keeps us connected as a human race. Without the ability to relate effectively we truly do become an island… solitary and isolated within ourselves with no ability to feel as though we belong or are a part of something greater. It’s like the cumulative strength of magnets. When you collectively add magnets together, their overall strength increases. I see this as people with positive and effective emotions joining together to increase their overall effectiveness and strength as a human race. However, you place the opposing polarity in the picture and the magnet (human being) will repel the other with all the strength in the magnet. Ultimately it is down to you to seek out people who will enhance your existence, challenge your thinking, press you to grow and develop. This is key to the purpose of being-with-another.  

Via Con Dios

[contemporarysex-blog]

Doing Anti-Diversity Wrong

So let's talk about this Google employee's "anti-diversity" memo. And I mean talk about it, not just freak out over it.

(If you haven't read the thing itself, do. If the author is right about one thing, it's that different points of view deserve to be discussed on their own merits, rather than dismissed up front for seeming outrageous.)

And let's not kid ourselves, whatever that memo is, it is definitely not hate speech. The author makes his argument in a polite and nuanced ways, clearly states his intentions (which are far more benign than the "women don't have a place in tech" reporting makes it seem), and makes some legitimately good points. He still gets a couple of crucial things wrong, and that's what I want to address in this post.

First, here's a basic breakdown of the author's argument as I understand it:

PREMISE 1: Statistically, men and women as a group are interested in (/good at) different things on average. For example, men are more likely to be "thing-oriented" and women more "people-oriented". (strong, with caveats)

PREMISE 2: This difference is rooted in biology and unlikely to change because of social measures. (has a point, but is not the whole story)

PREMISE 3: The purpose of diversity measures in companies such as Google is to make sure that there are as many women working in every field as there are men. (very weak)

CONCLUSION: Trying to enforce equal representation while drawing from an unequal population is tilting against windmills at best, and counterproductive at worst. (shaky as hell)

(You might notice that I'm not going into the whole "nobody's allowed to say that" and "diversity of opinions" self-victimization thing here. That's a rhetorical device, not an argument, and also it is not what most people seem to be reacting to.)

Let's start with premise 1. We don't need to debate the factual point; of course men, taken as a group, have different preferences on average than women, taken as a group. If you pick a random woman out of the general population, the probability that she is interested in [STEM stuff] is lower than it would be for a randomly selected man. Duh. But there are two caveats here:

Caveat 1: What is true for the general population is not necessarily true for those women who apply for jobs at Google. If you pick a woman who applied for a technical position at Google at random, your priors that she's interested in / good at it should be the same as for a man who applied for the same job. Why? Because selection effects, obviously. Women who apply for jobs at Google are not a representative sample of the female population. Also duh.

Caveat 2: Be careful about your constructs. I haven't looked into the literature, but "people-oriented" and "thing-oriented" strike me as both very general and very loaded ways to frame the difference. I'm not saying it's not a valid distinction to make, but we need to remember that there is a difference between the actual data (which can be made sense of in multiple ways and usually presents a complex picture) and the labels we use to carve it up.

Which brings us to the second premise. Yes, men and women today have different preferences; but where do these preferences come from, and are they necessary and unchanging in the way the author suggests?

Now, I will not discuss evolutionary psychology here. EvoPsych has a lot of interesting things to say, but I will not get bogged down in just-so stories about how this or that might have been adaptive at some point or not. For the most part, these have about the same predictive power as psychoanalysis, meaning none; they serve to "explain" a status quo, but you could tell a completely story and "explain" the same data just as well. Let's not do that here; let's please leave EvoPsych to the professionals.

But I have to discuss reductionism. There is this tendency among people who've read a little EvoPsych, nicely exemplified by the manifest's author here, to look at some feature of the world, find an evolutionary explanation for it, and then say "that's it, feature explained". That's not only a cheap way to shave off complexity, it also reifies the status quo in a way that does not allow for human agency. Once you accept that you can explain the same facts in different ways, choosing between competing explanations becomes an engineering problem: Which of these explanations can I actually do something with? If an explanation leaves you helpless and cynical, saying that "things just are like that, there's nothing you can do", you are probably operating at the wrong level of detail.

So let's have some (still very low) complexity. Sure, if a broad distinction can be observed for men and women all across the globe, it is likely to have some sort of biological basis. (Though you could also say that patriarchal societies are dominant pretty much across the globe... but let's concede the point here, because it doesn't make much of a difference.) But that's not all there is to it. Society (and, on a finer level, human psychology) takes these biological tendencies and builds on them. It weaves them into narratives that evolve over time and tell you how to behave, above and beyond what biology alone "requires", and changing much quicker than biology itself. We build identities and scripts and rituals, based on and influenced by our biological tendencies, sometimes exaggerating them, at other times sublimating them, warping them, even resisting them. (Just look at how many religions are built on a foundation of resisting some of our "natural impulses".)

What does that mean for diversity programs, then? It means that we do not, as the author suggests, simply have to resign ourselves that a lack of diversity in a given institution is biologically determined and there's nothing we can do about it. Some of the root causes may be biological, but that does not mean we cannot or should not examine our institutions to see where they don't conform to our values. Because that is what should be the driving force behind our aspirations: realize our values, based on a good image of reality; not looking at "reality" with a reductionist lense, shrugging and saying, "well, bad luck".

Of course we can, and should, debate those values. You can say that "having equal numbers of men and women in all professions and positions" is a stupid terminal goal to have, and I would probably agree. However, the purpose of all diversity programs that I know (I don't know much about Google's, but I'd suppose it's similar) is not to achieve a perfectly balanced male-female ratio, but simply to make it easier for those who tend to have it harder (because they're in the minority, because the work environment was not designed with them in mind, or whatever) to do the job that they are good at. In other words: (good) gender diversity measures are not about getting more women into certain positions at all costs, but about making it possible for qualified women to get there, without having to expend too much energy on surviving in a hostile environment. So much for premise 3, which is nothing more than a straw man. It's easy to attack your enemy if you misrepresent their position as something extremist and stupid as "we need more women here, no matter how qualified they are".

Which brings us to the conclusion. If enforcing equal representation is not the goal, and if corporate culture and institutional design have an effect beyond the biological base rate, and if the pool of women who apply for a job at Google is not representative of that base rate anyway... then yes, we can do at least some good by making it easier for those women who are interested in and good at [STEM stuff] to get into positions where they can use their talents without constantly fighting an uphill battle. Or more generally: If humans have any agency beyond the behavior "dictated" to them by their genes, then we can call them out on what they do and don't do, and they don't get to hide behind biology to say "can't help it".

And finally, to answer the obvious question why we should value diversity at all (except, you know, for reasons such as basic fairness and maybe complying with the law), here's the obvious answer: because a company such as Google affects lots of people of all kinds, including women, and it's a good idea to have interested parties from as many different kinds of people pitching in when it comes to all the decisions that are made there. This is not just out of a sense of responsibility or democratic spirit or whatever; it's simply good business. Unless you have a perfectly objective sexless raceless identityless AI to vet every decision, you're better off if you have a multitude of perspectives inside your company (and yes, that includes a multitude of political perspectives, just so we've got that covered as well).

[aurelliocheek]

A Year of Rain: Writing Strategies

How to build a new world for an RTS Game.

So, you wanna write this? A question I’ve been waiting for. When Nick, the captain of our daring endeavor, approached me, A Year Of Rain was supposed to become a Fantasy RTS based on a well-known IP; and to be honest, I was more than fine with that. See, I like that IP, I am very familiar with it and just from a cerebral logistics standpoint, I’ve always been comfortable settling in an established system and give it my own spin. All I’d have to do was looking for one of the more ­obscure places and events of that world, work with that foundation, and tell an interesting tale.

Which I did. Vigorously.

Then we had to discard that approach. The world for our game would not be an established one. We needed to build it from scratch, every nook and cranny. And here’s how we did that, or rather, my first-time experiences with RTS narrative design and maybe some survival tips on how to navigate that minefield.

Super rough worldbuilding draft.

A new IP. Well… We took that turn of events in stride. After all, even if existing worldbuilding provides you with nomenclature, systems, a fan base and many more convenient tools in your box, it’s all double-edged: you can’t slip on lore, the systems restrain you, while gameplay and game design boundaries are sneaking up from behind. You also owe the fans maximum accuracy anyway to avoid alienation. Put like this, building your own world from scratch sounds a lot more appealing, doesn’t it? It’s a gorgeous blooming field of nearly endless possibilities and free of any veto you wouldn’t give yourself.

Right…?

The whole world in your hands I’ve done this for plenty tabletops and homebrew Pen & Paper systems. It’s important to have an interesting world for an interesting tale you want to tell. Doing this for a very specifically tagged game is a different beast altogether. To keep the field analogy going, when first thinking about a world for a Fantasy RTS game, I felt like I arrived a week after the harvest.

Staring into the abyss of fantasy intertextuality made me uncomfortable right from the start, when I was asking myself: ‘What kind of world is this going to be?’

Creating a new, compelling world for an RTS game is a challenge.

Standard globe, massive Midlandia continent where all the people hang out and fight each other or whatever? It’s been done – ad nauseam and to death.

A shattered world, with drifting pieces and… Shit, this has been done. Pocket dimension? Done. Flat, you could say, a disc-like world? Yeah, good luck.

Okay, but what if it has layers like an onion… Septerra Core? Who even remembers that?! I do, it was a very charming game, actually. Anyway, a world needs people. People are easy! Species, races, cultures, there are so many cool fantasy folks… which… have all been utilized to exhaustion.

Even as I am writing this, a game cropped up that is so eerily similar to the core ideas I eventually developed for my world and story that it snaps the credibility of parallel evolution and makes me reconsider my general stance on psychic spies. I came to terms with the notion long before that announcement, but it confirmed my take on worldbuilding I had to adapt if I wanted to keep my sanity: There are many, many worlds out there and chances are high you won’t reinvent the wheel. Take solace in the fact that you can craft a very efficient, aesthetically pleasing wheel!

For here comes the twist: Intertextuality is a good thing. Since I’m throwing that word around like I think I know what it means, here’s what it is… “The relationship between texts, especially literary ones.”

It’s the reason why references work. For example, why Pride & Prejudice & Zombies exists, and you still get what that title implies. It’s why Banner Saga doesn’t need to explain the language, cultural setting, or apparel of the world they created because we have read about or seen media featuring Vikings. Darkest Dungeon draws a lot of its appeal from weird fiction, gothic and cosmic horror and you understand that connection. It’s why many people love it when fictional characters or worlds reference the real world, or pop culture or even quote from other ­movies and works of literature. ­Because we get what that means. Because it’s a nod to what we, and probably the creator of that fiction, love (the latter being strictly speaking an allusion, but it fits under the same umbrella, bear with me here). In broad strokes, it means that people understand connections and baselines without your explanation, because someone, at some point, did a very similar thing and established a widely known convention with it.

Yes, we’ve made a papercraft map.

It seems like the bane of innovation You may feel like everything has been done already, or even get conflicted because a line you wrote is similar or identical to something that already exists. However, just like tropes, archetypes, and cliché, it’s a boon for your world’s foundation if you swing it with precision. Best case, whatever you decide: On a very basic level, your audience will have a fond connotation to many of the things you do. There’s a catch, of course. You’ll need a lot of lipstick for your intertextual pig. The real work for me started after laying the foundation when I decided what type of world I wanted and who populated it. Both choices, at a glance, weren’t too special, admittedly.

What I hoped made them special was thoroughly fleshing out every race, species, and culture, applying some twists here and there… I tried generating credible systems and all the bones and beams that not only support the worldbuilding but also telegraph and highlight what made this world compelling, comfortably familiar, yet also refreshing.

You can do a lot if you stick to some fantasy guns and bolster them with nuances. In A Year Of Rain, for example, dwarves are the most competent spellcasters and considering how this world is designed, it even makes sense, though it’s not something you see very often. And it escalated pretty easily from there: What are the consequences for other species? What is their strategy? And how would that other adjacent fantasy race act or evolve and so on? I did that for, I think, 16 species concepts and there was a point when there were more connections and ideas than I actually wanted.

After fleshing out all the cultural dynamics, historical angles, rules of magic, justifying dwarven rune-powered railguns, establishing how many terabytes of memories a sentient fungus could store compared to divine lichen and what kind of weed lizardfolk prefer to smoke, I was finally ready to apply all this to the game itself.

Or not.

Strategic Writing Turns out, an RTS has comparatively limited narrative space. I would go as far as to call it claustrophobic. Design and format of an RTS tend to isolate the parts of the world you build. You have one single map at a time to establish whatever you want to transport narratively. And you only get one shot, because there usually is, by design, no backtracking.

It’s fair to assume that’s one reason why this genre often struggles with thorough worldbuilding and story in its campaign and multiplayer. Everything you can show, tell and narrate has to fit in roughly 15-30 minutes of tiny people murdering each other in real time. Then, you move on to the next area where, you guessed it, you train tiny people and have them murder each other for 15-30 minutes.

There is little room to breathe, or significantly manipulate the game flow, or show the inhabitants of your world doing anything other than fighting and killing to do more fighting and killing. That’s where the majority of anything you’ll write will be focused on. The units you command have no narrative agenda, almost no space to reflect on what they’re doing or want to do; they fight and die and obey the great cursor.

“But Blizzard!” you say?

Campaign is a different horse. It’s easier there. You can, to a certain degree, pace what happens, insert cutscenes and design a fantasy, a goal, and establish what drives this narrative… And at least your characters get to talk and express opinions, motivation, broader personality and all that, so: Yes, Blizzard cracked the code in most of their campaigns and will probably remain on that throne till the flippin’ sun burns out. But looking at virtually all other RTS games, there’s a trend to keep the world simple, the greater worldbuilding or story potential unexplored (Warlords RTS, Grey Goo) or exaggerate other aspects enough that they tilt from ludicrous to awesome and thus make for a satisfying campy story (looking at you, Command & Conquer). There’s a reason why even master craftsmen like the folks at Blizzard preach the mantra: Gameplay first in RTS.

All that doesn’t mean you can’t tell a compelling story, it doesn’t mean you can’t build a fantastic world, but it means that it may feel awkward at first. It’s a much greater challenge than in an RPG, an adventure or something similar where you can weave both things easier into a nice colorful ­tapestry. For our game, there is no after-mission hub to talk to characters, no codex to look up things like history and lore, no audio logs, books or scrolls, no close-up first- or third-person perspective to do advanced intrinsic storytelling. RTS has a fast, relentless pace. Your opponent, be it a human or AI, won’t wait for you to absorb subjects declared second priority like a narrative or worldbuilding details. So, whatever you tell is ideally right there when you play.

Some rules and tools you know still apply accordingly. For example, each of our units has 17 standard response lines. You better believe I tried to cram as much character as I could in there, tried my best to give them personality you can relate to in a few clicks and with allusions to the world around them.

Daedalic’s development team is building the A Year Of Rain world.

Then there are our phenomenal art, design, sound and SFX people Worldbuilding is, of course, not only writing. How characters look, what gear they carry, how their magic or tools of trade manifest and interact, their body language, animation, and voice work… all that blasts open a welcome breach into the walls you run into with an RTS, just like with any other game. Though the world is delivered in chunks in this genre, you can still do plenty of environmental storytelling, be it through biomes, architecture, weather, or ambient sounds and how the whole palette interconnects through the game. The tools are there; they just need lots of attention. The more you have prepared, the better. Whatever you came up with, whatever your vision is, don’t use a crowbar. Listen to the other departments and let them work their magic, even, or especially when that means letting go of your brainchild because they came up with a cooler solution. I’m a writer. What the hell do I know about shapes and the right visual impact, or the finer points of ability synergies and level design? Try to trust people as they trust you.

This is a good time to point out that 50% of all my conceptual resources won’t make it directly into the game. Some things are just too intricate/niche and have no business being there considering the very tight space that’s rightfully conceded to the gameplay. Adjust that percentage further north, actually, since some visual ideas don’t make good silhouettes for in-game models, because they’d be too small, too noisy or just a pain to animate you could never justify. It’s fine, though. Compare it to an actor who’s told to come up with a backstory for a bunch of tiny props on their costume. They’ll never get any big reference in the movie, but they help the actor getting into the role.

As I’ve mentioned, the characters’ role is basically to fight and die, above all else. It creates a dissonance, intuitively. Telling war stories is no hard sell, but it adds a new layer to the worldbuilding itself. Is this a new conflict? Where will you locate it? Is it a flashpoint or a global affair, and how much sense does that make? How do you plan for the future, i.e., at the end of your campaign, is your world fixed or broken, and where does it go from there? Or is it even beyond fixing and stays in a constant, vicious cycle of warfare?

The one luxury I had here was that I got to have my cake and eat it too: I made a world that’s broken, and I elected to focus on one conflict on a very specific piece of land. It leaves enough breathing room to tease a much bigger playground around the elaborate nice sandbox we’ll ship with this game.

Narrative Design for an RTS is a wild ride. And despite the pinch of salt in the lines above I definitely enjoy the chance I’ve been given with this. This article is honestly a slapdash work of professional opinion, advise, and direct dirty development experience. It’s a rough field guide for those treading these grounds for the first time, informative entertainment, or a good foundation for discussion.

See you in that world we’ve built, if you’re so inclined!

Ben Kuhn

Ben Kuhn is a writer and narrative designer at Daedalic Entertainment. Seven years sailing for Daedalic, mostly as a translator, dialogue writer, and voice director, packing a Master of Arts in English literature and creative writing acquired at the University of Bremen and Maynooth. Signed up due to his love of the medium and good stories and continues to be happy about that choice.

The post A Year of Rain: Writing Strategies appeared first on Making Games.

A Year of Rain: Writing Strategies published first on https://leolarsonblog.tumblr.com/

[philipfloyd]

Google BERT Update. How the Natural Language Algorithm Affects You

Just last week Google made waves with its announcement of quantum supremacy – the claim that they have developed a quantum computer that has been demonstrated to solve, in a matter of days, a problem that a “classic” supercomputer would most likely take thousands of years to solve. Elsewhere, stories about robots taking our jobs abound, while machine learning seems to be on everyone’s mind.

    But change is not always flashy or even visible. Last week, Google introduced a new update named BERT, which is characterized as a massive and the biggest step forward for search in the past 5 years, as well as one of the biggest steps forward in the history of search altogether. Yet, look and ask around in the SEO community and you’ll see very little that announces as much. Also, it is not yet very clear what Google’s BERT is targeting and how will the SEO landscape be influenced by this big update. So, let’s figure it all out!

  What Is Google BERT Update?

What Is Google BERT Targeting?

Does Google BERT Affect SEO?

Does Google BERT Affect Content Marketing?

  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It’s the title of a novel by visionary sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. If it doesn’t sound familiar, you might better recognize it under its movie adaptation title, Blade Runner. Both book and movie concern themselves with questions on what it means to be human in an ever more technological world and how to (still) distinguish between humans and androids. 2014 indie sci-fi Ex-Machina, by director Alex Garland, asks a similar question by referencing the concept of the Turing test: if a robot were to pass as human to every other human in the universe, would it still be a robot? These are fascinating questions and luckily we can still ponder about them in sci-fi literature and film. We’re not there yet in real life, although one has to wonder how long will it take until the more trivial “I Am Not a Robot” captcha will get checked by a robot (it has).

  Even though we are still far away from sheep-dreaming androids, we’re seeing constant progress in the way of more human-like computer interactions.

  What Is the Google BERT Update?

  Putting it simply, Google BERT is supposed to help a machine understand what the words in a sentence mean, but with all the nuances of context.

  Yet, to respond to the question what does BERT mean? we need to talk in a more explanatory note.

  BERT, which is what the latest and the biggest Google algorithm update is called, stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and is a deep learning algorithm related to natural language processing.

  So, is BERT a language model? (geeky alert ahead)

  Yes, we can say that it is a language model. Yet, you need to know that even if BERT is a new concept, is not hot new. The BERT concept was made public in 2018, in a paper published by researchers at Google Artificial Intelligence Language. 

  According to Google researchers, “unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications.”

  Language model pre-training has been shown to be effective for improving many natural language processing tasks. These include sentence-level tasks such as natural language inference and paraphrasing, which aim to predict the relationships between sentences by analyzing them holistically, as well as token-level tasks such as named entity recognition and question answering, where models are required to produce fine-grained output at the token level.

    If we were to ask Google what the BERT name means, we’ll get to see a range of interesting results. In all fairness, my search query was for “bert name”, nothing related to the update. Yet, if we’re looking at the “people also ask section”, we get three different pieces of information. Not contradictory, not opposite, but different which might translate in confusion for the user. Will the BERT algorithm update solve this matter? Let’s pursue our investigation to find out.

    Fun Fact: The Google BERT Update was launched on October 25, the same day Kanye West launched its latest album, Jesus Is King. 

  What Is Google BERT Targeting?

  By Google’s own estimates, BERT update will affect 10% of all queries. That’s a tremendous percentage, but it might not have caused a visible splash by SEO community standards. That’s most likely because the update focuses on “longer, more conversational queries”, whereas these longer tail queries are queries that (probably) SEOs don’t target as much in a heavy way.

  If that last part sounds familiar, it might be because it’s not too far off from our recent discussions about search intent. The basic question is, then, what does the user really want to find out? There are quite a few examples out there illustrating the difference that BERT made.

  Search Engine Journal provides an example of BERT understanding, using the phrase “how to catch a cow fishing,” which has nothing to do with the image that may be conjured in your head right now (or in the picture below) and everything to do with a very particular sense of the word “cow” in relation to fishing, referring to a large striped bass.

    Google itself offers some examples of queries which would have been pretty clear in intent to a human conversation partner (e.g.: “2019 brazil traveler to usa needed a visa,” and “do estheticians stand a lot at work”), but were previous to the update entirely lost on Google, based on the results it displayed.

    By applying the BERT models to both rankings and featured snippets in Search, Google pretends to be able to do a much better job, helping users find useful information. In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.

  Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in the query. And users can search in a way that feels natural for them.

    In an article from 2018, Rani Horev predicted BERT’s importance. As he stated, BERT will improve search and is undoubtedly a breakthrough in the use of Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing. The fact that it’s approachable and allows fast fine-tuning will likely allow a wide range of practical applications in the future.

  Does Google BERT Affect SEO?

  Yes, the BERT update affects SEO and allow me to explain why. 

  SEO – Search engine optimization is the process of making your site better for search engines. Therefore, any update that the search engines are making to their algorithm influences the search engine optimization process. 

  Now, the question that remains is what can you do to optimize for the BERT update?

  If we listen to Danny Sullivan, Google’s public Search Liaison, who helps people better understand search and helps Google better hear public feedback, the answer is pretty straightforward: nothing new. What Danny actually highlights is that there is nothing that you should do from today on that you shouldn’t have done before BERT. And that is: write content for users.  

    We hope that there is no doubt for anyone that Google has been focusing on content for a couple of years (here’s a case study on Panda 4 update, which targeted content big time and affected lots of important websites). And we don’t want to re-iterate the “content is king” nor to over-highlight the importance of writing both SEO and user-friendly content. Yet, let’s try to understand where SEO is standing now in the context of BERT.

  We believe that two main aspects need to be taken into consideration when we ask ourselves how the latest Google Update influence SEO. 

  Identify and Optimize for the Right User’ Search Intent

  In the BERT training process, the model receives pairs of sentences as input and learns to predict if the second sentence in the pair is the subsequent sentence in the original document. So, the algorithm is trying to better understand the user’s needs, even to predict them if and when possible. 

  Google BERT update tries to (even) better understand the users’ search intent. 

  Search intent or keyword intent is the reason why people conduct a specific search. Why are they searching? What are they trying to achieve through their search? Are they trying to figure out the answer to a question or do they want to reach a specific website? 

  With the increasing use of mobile and voice search, where people need fast and contextual answers to their questions,  Google tries to become more and more able to determine the search intent of people. So, the whole Google SERP is now trying to best fit the search intent and not the exact searched keyword. Now, more than ever, there will be situations when the exact searched term will not even be included in the Google search results page. And this happens because Google has become better and better at determining the search intent of people.

  Google has to figure out what exactly do people want, so it can offer them the search engine page results they need. And, from an SEO point of view, your job is to create content that is relevant to the Google users and matches their search intent. 

  Not to linger on this anymore, remember that search intent is more important than ever and here’s how to optimize for each type of search intent. 

  Optimize for Featured Snippets

  Google stated that BERT is about users’ natural language and understanding longer queries. What Google tries to highlight with the focus on featured snippets is that searcher intent is to find content that responds exactly to the this question really quick. 

  Featured Snippets (also known as answer boxes, knowledge graphs or Google direct answers).  If you’re searching for something like “how many calories does an apple have”, you’ll get a direct answer, highlighted within a box, just like in the examples below. We did a really cool research on answer boxes a while ago; you should check it out.

    Also, with the BERT update, Google focused on showing even more relevant featured snippets. To better understand what this improvement is all about, we are given the example the featured snippet for the query parking on a hill with no curb. Before, Google used to place too much importance on the word “curb” and ignored the word “no”, not understanding how critical that word was to appropriately respond to this query. So they would return results for parking on a hill with a curb. This latest update seems to fix this matter, as the search engine better understands the query and the context. 

    But how should you optimize for the featured snippets or answer boxes? Well, here is where content steps in, so keep on reading. 

  Does Google BERT Affect Content Marketing?

  Yes, Google stated that content is even more important, and therefore, one should focus their full attention on writing content relevant for the user.

  By definition, content marketing implies creating valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. And Google’s featured snippet seems to endorse that. And since Google announced that it had leveraged its pre-trained language model BERT to dramatically improve the understanding of search queries, it’s clear that content marketing needs to comply with this biggest leap forward in the history of search. 

  As Google better understands natural language, focusing on longer tail keywords and on featured snippets, it’s clear that there are big opportunities for content writers to serve their readers with content written more “humanly”, that answers a searcher’s question as quick as possible and provides much value. 

      Leaving the theory aside, here are the steps you should take to write content that is relevant for your users but also content that will rank high so that your users will find it. 

  Step 1. Perform a Google SERP analysis

  Every keyword research or content optimization process should start with a SERP analysis together with a competitor analysis. The Ranking Analysis from the Content Optimizer Tool gives you tons of insights related to the analyzed keyword. Quick and easy, you get to know the search volumes, what type of content ranks on that keyword, how difficult it is to rank on that query (by following keyword difficulty), as well as how popular that keyword is among searchers. Also, the tool lets you know the exact keywords and links that boosted that page in the top Google results to easily optimize your content. 

    Step 2. Create relevant & optimized content 

  Content Optimizer does most of the job for you. I know I’m biased and I don’t want to praise the tool too much, but the reality is that it does most of the job for you. Once you performed the ranking analysis, what you need to do is start writing a new piece of content or optimize the existing one and the Content Assistant will let you know the exact keywords you need to use so your content will be relevant for the user’s search intent. 

  Remember, you need to write for humans. BERT seems to make Google understand even better the searcher’s queries, so you have no excuses.  And if you’re asking why do you need a tool to “write for humans” I’d tell you that a tool can give you lots of insights of what you’re users are actually interested in and you can write content that will answer their needs; and secondly, your users need to find your content first on the first Google page result to access it. 

    Step 3. Discover new keywords & rankings opportunities

  You don’t have to limit yourself to one targeted keyword;  you need to discover other queries that your users might be interested in. Searchers have more than one question when it comes to products from your business. Take the opportunity and offer them relevant content for most of their questions. You can use the same Content Optimizer for this task. The tool has two sections that will automatically let you know what other questions are related to your search query:

  The Keyword Explorer  – this section is great for keyword analysis and for discovering new keyword opportunities. It also gives you the possibility of seeing only the question suggestions. Get inspired by the list of questions, check out the relevancy of the question, its volume, CPC (cost per click), and choose the one that is the most suitable and profitable.  

  The People Also Ask section – the Content Assistant will let you know the exact keywords you should use in your content, what people are searching for, but it will also offer you a set of questions that relate to your original search query. You should consider answering these questions in your content or create new content starting from these questions. 

    Although BERT integration in Google Search is currently only available for English queries in the US, Google says it is planning to apply BERT to additional languages and locations. So the rest of the world won’t have to wait too long until BERT will be responsible for the searches in dozens of languages. 

  When applied to ranking and featured snippets in search, BERT models can process words in relation to all other words in a sentence rather than considering them one-by-one and in order. This enables a better “understanding” of context, which is particularly helpful when it comes to longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions strongly affect meaning. This brings huge opportunities to the search world and big challenges to SEOs and digital marketers. 

  And while the performance improvements are impressive, Google acknowledges that natural language understanding remains an ongoing challenge. This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t adapt their marketing strategy or should re-think their marketing automation and SEO strategies to comply to today’s search marketing requirements. Yet, with search engines becoming more and more complex, there are no “complete guides” or “tips and tricks” lists to optimize for BERT or any other future updates (most likely). You need to keep yourself updated and have the user in mind no matter what you do.  

The post Google BERT Update. How the Natural Language Algorithm Affects You appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

from Marketing https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/23379/google-bert-update/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[krisggordon]

Google BERT Update. How the Natural Language Algorithm Affects You

Just last week Google made waves with its announcement of quantum supremacy – the claim that they have developed a quantum computer that has been demonstrated to solve, in a matter of days, a problem that a “classic” supercomputer would most likely take thousands of years to solve. Elsewhere, stories about robots taking our jobs abound, while machine learning seems to be on everyone’s mind.

    But change is not always flashy or even visible. Last week, Google introduced a new update named BERT, which is characterized as a massive and the biggest step forward for search in the past 5 years, as well as one of the biggest steps forward in the history of search altogether. Yet, look and ask around in the SEO community and you’ll see very little that announces as much. Also, it is not yet very clear what Google’s BERT is targeting and how will the SEO landscape be influenced by this big update. So, let’s figure it all out!

  What Is Google BERT Update?

What Is Google BERT Targeting?

Does Google BERT Affect SEO?

Does Google BERT Affect Content Marketing?

  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It’s the title of a novel by visionary sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. If it doesn’t sound familiar, you might better recognize it under its movie adaptation title, Blade Runner. Both book and movie concern themselves with questions on what it means to be human in an ever more technological world and how to (still) distinguish between humans and androids. 2014 indie sci-fi Ex-Machina, by director Alex Garland, asks a similar question by referencing the concept of the Turing test: if a robot were to pass as human to every other human in the universe, would it still be a robot? These are fascinating questions and luckily we can still ponder about them in sci-fi literature and film. We’re not there yet in real life, although one has to wonder how long will it take until the more trivial “I Am Not a Robot” captcha will get checked by a robot (it has).

  Even though we are still far away from sheep-dreaming androids, we’re seeing constant progress in the way of more human-like computer interactions.

  What Is the Google BERT Update?

  Putting it simply, Google BERT is supposed to help a machine understand what the words in a sentence mean, but with all the nuances of context.

  Yet, to respond to the question what does BERT mean? we need to talk in a more explanatory note.

  BERT, which is what the latest and the biggest Google algorithm update is called, stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and is a deep learning algorithm related to natural language processing.

  So, is BERT a language model? (geeky alert ahead)

  Yes, we can say that it is a language model. Yet, you need to know that even if BERT is a new concept, is not hot new. The BERT concept was made public in 2018, in a paper published by researchers at Google Artificial Intelligence Language. 

  According to Google researchers, “unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications.”

  Language model pre-training has been shown to be effective for improving many natural language processing tasks. These include sentence-level tasks such as natural language inference and paraphrasing, which aim to predict the relationships between sentences by analyzing them holistically, as well as token-level tasks such as named entity recognition and question answering, where models are required to produce fine-grained output at the token level.

    If we were to ask Google what the BERT name means, we’ll get to see a range of interesting results. In all fairness, my search query was for “bert name”, nothing related to the update. Yet, if we’re looking at the “people also ask section”, we get three different pieces of information. Not contradictory, not opposite, but different which might translate in confusion for the user. Will the BERT algorithm update solve this matter? Let’s pursue our investigation to find out.

    Fun Fact: The Google BERT Update was launched on October 25, the same day Kanye West launched its latest album, Jesus Is King. 

  What Is Google BERT Targeting?

  By Google’s own estimates, BERT update will affect 10% of all queries. That’s a tremendous percentage, but it might not have caused a visible splash by SEO community standards. That’s most likely because the update focuses on “longer, more conversational queries”, whereas these longer tail queries are queries that (probably) SEOs don’t target as much in a heavy way.

  If that last part sounds familiar, it might be because it’s not too far off from our recent discussions about search intent. The basic question is, then, what does the user really want to find out? There are quite a few examples out there illustrating the difference that BERT made.

  Search Engine Journal provides an example of BERT understanding, using the phrase “how to catch a cow fishing,” which has nothing to do with the image that may be conjured in your head right now (or in the picture below) and everything to do with a very particular sense of the word “cow” in relation to fishing, referring to a large striped bass.

    Google itself offers some examples of queries which would have been pretty clear in intent to a human conversation partner (e.g.: “2019 brazil traveler to usa needed a visa,” and “do estheticians stand a lot at work”), but were previous to the update entirely lost on Google, based on the results it displayed.

    By applying the BERT models to both rankings and featured snippets in Search, Google pretends to be able to do a much better job, helping users find useful information. In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.

  Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in the query. And users can search in a way that feels natural for them.

    In an article from 2018, Rani Horev predicted BERT’s importance. As he stated, BERT will improve search and is undoubtedly a breakthrough in the use of Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing. The fact that it’s approachable and allows fast fine-tuning will likely allow a wide range of practical applications in the future.

  Does Google BERT Affect SEO?

  Yes, the BERT update affects SEO and allow me to explain why. 

  SEO – Search engine optimization is the process of making your site better for search engines. Therefore, any update that the search engines are making to their algorithm influences the search engine optimization process. 

  Now, the question that remains is what can you do to optimize for the BERT update?

  If we listen to Danny Sullivan, Google’s public Search Liaison, who helps people better understand search and helps Google better hear public feedback, the answer is pretty straightforward: nothing new. What Danny actually highlights is that there is nothing that you should do from today on that you shouldn’t have done before BERT. And that is: write content for users.  

    We hope that there is no doubt for anyone that Google has been focusing on content for a couple of years (here’s a case study on Panda 4 update, which targeted content big time and affected lots of important websites). And we don’t want to re-iterate the “content is king” nor to over-highlight the importance of writing both SEO and user-friendly content. Yet, let’s try to understand where SEO is standing now in the context of BERT.

  We believe that two main aspects need to be taken into consideration when we ask ourselves how the latest Google Update influence SEO. 

  Identify and Optimize for the Right User’ Search Intent

  In the BERT training process, the model receives pairs of sentences as input and learns to predict if the second sentence in the pair is the subsequent sentence in the original document. So, the algorithm is trying to better understand the user’s needs, even to predict them if and when possible. 

  Google BERT update tries to (even) better understand the users’ search intent. 

  Search intent or keyword intent is the reason why people conduct a specific search. Why are they searching? What are they trying to achieve through their search? Are they trying to figure out the answer to a question or do they want to reach a specific website? 

  With the increasing use of mobile and voice search, where people need fast and contextual answers to their questions,  Google tries to become more and more able to determine the search intent of people. So, the whole Google SERP is now trying to best fit the search intent and not the exact searched keyword. Now, more than ever, there will be situations when the exact searched term will not even be included in the Google search results page. And this happens because Google has become better and better at determining the search intent of people.

  Google has to figure out what exactly do people want, so it can offer them the search engine page results they need. And, from an SEO point of view, your job is to create content that is relevant to the Google users and matches their search intent. 

  Not to linger on this anymore, remember that search intent is more important than ever and here’s how to optimize for each type of search intent. 

  Optimize for Featured Snippets

  Google stated that BERT is about users’ natural language and understanding longer queries. What Google tries to highlight with the focus on featured snippets is that searcher intent is to find content that responds exactly to the this question really quick. 

  Featured Snippets (also known as answer boxes, knowledge graphs or Google direct answers).  If you’re searching for something like “how many calories does an apple have”, you’ll get a direct answer, highlighted within a box, just like in the examples below. We did a really cool research on answer boxes a while ago; you should check it out.

    Also, with the BERT update, Google focused on showing even more relevant featured snippets. To better understand what this improvement is all about, we are given the example the featured snippet for the query parking on a hill with no curb. Before, Google used to place too much importance on the word “curb” and ignored the word “no”, not understanding how critical that word was to appropriately respond to this query. So they would return results for parking on a hill with a curb. This latest update seems to fix this matter, as the search engine better understands the query and the context. 

    But how should you optimize for the featured snippets or answer boxes? Well, here is where content steps in, so keep on reading. 

  Does Google BERT Affect Content Marketing?

  Yes, Google stated that content is even more important, and therefore, one should focus their full attention on writing content relevant for the user.

  By definition, content marketing implies creating valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. And Google’s featured snippet seems to endorse that. And since Google announced that it had leveraged its pre-trained language model BERT to dramatically improve the understanding of search queries, it’s clear that content marketing needs to comply with this biggest leap forward in the history of search. 

  As Google better understands natural language, focusing on longer tail keywords and on featured snippets, it’s clear that there are big opportunities for content writers to serve their readers with content written more “humanly”, that answers a searcher’s question as quick as possible and provides much value. 

      Leaving the theory aside, here are the steps you should take to write content that is relevant for your users but also content that will rank high so that your users will find it. 

  Step 1. Perform a Google SERP analysis

  Every keyword research or content optimization process should start with a SERP analysis together with a competitor analysis. The Ranking Analysis from the Content Optimizer Tool gives you tons of insights related to the analyzed keyword. Quick and easy, you get to know the search volumes, what type of content ranks on that keyword, how difficult it is to rank on that query (by following keyword difficulty), as well as how popular that keyword is among searchers. Also, the tool lets you know the exact keywords and links that boosted that page in the top Google results to easily optimize your content. 

    Step 2. Create relevant & optimized content 

  Content Optimizer does most of the job for you. I know I’m biased and I don’t want to praise the tool too much, but the reality is that it does most of the job for you. Once you performed the ranking analysis, what you need to do is start writing a new piece of content or optimize the existing one and the Content Assistant will let you know the exact keywords you need to use so your content will be relevant for the user’s search intent. 

  Remember, you need to write for humans. BERT seems to make Google understand even better the searcher’s queries, so you have no excuses.  And if you’re asking why do you need a tool to “write for humans” I’d tell you that a tool can give you lots of insights of what you’re users are actually interested in and you can write content that will answer their needs; and secondly, your users need to find your content first on the first Google page result to access it. 

    Step 3. Discover new keywords & rankings opportunities

  You don’t have to limit yourself to one targeted keyword;  you need to discover other queries that your users might be interested in. Searchers have more than one question when it comes to products from your business. Take the opportunity and offer them relevant content for most of their questions. You can use the same Content Optimizer for this task. The tool has two sections that will automatically let you know what other questions are related to your search query:

  The Keyword Explorer  – this section is great for keyword analysis and for discovering new keyword opportunities. It also gives you the possibility of seeing only the question suggestions. Get inspired by the list of questions, check out the relevancy of the question, its volume, CPC (cost per click), and choose the one that is the most suitable and profitable.  

  The People Also Ask section – the Content Assistant will let you know the exact keywords you should use in your content, what people are searching for, but it will also offer you a set of questions that relate to your original search query. You should consider answering these questions in your content or create new content starting from these questions. 

    Although BERT integration in Google Search is currently only available for English queries in the US, Google says it is planning to apply BERT to additional languages and locations. So the rest of the world won’t have to wait too long until BERT will be responsible for the searches in dozens of languages. 

  When applied to ranking and featured snippets in search, BERT models can process words in relation to all other words in a sentence rather than considering them one-by-one and in order. This enables a better “understanding” of context, which is particularly helpful when it comes to longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions strongly affect meaning. This brings huge opportunities to the search world and big challenges to SEOs and digital marketers. 

  And while the performance improvements are impressive, Google acknowledges that natural language understanding remains an ongoing challenge. This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t adapt their marketing strategy or should re-think their marketing automation and SEO strategies to comply to today’s search marketing requirements. Yet, with search engines becoming more and more complex, there are no “complete guides” or “tips and tricks” lists to optimize for BERT or any other future updates (most likely). You need to keep yourself updated and have the user in mind no matter what you do.  

The post Google BERT Update. How the Natural Language Algorithm Affects You appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

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Google BERT Update. How the Natural Language Algorithm Affects You

Just last week Google made waves with its announcement of quantum supremacy – the claim that they have developed a quantum computer that has been demonstrated to solve, in a matter of days, a problem that a “classic” supercomputer would most likely take thousands of years to solve. Elsewhere, stories about robots taking our jobs abound, while machine learning seems to be on everyone’s mind.

    But change is not always flashy or even visible. Last week, Google introduced a new update named BERT, which is characterized as a massive and the biggest step forward for search in the past 5 years, as well as one of the biggest steps forward in the history of search altogether. Yet, look and ask around in the SEO community and you’ll see very little that announces as much. Also, it is not yet very clear what Google’s BERT is targeting and how will the SEO landscape be influenced by this big update. So, let’s figure it all out!

  What Is Google BERT Update?

What Is Google BERT Targeting?

Does Google BERT Affect SEO?

Does Google BERT Affect Content Marketing?

  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It’s the title of a novel by visionary sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. If it doesn’t sound familiar, you might better recognize it under its movie adaptation title, Blade Runner. Both book and movie concern themselves with questions on what it means to be human in an ever more technological world and how to (still) distinguish between humans and androids. 2014 indie sci-fi Ex-Machina, by director Alex Garland, asks a similar question by referencing the concept of the Turing test: if a robot were to pass as human to every other human in the universe, would it still be a robot? These are fascinating questions and luckily we can still ponder about them in sci-fi literature and film. We’re not there yet in real life, although one has to wonder how long will it take until the more trivial “I Am Not a Robot” captcha will get checked by a robot (it has).

  Even though we are still far away from sheep-dreaming androids, we’re seeing constant progress in the way of more human-like computer interactions.

  What Is the Google BERT Update?

  Putting it simply, Google BERT is supposed to help a machine understand what the words in a sentence mean, but with all the nuances of context.

  Yet, to respond to the question what does BERT mean? we need to talk in a more explanatory note.

  BERT, which is what the latest and the biggest Google algorithm update is called, stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and is a deep learning algorithm related to natural language processing.

  So, is BERT a language model? (geeky alert ahead)

  Yes, we can say that it is a language model. Yet, you need to know that even if BERT is a new concept, is not hot new. The BERT concept was made public in 2018, in a paper published by researchers at Google Artificial Intelligence Language. 

  According to Google researchers, “unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications.”

  Language model pre-training has been shown to be effective for improving many natural language processing tasks. These include sentence-level tasks such as natural language inference and paraphrasing, which aim to predict the relationships between sentences by analyzing them holistically, as well as token-level tasks such as named entity recognition and question answering, where models are required to produce fine-grained output at the token level.

    If we were to ask Google what the BERT name means, we’ll get to see a range of interesting results. In all fairness, my search query was for “bert name”, nothing related to the update. Yet, if we’re looking at the “people also ask section”, we get three different pieces of information. Not contradictory, not opposite, but different which might translate in confusion for the user. Will the BERT algorithm update solve this matter? Let’s pursue our investigation to find out.

    Fun Fact: The Google BERT Update was launched on October 25, the same day Kanye West launched its latest album, Jesus Is King. 

  What Is Google BERT Targeting?

  By Google’s own estimates, BERT update will affect 10% of all queries. That’s a tremendous percentage, but it might not have caused a visible splash by SEO community standards. That’s most likely because the update focuses on “longer, more conversational queries”, whereas these longer tail queries are queries that (probably) SEOs don’t target as much in a heavy way.

  If that last part sounds familiar, it might be because it’s not too far off from our recent discussions about search intent. The basic question is, then, what does the user really want to find out? There are quite a few examples out there illustrating the difference that BERT made.

  Search Engine Journal provides an example of BERT understanding, using the phrase “how to catch a cow fishing,” which has nothing to do with the image that may be conjured in your head right now (or in the picture below) and everything to do with a very particular sense of the word “cow” in relation to fishing, referring to a large striped bass.

    Google itself offers some examples of queries which would have been pretty clear in intent to a human conversation partner (e.g.: “2019 brazil traveler to usa needed a visa,” and “do estheticians stand a lot at work”), but were previous to the update entirely lost on Google, based on the results it displayed.

    By applying the BERT models to both rankings and featured snippets in Search, Google pretends to be able to do a much better job, helping users find useful information. In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.

  Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in the query. And users can search in a way that feels natural for them.

    In an article from 2018, Rani Horev predicted BERT’s importance. As he stated, BERT will improve search and is undoubtedly a breakthrough in the use of Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing. The fact that it’s approachable and allows fast fine-tuning will likely allow a wide range of practical applications in the future.

  Does Google BERT Affect SEO?

  Yes, the BERT update affects SEO and allow me to explain why. 

  SEO – Search engine optimization is the process of making your site better for search engines. Therefore, any update that the search engines are making to their algorithm influences the search engine optimization process. 

  Now, the question that remains is what can you do to optimize for the BERT update?

  If we listen to Danny Sullivan, Google’s public Search Liaison, who helps people better understand search and helps Google better hear public feedback, the answer is pretty straightforward: nothing new. What Danny actually highlights is that there is nothing that you should do from today on that you shouldn’t have done before BERT. And that is: write content for users.  

    We hope that there is no doubt for anyone that Google has been focusing on content for a couple of years (here’s a case study on Panda 4 update, which targeted content big time and affected lots of important websites). And we don’t want to re-iterate the “content is king” nor to over-highlight the importance of writing both SEO and user-friendly content. Yet, let’s try to understand where SEO is standing now in the context of BERT.

  We believe that two main aspects need to be taken into consideration when we ask ourselves how the latest Google Update influence SEO. 

  Identify and Optimize for the Right User’ Search Intent

  In the BERT training process, the model receives pairs of sentences as input and learns to predict if the second sentence in the pair is the subsequent sentence in the original document. So, the algorithm is trying to better understand the user’s needs, even to predict them if and when possible. 

  Google BERT update tries to (even) better understand the users’ search intent. 

  Search intent or keyword intent is the reason why people conduct a specific search. Why are they searching? What are they trying to achieve through their search? Are they trying to figure out the answer to a question or do they want to reach a specific website? 

  With the increasing use of mobile and voice search, where people need fast and contextual answers to their questions,  Google tries to become more and more able to determine the search intent of people. So, the whole Google SERP is now trying to best fit the search intent and not the exact searched keyword. Now, more than ever, there will be situations when the exact searched term will not even be included in the Google search results page. And this happens because Google has become better and better at determining the search intent of people.

  Google has to figure out what exactly do people want, so it can offer them the search engine page results they need. And, from an SEO point of view, your job is to create content that is relevant to the Google users and matches their search intent. 

  Not to linger on this anymore, remember that search intent is more important than ever and here’s how to optimize for each type of search intent. 

  Optimize for Featured Snippets

  Google stated that BERT is about users’ natural language and understanding longer queries. What Google tries to highlight with the focus on featured snippets is that searcher intent is to find content that responds exactly to the this question really quick. 

  Featured Snippets (also known as answer boxes, knowledge graphs or Google direct answers).  If you’re searching for something like “how many calories does an apple have”, you’ll get a direct answer, highlighted within a box, just like in the examples below. We did a really cool research on answer boxes a while ago; you should check it out.

    Also, with the BERT update, Google focused on showing even more relevant featured snippets. To better understand what this improvement is all about, we are given the example the featured snippet for the query parking on a hill with no curb. Before, Google used to place too much importance on the word “curb” and ignored the word “no”, not understanding how critical that word was to appropriately respond to this query. So they would return results for parking on a hill with a curb. This latest update seems to fix this matter, as the search engine better understands the query and the context. 

    But how should you optimize for the featured snippets or answer boxes? Well, here is where content steps in, so keep on reading. 

  Does Google BERT Affect Content Marketing?

  Yes, Google stated that content is even more important, and therefore, one should focus their full attention on writing content relevant for the user.

  By definition, content marketing implies creating valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. And Google’s featured snippet seems to endorse that. And since Google announced that it had leveraged its pre-trained language model BERT to dramatically improve the understanding of search queries, it’s clear that content marketing needs to comply with this biggest leap forward in the history of search. 

  As Google better understands natural language, focusing on longer tail keywords and on featured snippets, it’s clear that there are big opportunities for content writers to serve their readers with content written more “humanly”, that answers a searcher’s question as quick as possible and provides much value. 

      Leaving the theory aside, here are the steps you should take to write content that is relevant for your users but also content that will rank high so that your users will find it. 

  Step 1. Perform a Google SERP analysis

  Every keyword research or content optimization process should start with a SERP analysis together with a competitor analysis. The Ranking Analysis from the Content Optimizer Tool gives you tons of insights related to the analyzed keyword. Quick and easy, you get to know the search volumes, what type of content ranks on that keyword, how difficult it is to rank on that query (by following keyword difficulty), as well as how popular that keyword is among searchers. Also, the tool lets you know the exact keywords and links that boosted that page in the top Google results to easily optimize your content. 

    Step 2. Create relevant & optimized content 

  Content Optimizer does most of the job for you. I know I’m biased and I don’t want to praise the tool too much, but the reality is that it does most of the job for you. Once you performed the ranking analysis, what you need to do is start writing a new piece of content or optimize the existing one and the Content Assistant will let you know the exact keywords you need to use so your content will be relevant for the user’s search intent. 

  Remember, you need to write for humans. BERT seems to make Google understand even better the searcher’s queries, so you have no excuses.  And if you’re asking why do you need a tool to “write for humans” I’d tell you that a tool can give you lots of insights of what you’re users are actually interested in and you can write content that will answer their needs; and secondly, your users need to find your content first on the first Google page result to access it. 

    Step 3. Discover new keywords & rankings opportunities

  You don’t have to limit yourself to one targeted keyword;  you need to discover other queries that your users might be interested in. Searchers have more than one question when it comes to products from your business. Take the opportunity and offer them relevant content for most of their questions. You can use the same Content Optimizer for this task. The tool has two sections that will automatically let you know what other questions are related to your search query:

  The Keyword Explorer  – this section is great for keyword analysis and for discovering new keyword opportunities. It also gives you the possibility of seeing only the question suggestions. Get inspired by the list of questions, check out the relevancy of the question, its volume, CPC (cost per click), and choose the one that is the most suitable and profitable.  

  The People Also Ask section – the Content Assistant will let you know the exact keywords you should use in your content, what people are searching for, but it will also offer you a set of questions that relate to your original search query. You should consider answering these questions in your content or create new content starting from these questions. 

    Although BERT integration in Google Search is currently only available for English queries in the US, Google says it is planning to apply BERT to additional languages and locations. So the rest of the world won’t have to wait too long until BERT will be responsible for the searches in dozens of languages. 

  When applied to ranking and featured snippets in search, BERT models can process words in relation to all other words in a sentence rather than considering them one-by-one and in order. This enables a better “understanding” of context, which is particularly helpful when it comes to longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions strongly affect meaning. This brings huge opportunities to the search world and big challenges to SEOs and digital marketers. 

  And while the performance improvements are impressive, Google acknowledges that natural language understanding remains an ongoing challenge. This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t adapt their marketing strategy or should re-think their marketing automation and SEO strategies to comply to today’s search marketing requirements. Yet, with search engines becoming more and more complex, there are no “complete guides” or “tips and tricks” lists to optimize for BERT or any other future updates (most likely). You need to keep yourself updated and have the user in mind no matter what you do.  

The post Google BERT Update. How the Natural Language Algorithm Affects You appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

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Mobile Applications to Help Improve Your English

Young elsa speak app folks right this moment (as well as learners of all ages) are equipped with more instruments for studying English than ever before. Back in the Eighties, learners relied upon non-public lessons, paper books, and language-studying tapes to enhance their English language skills. Now there are numerous extra opportunities on-line to hear genuine native audio system of English and to practice with activities like multiple-selection drills. Many of those actions are free whereas others value a fee. Whereas learners previously needed to journey throughout the globe to follow authentic language in an actual-world context, now learners utilize apps, text messaging, FaceTime, Skype, Google Hangouts, and extra to follow their language abilities. All one needs is a good Internet connection, a pc and an Android or iPad to get elsa speak app download started.

Before everything, one should not overlook the significance of studying literature within the language that one research it doesn't matter what the language could be. Kindle, Barnes and Noble, and other providers offer a superb choice read more on wikipedia here of downloadable books. Many choose PDF books that may be saved within the iBooks Utility of their iPads or Androids. Most experts agree that the very best English speakers and writers are those who have taken the time to learn extensively within the numerous genres together with but not restricted to romance, literary fiction, thriller, fantasy, science fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Writers of great books are likely to exemplify the most effective English so one shouldn't bypass the digital e book as a invaluable device in a world that tends to provide the quick gratification of accomplishing knowledge via online packages.

That being mentioned, it's good to know there are such a lot of apps and Web sites for college students who wish to study English on their very own, at the same time as a way of outperforming friends at college or at work (or to realize a high score on a test). One such valuable site for buying English is Udemy. Udemy provides courses of every kind in the English language. A majority of the lecturers are native English speakers or second-language speakers of high proficiency. By taking a Udemy course, the learner builds vocabulary particular to a field of expertise.

Another glorious site is The Great Programs, a site where one should buy a digital course by Great Professors and stream it in a web-based, digital locker. The Nice Programs site supplies quite lengthy English programs with a broad range of matters, especially in literature and philosophy. In any other case, an advanced English -language-learner may supplement his or her studies with excellent lectures given at TED.com or by free programs provided by means of universities at Coursera's web site.

There is something for people in any respect language levels, from the early novices to the superior professionals. There are programs to handle the needs of each learning style. Irrespective of how younger or old, everyone benefits from web sites originally created for each private and non-private colleges. Learners https://www.elsaspeak.net/ and teachers find a vast number of downloadable worksheets and puzzles as well as downloadable English books at such sites. Many of those learning sites are supported by the products they advertise and promote. Such sponsor's products present value because they tend to be related to the acquisition of English.

It could be not possible to supply a listing of all sites obtainable on the market in the digital world. New websites pop up all the time when artistic people design original means of teaching languages online. Fairly than learning in a single venue with a restricted methodology, college students profit from publicity to the number of instructing strategies, methods, activities, and video games. Here is a checklist of some of my favourite sites that I've used in my expertise as an English teacher. Not all of those websites match the wants of each learner so learners want to pick and select between these sites and extra:

At Kiz Phonics, students discover worthwhile examples of the pronunciation of English sounds. Needless to say this site is American, however there are equivalent sites with pronunciation from England, Canada and other English-talking international locations. Grownup learners will profit just as a lot from listening to examples of pronunciation on a children's web site as will children since phonics apply to all ages. It is advisable to focus on the wide array of vowel sounds pronounced by English speakers because most second-language speakers of English are initially unaware of the way every vowel makes so many sounds relying upon the letters round it.

For unfamiliar phrases, I might flip to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary on-line, to the Oxford Dictionary on-line, or to a basic "phrase-of-the-day" e-mail list for which one can sign up to get each day messages with new vocabulary. Not even a native speaker will possible know all of the phrases that one receives within the e-mails of words each day. Students should pay shut consideration to the etymologies of words. An etymology is an explanation of where a phrase came from and presumably how it modified in both form and sound over a long time frame. The research of the origins of phrases makes a challenging language like English all of the more fun because it hyperlinks the language to historic origins and to numerous cultures.

When contemplating the meanings of words, it stays clever to judge a phrase used in context. English vocabulary is planted in a setting that permits the English-language-learner to know the supposed that means. There are sites, together with these sites with dictionaries, that explain the differences between homonyms, homophones, synonyms and rhyming words. One such site is the RhymeZone.com. The Rhyme Zone also gives a beneficial thesaurus that can allow learners to grasp the nuances of the English language.

ABA English offers a natural manner of studying English by means of watching films associated to actual life. Certainly one of my former grownup college students from Italy remarked that this website was satisfying and that it made learning English look like less work than learning within the classroom. ABA English provides a trial period in order that anybody can check out this system and benefit from their movies free of charge. If learners desire to advance in this system, they will join the Premium companies. In any other case, learners may prefer watching You Tube without spending a dime videos about the English language and singing together with some You Tube Music videos with the lyrics printed for singers. Singing allows learners to observe the flow of sounds in a pure way.

Wall Avenue English affords exciting social golf equipment. College students go to at least one their centers (centres) to participate in terrific activities that tackle common tradition, traits, marketing, business, advertising, and even the humanities. It may be a variety of fun to make associates at a Wall Street social activity. Wall Street additionally gives an exciting "Village" online recognized also as "English Anytime" for motivated learners who have to know English geared towards success on the job, in school, and within the workforce. Wall Street English combines the very best of on-website teaching with on-line teaching for a really cheap and inexpensive worth.

For severe ESL and TEFL college students who wish to explore English tales intimately, one finds Pink Monkey.com, a website with an immense collection of literary summaries which are written in English. Such summaries will assist learners higher understand their literary studies or choose books that they could like to read. Both Cliffs and Spark Notes are similar American websites for literary inclined students of the great English language.

Last but not least, ABCmouse.com, for a small charge, teaches kids actions that come immediately from the classroom. One finds thousands of actions at children's fingertips. College students click on any level and are led to an best english speaking practice app exercise in order that learners never run out of activities. For teenagers of all ages, Reading Bear will teach them 1,200 vocabulary gadgets in 50 displays that cowl all the principles of English phonics freed from charge.

As one can see, regardless of the place one has studied English up to now or where she or he presently studies English alone or in a classroom, there may be much that the learner can study on-line to enhance the reading, writing, listening, and speaking of English by web sites and apps. Learners will find an array of actions ranging from basic, elementary phonics to school-degree presentations on sites like Udemy and TED.com. Irrespective of where you have got arrived in your English language studies, you must take accountability on your personal studying.

A single trainer can't present students with all the data they need because a instructor's knowledge is restricted and comes from a single viewpoint no matter how great the teacher is likely to be. Thus, college students shouldn't blame their teachers for what they do not know when there are so many opportunities to ELSA Speak App elsa speak promo code explore English on the Internet. College students should at all times utilize research as a way of getting a greater understanding of phrases, phrases, and idioms. It stays the accountability of the learner to hunt to cowl all facets of language, particularly when there are such a lot of thrilling opportunities!

English is the global enterprise language of the day. Many faculties, schools and universities are all offering English instructing for college students and try this site business professionals. With the growing demand for English, many ESL academics are also trained to fulfill the global demand of ESL training needs.

For instance, in lots of Asian and African international locations, the English language is being taught as the Second or Third Language. Also, there are a lot of sorts of English given the mom-tongue influences in nations similar to Singapore, Malaysia, ELSA Speak App app english speaking and listenin New Zealand, India, Brunei, Australia and Canada. As an ESL trainer, one can find that this ESL educating guide supplies you with a quick guidelines of ideas, helping you to make your ESL classes enjoyable and simple for international students.

Understand Your ESL ELSASpeakApp College students:

Mainly, you will have two forms of students - faculty college students and company shoppers. ESL faculty students are those that don't have English because the mother tongue. They need assistance with Basic English grammar in addition to Advanced English dialog for day by day living. Company business shoppers are these managers and employees who want to shine their English in an ESL class for efficient international enterprise communication. By understanding your ESL college students, you will be able to design teaching strategies that deal with their specific needs.

Break The elsa speak promo code Ice:

Breaking the silence within the first 10 minutes of each ESL class is essential for success. Most ESL students are very shy to talk and write something in English. With a optimistic and supportive studying atmosphere, you will be able to encourage them to attempt speaking and writing in English each day. To interrupt the ice, you will have to make the primary 10 minutes the most fun and relaxing in your students to open up themselves and communicate English freely via mini video games and workout routines. Invent fun games for them to introduce each other, inform funny tales, or clarify something in English.

Create Interactive Actions:

English learning should not be boring. Make your courses enjoyable and interactive for all of your ESL students. Then, they are going to be involved in learning and will develop into engaged all through the lessons. Manage learning activities that maintain your ESL students concerned and can enable them to learn from one another. Ask their opinions and options on new matters. Discuss problems and challenges that they encounter in English talking and writing. Combine seasonal occasions (e.g. New 12 months, Thanksgiving and Christmas) as a part of your educating curriculum.

Focus on Communication Abilities:

If there's one thing you may educate ESL college students, it is to focus on their communication expertise. This implies serving to them to enhance day by day conversations with others, to shine their phone manners and to shine their writing type. With telephone conversations, ESL students may have no visual clues so it is very important communicate clearly and slowly.

When unsure, they need to at all times ask a question to clarify and ensure what they intend to say. With written communication, ESL students just have to observe writing one thing or something day-after-day from a easy word, a letter, an invitation or electronic mail message to a full essay or report assignment. Educate them the suitable alternative of words and phrases to attenuate confusion for others. Observe talking in front of a mirror each morning and night.

Have you ever met Siri? Well, after all you could have in case you are an iPhone 4S consumer. Based on some consumer evaluations, Siri is quite a unprecedented digital assistant app in terms of helping you with your every day activities, corresponding to setting an alarm, scheduling appointments, finding a restaurant, and even answering a number of random questions bothering you all throughout the day.

True enough that Siri could possibly be a powerful app you possibly can add to your telephone, and you might be fortunate sufficient if in case you have ELSA Speak App english speaking practice app an iPhone 4S since you might enjoy the thrilling advantages of having Siri as your day by day companion. However how about for Android customers?

Fear no more, Android users, you might be definitely not out of luck! Inform Siri to maneuver over as she isn't just the proper digital buddy more about the company for you. Actually, there are a variety of options available in order so that you can have your own digital assistant on your smartphone.

So, here's a record of virtual assistant apps you could download immediately in your smartphone.

Speaktoit

This digital assistant might help you type out textual content messages, nonetheless, you continue to need to hit the ship button afterwards. It could possibly help preserve your calendar and it may possibly additionally inform you weather updates of a certain location. All you have to do is dictate it, and it is just like how Siri works. Speaktoit could be your nice journey companion.

Jeannie

Do you need a virtual buddy that is multilingual? If that's the case, then Jeannie might be the perfect possibility for you. What's attention-grabbing about Jeannie is that she has traveled the world, and that is the reason why she app english speaking and listening grids knows a variety of languages. Even though she can just speak English, she will be able to type text messages in other languages. This might be a pleasant characteristic if you have non-English speaking family members or friends.

One other spectacular factor about her is that she is net savvy, and she will check products on online marketplaces corresponding to Amazon. Truly, Jeannie has two variations, the lite one which you can download freely from the Google Play Store, and the advert model that that you must buy for around $three.

Vlingo

This one is Siri's rival in terms of the vary of offers. Aside from working as a locator for an area restaurant nearby, Vlingo can app grids english ks3 speaking and listening even work as your updater on your social networking sites reminiscent of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and so on.

Skyvi

That is said to be the most creative of all digital assistants. While other digital assistants offer you basic info concerning your issues, Skyvi offers you leisure that would ease your helpful resources nerve-racking day. It's programmed to let you know jokes, and it could possibly additionally make some witty remarks. It's a free app that you could get from the Google Play Store.

So, are you thinking of making your life a complete lot easier? Then, you should start getting ELSA Speak App speak english fluently app your self a digital buddy that can make it easier to via your daily ups and downs.

This checklist of digital assistants is a must have for every smartphone user who wants to make his or her work simpler, quicker, and smarter. Hence, hit the Google Play Retailer in your Android telephone now and begin getting your individual virtual assistant that may completely fit your on a regular basis needs and considerations.

[willafigg]

The Natural Laws of Leadership

Today, we are excited because we have a post from Andrew White ahead of Marketing of Loveawake.com dating site. He is a recognized expert on online marketing. He also teaches self-motivation on his downtime.  He beautifully answers what is leadership in this insightful article. We hope you learn more and enjoy the reading as we did.

I recently picked up John C. Maxwell’s The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership – there are a lot of books on leadership, but when I was flipping through its pages at Barnes and Noble, its contents really resonated with me so I bought it. I was later comforted to learn that it is among the top-rated books when searching for “leadership” on Amazon.com.

Something you should know about me, if it wasn’t already patently obvious, is that I am not a natural leader. I am, however, a naturally fluent and eloquent speaker. For a long time, I painfully and mistakenly confused my oratory charisma with charisma and leadership par excellence. I have experienced a lot of frustration stemming from wanting others to follow me and then being disappointed when I didn’t achieve the results I wanted. This was due to a disconnect between my perception of my leadership abilities and others’ perception of my strength as a leader. (And if there isn’t already a whole category of mental health literature dedicated to disconnects between your self-perception and others’ perception of you, there ought to be.)

Fortunately, leadership is a skill that can be acquired, and it’s one that I’m working on. I have a long journey ahead of me, and this book has helped me realize actionable areas where I can work to grow.

This post is long – I am not yet skilled enough in leadership to write a shorter one – but it is shorter than Maxwell’s book.

Here we go.

Law of the lid – leadership ability determines a person’s level of effectiveness

For any goals that require participation or cooperation of other people, your effectiveness will be greatly impacted by leadership. Fortunately, leadership ability is something you can work to improve: a good start is by better alignment with these laws!

Law of influence – the true measure of leadership is influence–nothing more, nothing less

Leadership doesn’t come from a title. This may explain why a lot of people cling to their titles, say, in the workplace environment; it validates a self-image of being high ranking, without requiring any real charisma. It may also explain why some people become egregiously offended by people claiming to be the CEO of businesses with a handful or even zero employees. (Big-time CEOs are often true leaders, and awarding yourself a big title can help you influence others.)

Leadership doesn’t come from having a lot of knowledge; there are plenty of academics and other obscure erudites who aren’t leaders. However, a lack of knowledge can sabotage an otherwise capable leader; indeed, knowledge breeds capability, which is a trait of the leader, but knowledge alone is not sufficient criterion for leadership. Leadership doesn’t come from being a manager or entrepreneur. As a manager, you’re just managing pre-existing systems to make sure that they don’t run off course. As an entrepreneur, you’re just identifying and executing business opportunities. Of course, leadership skill can greatly help a manager or entrepreneur succeed. And leadership doesn’t come from being a pioneer. Just because you are the first to explore an unknown area (for example, experimenting with a new approach to nutrition) doesn’t make you a leader. Instead, proof of leadership is found in followers. If other people follow your foray into the unknown, then you are a leader.

I’ll reiterate: proof of leadership is found in followers.

Several factors come into play when people emerge as leaders: their character (who they are), their relationships (who they know), their knowledge (what they know), their intuition (what they feel), their experience (where they’ve been), their past success (what they’ve done), and their ability (what they can do).

There is a difference between leadership with leverage, where someone follows you because you have control over their salary, academic history, or can hold some other gun to their head, and pure leadership, which stems from influence.

If you want to test your leadership skills, try getting involved with a volunteer organization and try to effect change. This may be one of the reasons employers like Joel Spolsky value starting non-profits in college: its a test of leadership ability. And as Maxwell mentions (in Law 20), having leaders in your organization is a great boon.

Law of Process – leadership develops daily, not in a day

We need to use our pre-frontal cortex and construct a long-term plan for cultivating our leadership skills. Determine a personal plan for growth; set goals. I found this book to be helpful. You can also make long-term investments in people who follow you; one way to do this is by creating a culture of growth within your company (or any other organization). Tony Hsieh did this at Zappos (check out my notes on his book Delivering Happiness).

  Law of Navigation – anyone can steer the ship but it takes a leader to chart the course

Preparation is critical! Maxwell advises that you do your homework before creating an action plan: draw on past experience, hold intentional convos with experts and team members to gather info, and examine current conditions. I can testify from personal experience that it is much much easier to get someone to comply with your wishes if you have exhaustively prepared. My high school chemistry teacher, Mr. Casey O’Connell, taught that to me by making sure that we tried as hard as we could on a problem, and then writing down our specific questions, before approaching him for help. That way, we could get immediately down to business. Similarly, people on message boards are much more likely to help you with a problem if you’ve done your homework: tell them that you’ve experimented with different approaches and that you’ve searched on Google before asking. People like to help, but they often resent their time being wasted, which is a sign of disrespect. As you’ll see in Law 7, respect for others is an important attribute of a leader.

Also, it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to fake skill. Studies have demonstrated that experts remember more details from conversations in subjects of their expertise, spot more nuanced features when glancing at a subject-relevant object, and can have quicker response times to questions. When you are talking with someone, through your response time and other subtle cues, they can get an intuitive read of your preparedness or expertise.

Law of addition – leaders add value by serving others

Are you making things better for those who follow you? You can lead others for whom you are making conditions worse (e.g. in abusive relationships), but this is not a profitable and viable long-term strategy (c.f. recent drama in the stock market). Value adding requires intentionality: although we’ve been socially conditioned to think otherwise, we humans are really selfish creatures. You can argue about altruism (Williams syndrome cases are an exception), but normal altruism is mostly directed toward group members, and you can even argue that selflessness only exists because of selfish payoff. Perhaps through an evolution of consciousness, we can conceive of all of the humanity as one group, but that would be subject to another post.

Maxwell says we add value when we value others, when we make ourselves more valuable to others, and when we know and relate to what others value. This last one is huge, both in personal life and in business. On a business’s website, we should tailor our messaging to what the customer actually cares about instead of bragging about our own success. In writing this blog, I am going to try to be aware that examples I provide from my personal life actually help drive points home and are not simply self-serving egocentricity (I have already done some vicious editing).

Some exercises recommended by Maxwell:

* If you want to improve in this area, you can practice doing small acts of service for others without seeking credit or recognition for them, and then continue until you no longer resent doing them. * Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 on how well you relate to the values of people close to you. If you can’t articulate what someone values, then spend more time with that person in order to improve. (I just applied this idea when shopping for a birthday gift.)

  Law of solid ground – trust is the foundation of leadership

Maxwell says that trust comes from competence, connection, and character. Character communicates consistency, potential, respect; character comprises integrity, authenticity, and discipline. In order to develop integrity, don’t shave the truth, don’t tell white lies, and don’t fudge numbers. Be truthful even when it hurts. In order to develop authenticity, be yourself with everyone. In order to develop discipline, do the right thing every day regardless of how you feel. If you want to test whether you’re trustworthy, ask yourself: do you regularly carry weighty responsibilities? Do you hear bad news from followers instead of just good news?

If your followers aren’t placing their complete trust in you, you shouldn’t blame them. Instead, ask yourself what you can do to build more trust.

Law of respect – people naturally follow leaders stronger than themselves

This one is huge. Having an understanding of this is very important to understanding human nature. People will only follow leaders stronger than themselves and very rarely follow leaders weaker than themselves. People may follow someone weaker if it’s in the context of the workplace, or if they absolutely need to in order to achieve some personal end. However, people will rarely comply with people weaker than them and they will resent having to follow someone weaker than them. (It could be fun to do an analysis of leadership in the context of the TV show The Office, wherein frustration results from having a non-leader, Michael Scott, with a leadership title. Incidentally, I am planning another post about The Office, tentatively titled “Information Theory and Comedy”).

There are six ways leaders gain other’s respect: 1. Natural leadership ability. 2. Respect for others. Following a leader is voluntary. 3. Courage. Courage includes doing what’s right, even at the risk of failure, in the face of great danger and under the brunt of relentless criticism. It gives followers hope. 4. Success. This is self-explanatory, but everyone enjoys siding with a winner. 5. Loyalty. People respect people who stick with the team until the job is done, remain loyal to the organization when the going gets rough, and look out for followers even when it hurts them. 6. Adding value to others.

If you’re curious about “measuring your respect”, try looking at the caliber of people who choose to follow you. Your strength is signified by both the ceiling and the average strength of your followers. Also, you can try seeing how your people respond when you ask for commitment or change: this tests your compliance, which is the measure of your influence, which as stated in Law 2, is the true reflection your strength as a leader.

If your goal is to improve your strength, rather than measure, then create a goal, practice or habit for each of the six areas. Ask people in your life who are closest to you what they respect most about you, and ask them to tell you in which areas you most need to grow. Then chart your course based on their honest feedback.

Law of intuition – leaders evaluate everything with a leadership bias

Leaders read a lot of things: leaders read situations, leaders read trends, leaders read their resources, leaders read people, and leaders read themselves. Leaders are intuitive in their areas of strength.

In order to grow in this area, I’ve been working on my ability to read people. If this is something you’re interested in, you can read my notes on Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman or What Every Body Is Saying by Joe Navarro. Paul Ekman’s book Unmasking the Face is also fairly good, and he has an online course to train your ability to quickly interpret emotions. I’m going to sign up for it and review it soon.

Maxwell advises, “Think about your current projects or goals. Imagine how you can accomplish them without doing any of the work yourself…except by recruiting, empowering, and motivating others.”

Ask, Who is the best person to take this on? What resources do we possess that can help us? What will this take financially? How can I encourage my team to achieve success?

  Law of magnetism – who you are is who you attract

People attract others of the similar generation, attitude, background, values, energy, giftedness, and leadership ability. Be cognizant of that. As Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s elite venture capital firms says on their webpage explaining their criterion for companies they choose to invest in: “A company’s DNA is set in the first 90 days. All team members are the smartest or most clever in their domain. ‘A’ level founders attract an “A” level team.” Other books also express the notion that “B” founders attract a “C” level team, and so forth.

  Law of connection – leaders touch a heart before they ask for a hand

Maxwell says that there are eight steps to connection:

Connect with yourself 2. Communicate with openness and sincerity 3. Know your audience 4. Live your message 5. Go to where they are 6. Focus on them, not yourself 7. Believe in them 8. Offer direction and hope

He also offers the helpful maxim, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Law of the inner circle – a leader’s potential is determined by those closest to him

On selecting your inner circle, ask: 1. Do they have high influence with others? 2. Do they bring a complimentary gift to the table? 3. Do they hold a strategic position in their organization? 4. Do they add value to me and to the organization? seek people who help you improve 5. Do they positively impact other inner circle members?

A “yes” answer to the above five criteria is not sufficient grounds for inclusion, but Maxwell cautions that a single no is grounds for exclusion. He adds that in general, you should look for people who evince excellence, maturity, and good character in everything they do.

Law of empowerment – only secure people give power to others

If you’re feeling insecure about this, Maxwell claims the paradoxical “making yourself dispensable, you actually make yourself indispensable”. Unfortunately, he does not justify it from a logical perspective, but it seems intuitively right and I’m ready to believe him based on his extensive leadership experience. Maybe the paradox is true because having the ability to empower people is a leadership trait, and strong leaders are always desirable.

Also, he recommends that you start believing in your people. Dwell on their positive qualities and characteristics; look for their greatest strengths and envision how they could leverage those strengths to achieve significant things. You gain nothing by dwelling on their weaknesses (except, perhaps, when evaluating for termination or reassignment). As Dale Carnegie advises, “Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.”

  Law of the picture – people do what people see

  There’s a reason that “do as I say, not as I do” is such an ineffective leadership strategy. We are mimetic learners and more readily learn by imitation rather than through explicit instruction.

Some points: 1. Followers are always watching what you do 2. It’s easier to teach what’s right than to do what’s right 3. We should work on changing ourselves before trying to improve others 4. According to workers surveyed, the most valuable gift a leader can give is being a good example

Mission provides purpose, answering “why?” Vision provides a picture, answering “what?” The strategy provides a plan, answering “how?”

If you want to improve your alignment with the law of the picture, list three to five things you wish your people did better than they currently do. Now, grade your performance on them. If your self-scores are low, then you need to change your behavior. If your scores are high, then you need to make your example more visible to your people.

Law of buy-in – people buy into the leader, then the vision

The leader finds the dream and then the people; the people find the leader and then the dream. If you are struggling to find people willing to listen to your great idea, perhaps you should consider improving your leadership skills.

The law of victory – leaders find a way for the team to win

The best leaders are relentless in their pursuit of group victory. Leadership is responsible, losing is unacceptable, passion is unquenchable, creativity is essential, quitting is unthinkable, commitment is unquestionable, victory is inevitable.

There are three components that lead to victory: 1. Unity of vision, with everyone sharing a common agenda. This is crucial, and unfortunately, many people have their own personal agendas (of advancement, or psychology game-play) that really work against project success. 2. Diversity of skills 3. A leader dedicated to victory and raising players to their potential

Law of the big mo – momentum is a leader’s best friend

In top-tier organizations, there is a spirit of excellence that produces positive upward momentum.

Momentum is the great exaggerator 2. Momentum makes leaders look better than they are 3. Momentum helps followers perform better than they are 4. Momentum is easier to steer than start 5. Momentum is the most powerful change agent 6. Momentum is the leader’s responsibility 7. Momentum begins inside the leader

In order to foster momentum, continually praise effort, but reward and celebrate accomplishments. I’m not certain about the best way to reward someone, whether it’s through social rewards, cash incentives, or cash equivalents (e.g. sports tickets). Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that achievement-based cash awards only work in a mechanical environment, like a factory or homomorphisms thereof, and not in environments requiring creative thinking: in those environments, it actually suppresses performance. My intuition is that cash equivalents are best.

Early wins are critical, so try to see how quickly you can build some kind of momentum.

  Law of priorities – leaders understand that activity is not necessarily accomplishment

The Pareto principle, as applied to business, states that 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort.

If you want to improve in this area, three questions are important:

What is required? 2. What gives the greatest return? 3. What brings the greatest reward?

List your answers to the above three questions, and then delegate or eliminate things from your life that wasn’t listed. As Hiten Shah says, “Do what you love and outsource the rest.” One thing I have to do in my business is making spec documents. The truth of the matter is, this is something I can easily teach others to a point that they could easily do it 80% as well as me, and probably exceed me with practice. I am going to write a blog post on how to create kick-ass spec documents, and then I can just hire someone else to do them for me.

  Law of sacrifice – a leader must give up to go up

There is no success without sacrifice. Leaders are often asked to give up more than others. You must keep giving up to stay up; there’s a common fallacy that once you’ve reached the finish line, you can revert to old behaviors. And the higher the level of leadership, the greater the sacrifice.

Make two lists: things you are willing to give up in order to go up, and the things you are not willing to sacrifice to advance. I’ve made some sacrifices already, such as in my diet (avoiding meat, raw and refined sugar, and other indulgences). I’ve stopped smoking weed, and I’m planning on making a post on how to stop smoking, targeted towards people who are thinking about quitting. Also, I’ve really cut down on my alcohol consumption; I rarely drink when I go out. (This doesn’t pose any social problems, since if I want to drink something when I’m out, I order water and tip the bartender, and nobody really cares.) Something I should give up, but haven’t yet, is negative thinking. I am working on it, though. One way I’m tackling it is through journaling gratitude at GratitudeLog.com (I should make this a daily practice).

Something I’m not yet willing to give up is playing basketball.

Law of timing – when to lead is as important as what to do and where to go

Timing requires an understanding of the situation, maturity (right motives), confidence, decisiveness, experience, intuition (e.g. about timing and morale), and preparation (if the timing isn’t right, the leader must create those conditions).

Law of explosive growth – to add growth, lead followers–to multiply, lead leaders

Leaders who develop leaders want to be succeeded. As I mentioned earlier, when you make yourself dispensable, you paradoxically become indispensable. Leaders who develop leaders develop the top 20 percent; leaders who develop leaders focus on strengths; leaders who develop leaders treat individuals differently, focusing on the highest-performing individuals; leaders who develop leaders invest time in others, building for the very long-term.

Unfortunately, developing leaders is not an “add-water-and-stir proposition”. Leaders are hard to find (they don’t flock, like most humans/other animals), they’re hard to gather and hard to keep.

There are three stages of developing leaders: stage 1 is developing yourself. Stage 2 is developing your team. And stage 3 is developing leaders.

Law of legacy – a leader’s lasting value is measured by succession

The recipe:

Know the legacy you want to leave 2. Live the legacy you want to leave 3. Choose who will carry on your legacy 4. Make sure you pass the baton

There’s an exercise that can help with steps one through three: imagine that you’re attending your own funeral and somehow have the ability to hear what people are saying at your eulogy. What do they say about you? Now consider what you’d want them to say about you – and act accordingly to shape their future behavior, today. Others may benefit from Steve Pavlina’s exercise on finding your life purpose. This may be my weakest area; right now, I don’t have any strong purpose. I do know that there’s more work I need to do in order to uncover it.

* * *

By reading this book and posting these “laws”, I am affirming Maxwell’s influence. Do I think that this list is comprehensive and exhaustive? No. Do I think the 21 laws are “irrefutable”? Not necessarily. But as Max DePree says, “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.” (Recall Steve Jobs’s famous “reality distortion field”.) DePree’s claim makes sense in a tribal sort of way; our realities are socially constructed, and who best to set the tone or frame, then the leader? So Maxwell’s use of definitive language, “irrefutable”, is understandable. I hope this post has benefited you in your quest to improve yourself as a leader. I know it’s benefited me. If you want to check out the book on Amazon, you can do so here.

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The Religion of 'Star Wars': Why People from All Faiths Embrace the Force

Yoda, seen here in ‘The Empire Strikes Back,’ has parallels in many religious traditions (Photo: Everett)

A lifelong Star Wars fan from California, Irfan Rydhan always saw echoes of his Muslim faith in the concept of the Force. But when he began researching the parallels between Star Wars and Islam for a blog post, he was surprised to find a traditional Sufi figure that reminded him of Yoda. “Al-Khidr is described as a green being who is very knowledgeable,” Rydhan, a project manager in the design and construction industry, tells Yahoo Movies. “And obviously that kind of translated for me into Yoda, who’s a green creature who guides someone into the right path.”

Rydhan isn’t the only person of faith to wonder if Yoda has roots in their own religious tradition. Jewish Star Wars fans have noted that the name of Luke Skywalker’s mentor sounds like the Hebrew terms yada, meaning “to know”, or yo-dei-ah, the original term for “Jew.” Some Taoists believe that Yoda’s age in Return of the Jedi (“When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not!”) is a nod to their belief that humans can live 800 years or more, like the Taoist saint Peng Zu. One Buddhism scholar claims that Yoda was actually modeled after a Tibetan Buddhist monk named Tsenzhab Serkong Rinpoche. And when The Empire Strikes Back opened in Utah theaters in 1980, many Mormons were convinced that Yoda was based on lookalike Spencer W. Kimball, the then-president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

It’s not just Yoda. Ever since the first Star Wars movie opened 40 years ago on May 25, people from all different faiths have been excited to find parallels to their own beliefs and traditions in the sci-fi saga, both in its larger themes about the all-powerful Force and specific details of the Skywalker saga. With all the ideological divisions and disagreements that exist between followers of different religions, how is it that Star Wars resonates with so many? The answer lies in creator George Lucas’ vision of his saga as a “mono-myth”: a story with broad themes and characters that would have echoes in nearly every belief system. Yahoo Movies spoke with several faith leaders, religion scholars, and adherents of different religions, all of them Star Wars fans, to get some perspective on how the Skywalker legend can be a source of divine inspiration.

Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi, who explains the Force in ‘A New Hope’ (Photo: Everett)

The Star Wars films chronicle the interplanetary battle between the scrappy, good-hearted Rebels and the sleek, power-hungry Empire. Original protagonist Luke Skywalker rises from naïve farm boy to despot-overthrowing hero when he learns the ways of the Jedi, an ancient order of warriors who harness a spiritual energy called the Force. “In terms of ideology, Star Wars is this beautiful milkshake, like a slurry of different religious ideas all mixed together,” says Ryan Overbey, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University.

That Star Wars recipe was concocted by Lucas, who was raised Methodist, but harbored a lifelong fascination with different cultures’ ideas of God. “I remember when I was 10 years old, I asked my mother, ‘If there’s only one God, why are there so many religions?’” Lucas told Time magazine in 1999. “I’ve been pondering that question ever since, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that all the religions are true.” That idea was reinforced for Lucas by the writings of mythologist Joseph Campbell, who theorized that all mythic narratives, including the stories of Christ and Buddha, were variations on the same universal story: the “hero’s journey.”

Lucas made an effort to model his Star Wars films on Campbell’s formula, “telling an old myth in a new way,” as he described it to Time magazine. Along with the broader story about the struggle between good and evil, the writer-director borrowed specific elements from a grab bag of myths and religions. For example: “Jedi” sounds like the Sufi term for “master of the mystic-warrior way,” the Arabic word “Al-Jeddi.” According to producer Gary Kurtz, the Jedi blessing “May the force be with you” is modeled on the Christian liturgical phrase “The Lord be with you.” Darth Vader’s invitation to Luke to join him on the dark side is evocative of the temptations of Jesus Christ and Buddha. Part of the Ewok language from Return of the Jedi is a Tibetan Buddhist prayer.

More importantly, Lucas invented a new concept of the divine for his Star Wars saga: the Force, the centerpiece of the Jedi. “I put the Force into the movie in order to try to awaken a certain kind of spirituality in young people — more a belief in God than a belief in any particular religious system,” Lucas told Time. The Force is described by Obi-Wan Kenobi in A New Hope as the source of a Jedi’s power, “the energy field created by all living things” which “binds the galaxy together.” In The Empire Strikes Back, we learn that the Force has a light and a dark side. It’s all deliberately vague, yet specific enough to apply to the idea of God in every major world religion. That’s where Rydham first saw parallels to Islam. “Our concept of God is kind of similar to the Force in terms of, we don’t believe that God has any human image or form that humans understand,” he explains.

Daisy Ridley as Rey in ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ (Photo: Lucasfilm)

For the increasing number of people who are raised without organized religion — many of whom have probably seen a Star Wars movie — the Force can open the door to understanding complex religious concepts. “When I teach religion, the Force is actually a good way to begin talking about things like Taoism or monism in Hinduism,” says Joseph Laycock, assistant professor of religious studies at Texas State University. Pastor Ben Larson-Wolbrink of the First Presbyterian Church of Beacon, NY has used the Force in religious instruction, as a way to “try to move beyond this idea of [God as] a guy on a throne on a cloud with a beard.”

It’s not just about using pop culture to make religion accessible; there are deeper theological ideas to be found in the Force as well. Rabbi Brent Spodek of the Beacon Hebrew Alliance sees the Force as a way to look past simple concepts of good and evil into the more nuanced understanding put forth by Jewish Rabbinical literature. “Darth Vader is Luke’s father, and Kylo Ren is Han Solo and Princess Leia’s son,” Spodek says. “The dark side, the shadow side, isn’t out there somewhere; it’s in here… In Hebrew it’s your yetzer hara, your own appetites, unchecked. All of the things we might think of as wrong are in many ways questions of moderation or control. Luke Skywalker’s like, ‘I need to learn how to fight, I want to defeat Vader.’ Of course, he wants to be powerful and mighty strong. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But that desire to be strong, that desire to be mighty, unchecked, is what leads you to be Vader.”

Such big ideas about human existence rarely come up in discussions of other pop-culture juggernauts. What is it about Star Wars that sparks these conversations? For one thing, the Star Wars films have a religious belief system built into the story, something that sets them apart from the secular-humanist Star Trek or the Marvel and D.C. movies, in which “gods” are just extra-powerful superheroes. As to why people of so many different faiths can comfortably align themselves with Lucas’s belief system, it has a lot to do with the fact that Lucas based it in religious ideas, rather than any specific practice.

“The Force and the Jedi Order and all of that are already a couple of degrees of separation from actual religious life as people experience it,” says Michael Norton, assistant professor of philosophy at University of Arkansas Little Rock. “So I think it’s easy for audiences to take that and fill in the gaps with their own experiences.” Laycock, who teaches Star Wars in his Religion and Film and World Religion courses, points out that the Force transcends cultural differences that inevitably exist in real-world religions. “There don’t really seem to different denominations of Jediism or anything,” he notes. “It’s all just the Force — you either feel it or you don’t. Like, different planets don’t experience the Force differently because of their cultures or languages — everybody just gets it!”

Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ (Photo: LucasFilm)

In this sense, Jediism can been seen as an idealized version of religion, uncorrupted by historical divisions. It’s little wonder that some Star Wars fans have been inspired to claim Lucas’ invented faith as their own. A 2017 New York Times article about the small-but-growing Jedi religion estimates the number of serious practitioners in England alone is around 2,000. Of course, bringing Jediism into the real world creates those real-world divisions absent in the films; for example, the independent Jedi organizations, the Temple of the Jedi order, and the Church of Jediism have conflicting belief systems.

Even if Jediism fails to thrive outside of Lucas’ galaxy, the Force will continue to be a touchstone for Star Wars fans of many faiths. The films might even be moving towards a deeper exploration of their own religious ideas. Rogue One introduced a new kind of Force follower in Chirrut Îmwe, a warrior-monk who commits himself to Jedi principles without actually being a Jedi. And Luke Skywalker’s declaration in the Last Jedi trailer that “It’s time for the Jedi to end”, while open to interpretation, might mean that traditional ways of using the Force will evolve and change with new heroine Rey.

As long as the films encourage audiences to go on their own spiritual quests, they’ll be keeping with Lucas’ original vision. As Lucas told Time about inventing the Force, “I wanted to make it so that young people would begin to ask questions about the mystery. Not having enough interest in the mysteries of life to ask the question, ‘Is there a God or is there not a God?’ — that is for me the worst thing that can happen.”

Watch the trailer for ‘Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi:’

Read more from Yahoo Movies:

‘Star Wars’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’: Back in 1977, People Couldn’t Stop Comparing the Two

Should You Name Your Baby Anakin? The Rising Popularity of a ‘Star Wars’ Baby Name

‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ First Look: Carrie Fisher on the Cover of ‘Vanity Fair’