Friday, March 20, 2020

Mel Gibsons Braveheart Essays

Mel Gibsons Braveheart Essays Mel Gibsons Braveheart Paper Mel Gibsons Braveheart Paper but theres a chance they had an illegitimate daughter before her death. Wallace in fact may have had several illegitimate children as he was seen as a ladies man. He fought his enemy bravely and savagely. Some of his deeds are startling in their cruelty by todays standards, but were the norm for this time. He was a honourable man, as well, who refused to kill women and children, when to do so was acceptable war practice. The sets costumes and special effects and grimy make up all carry the veneer of realism, putting the viewer knee-deep in the mud and blood. The battle scenes rank upon the roughest ever committed to film, and earn the film and R rating. In the 13th century, the forces fought with swords, maces, chains and anything large enough to swing. The film was shot mostly in earthly tones, and the transfer maintains the films dark, wet look very well. When there is an important piece in the film when hid wife murren is killed, it darkens then sky and becomes misty in order to let the audience know something is about to happen and as Wallace returns to the village we see the fire, which symbolises his anger and rage. The battle scenes are especially vivid, and despite all the action on-screen there was no actual digital artifacting. The lighting in this film is daylight, there is only two occasions were it is dark and that is when he is marrying murren and their love scene and of course when he meets the princess and their love scene. Mel Gibson happens to be an Oscar winning director, wildly successful producer and one of the most durable of this era. He claims to be anti-intellectual, but is, in fact a well read man with a sharp mind in the 80s he delivered the double whammy Mad Max and Lethal Weapon. His directing debut Man Without A Face 1993 Braveheart has been the proud owner of ten Oscars, best picture, best director, best cinematography, best sound effects, editing and best make up. Also nominated for best screen play, written directly for the screen, best original dramatic musical score and so on. This truly shows the great effect and memory Braveheart has left on people, and gave Mel Gibson his reward. Braveheart is a great film, it would have been better had more facts been left in and the fiction left out. I still loved the film, because I liked the story it was telling. Braveheart is a rare film with entertainment, history and passion. Its fair to say its not just a movie but also a state of mind. It allows the viewer to enter the mystical and magical world of Scotland and become a rebel fighting beside the mighty Wallace. You fall in love as he does and a part of you dies when he does.

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Publishing Should Be About Prose, Not Product

Publishing Should Be About Prose, Not Product Publishing Should Be About Prose, Not Product Publishing Should Be About Prose, Not Product By Mark Nichol When I’m not at my mountaintop hermitage, contorting myself into a lotus position in my capacity as a grammar guru, I do freelance copyediting. I accept just about any project offered to me, but today I rejected an assignment perhaps the first time I’ve ever done so. What was so heinous about the project that this promiscuous peruser of prose turned it down? Well, for one thing, it was a manuscript of an academic book. Not that there’s anything wrong with that except that much is wrong with it. Scholars (or the grad students or ghostwriters they delegate the actual writing of scholarly content to) are notoriously atrocious for their leaden prose and their ignorance of the fundamentals of capitalization, punctuation, and other basic elements of writing. Unfortunately, however, such inept writing is rampant in scholarly journals and academic books usually not only because their publishers seem not to expect or require anything better but also because they either pay copy editors so little that only inexperienced ones need apply or they omit copyediting from the editorial process altogether. In my case, I had done several projects for a company that some scholarly publishers outsource their editorial-production work to, but I was hesitant to take on another assignment. The first problem is that the company pays by the page, not by the hour, which discourages excellence in editing. The second is that the per-page rates for heavy, medium, and light editing are all much lower than the industry standard, and the expected rate of completion is higher. The third is that the company’s assigning editors generally evaluate projects as requiring light editing. With some types of writing much fiction, informal essays, and the like it’s fairly easy to minimize editorial intervention without shame. But when it comes to formal writing that is ostensibly to be held to a high standard, it is painful and stressful (for me, at least) to withhold treatment: I feel like a doctor applying Band-Aids to someone who’s been shot or stabbed or mauled. Nevertheless, I cautiously accepted another project from this company, and I almost immediately regretted it. The writing was not incoherent (as some content I’ve worked on for this client has been), but it was clumsy, and I bristled at the thought of earning half the equivalent of my normal hourly rate to dust the shelves when they needed sanding and refinishing. So I apologetically (but promptly) notified the assigning editor that I was returning the assignment unfinished. Back in the ancient mists of time (the mid-1980s, to be more precise), my first publishing gig was an entry-level job at a San Francisco publisher of humanities books and journals (long since, of course, swallowed up by a megacorporation, but still publishing under its own imprint). In the journals division, we worked meticulously and extensively to transform often-inept writing into prose that was a pleasure to read; one freelance copy editor, in particular, should have had his name on the cover of all the journals he worked on, so extensive was his rewriting (which no writer or journal editor, to my knowledge, ever complained about). Unfortunately, permission to indulge that pride of craft is an exception these days, and much of the trade-publishing industry has similarly compromised its integrity by valuing profit over prose. I’m fortunate to have two trade-publishing clients, one that produces mostly pop-culture titles, including a lot of movie tie-ins that are frothy and fun, and another that puts out progressive, reflective titles about making the world a better place. (And each company, in its own way, is doing great good.) What’s fortunate, above and beyond the fact that I would actually buy and read many of these books I’m paid to edit while they’re in raw form, is that the editors I work with are allowed to take pride in shepherding their projects, and I am in turn respected for my skill and given the time and the freedom to practice my craft with care. (And though the pay is not exceptional, it’s respectable.) Sorry you had to read through all that to get to the writing tip, but I think it’s worth your while. Here’s today’s lesson: If you are fortunate enough to be in a position to have your writing published in a professionally produced manner a book, a magazine or journal, a newspaper, a newsletter, or even on a Web site insist on being accorded the dignity of having it edited with due diligence. That may not be easy to do consistently, at least early in your career, but strive to get to a place where the publisher that agrees to distribute your work is one that will take care to prepare it thoroughly. So much otherwise promising, potentially compelling writing is corrupted by careless editing, or a lack of editing at all. (You’ve all seen books and other publications with writing that could easily have been improved or with embarrassing typographical errors.) Is that how you want the work that you have labored over to be released out into the world? Conduct research on publishers, read their output, and determine which companies take pride in what they produce. Let writers and readers unite to reward publishers that respect producers and consumers of the written word, and punish those that see prose as nothing more than product to move along the conveyor belt with as little expense and effort as possible. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Writing Basics category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:Writing Prompts 10160 Synonyms for â€Å"Trip†50 Plain-Language Substitutions for Wordy Phrases