I think film companies should produce shorter movies in some type of series format. Do a movie that lasts an hour or so, has a good story and actors so it doesn't require elaborate crap to compensate, and charge less for it. Have the story complete in and of itself, but leave teasers and danglers for the next one coming. Use recurring characters (maybe not gay cowboys though), and continuing plot lines, and have a new one come out once a month. Seems to me that something along those lines has the potential to keep people coming back for more, and could generate water cooler talk and all that other good stuff.
I guess I'm kinda saying put TV on the big screen. You can still have some biggies, but the serials could be the bread and butter.
Oh yeah, this idea is copyright and trademarked by me.
The command-line tools Diction and Style are worth a mention here. Diction gives grammar suggestions, and Style gives quite a bit of information about a document, including scores for 7 different readability indexes, number of "to be" verbs, sentence length, passive sentences, etc.
Here are some of the results for a document I've been working on: readability grades:
Kincaid: 11.2
ARI: 14.6
Coleman-Liau: 11.1
Flesch Index: 66.5
Fog Index: 13.2
Lix: 50.7 = school year 9
SMOG-Grading: 8.8 syllables
1035 sentences, average length 29.0 words
65% (675) short sentences (at most 24 words)
18% (190) long sentences (at least 39 words)
1 paragraphs, average length 1035.0 sentences
4% (51) questions
33% (345) passive sentences
longest sent 1422 wds at sent 1; shortest sent 1 wds at sent 672 word usage:
verb types:
to be (412) auxiliary (168)
types as % of total:
conjunctions 3(967) pronouns 8(2297) prepositions 7(2038)
nominalizations 0(59)
I don't know much about using UNIX (very little), and fortunately, I found a page (http://lucas.is-a-geek.net/blog/2003/12/16/gnu_di ction_for_panther) with the commands to install Diction and Style, so I just did a copy and paste to install. Now I just open a Terminal window, type "style", drag the document to the window, and hit return. I've used it with plain text, rich text, and Word documents, and it likely works with other types as well. I've come to use Style quite often.
From what I understand, the new MSOffice will calculate Flesch-Kincaid scores. Additionally, a GUI program called Flesh (VersionTracker) will give the Flesch-Kincaid scores.
For those with little UNIX skill (like me), here are the commands, from Lucas Thompson's Web site, to install Style and Diction (they worked for me anyway, under 10.3):
curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/diction/diction-1.02.tar.gz tar xfz diction-1.02.tar.gz cd diction-1.02 cp -f/sw/lib/fink/update/config.guess. cp -f/sw/lib/fink/update/config.sub ../configure --prefix=/sw --quiet make -s sudo make install
Slashdot Mirror
I think film companies should produce shorter movies in some type of series format. Do a movie that lasts an hour or so, has a good story and actors so it doesn't require elaborate crap to compensate, and charge less for it. Have the story complete in and of itself, but leave teasers and danglers for the next one coming. Use recurring characters (maybe not gay cowboys though), and continuing plot lines, and have a new one come out once a month. Seems to me that something along those lines has the potential to keep people coming back for more, and could generate water cooler talk and all that other good stuff.
I guess I'm kinda saying put TV on the big screen. You can still have some biggies, but the serials could be the bread and butter.
Oh yeah, this idea is copyright and trademarked by me.
they come with a free printer and a lifetime supply of paper and ink.
That would be a nice addition to Wikipedia--links to satellite imagery of battlefields and the like.
The command-line tools Diction and Style are worth a mention here. Diction gives grammar suggestions, and Style gives quite a bit of information about a document, including scores for 7 different readability indexes, number of "to be" verbs, sentence length, passive sentences, etc.
i ction_for_panther) with the commands to install Diction and Style, so I just did a copy and paste to install. Now I just open a Terminal window, type "style", drag the document to the window, and hit return. I've used it with plain text, rich text, and Word documents, and it likely works with other types as well. I've come to use Style quite often.
z /sw/lib/fink/update/config.guess . /sw/lib/fink/update/config.sub . ./configure --prefix=/sw --quiet
Here are some of the results for a document I've been working on:
readability grades:
Kincaid: 11.2
ARI: 14.6
Coleman-Liau: 11.1
Flesch Index: 66.5
Fog Index: 13.2
Lix: 50.7 = school year 9
SMOG-Grading: 8.8
syllables
1035 sentences, average length 29.0 words
65% (675) short sentences (at most 24 words)
18% (190) long sentences (at least 39 words)
1 paragraphs, average length 1035.0 sentences
4% (51) questions
33% (345) passive sentences
longest sent 1422 wds at sent 1; shortest sent 1 wds at sent 672
word usage:
verb types:
to be (412) auxiliary (168)
types as % of total:
conjunctions 3(967) pronouns 8(2297) prepositions 7(2038)
nominalizations 0(59)
I don't know much about using UNIX (very little), and fortunately, I found a page (http://lucas.is-a-geek.net/blog/2003/12/16/gnu_d
From what I understand, the new MSOffice will calculate Flesch-Kincaid scores. Additionally, a GUI program called Flesh (VersionTracker) will give the Flesch-Kincaid scores.
For those with little UNIX skill (like me), here are the commands, from Lucas Thompson's Web site, to install Style and Diction (they worked for me anyway, under 10.3):
curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/diction/diction-1.02.tar.g
tar xfz diction-1.02.tar.gz
cd diction-1.02
cp -f
cp -f
make -s
sudo make install
Good stuff.
Jason