Xennial Memes

Topics School days

English Class

A black-on-white typed poem titled "How to Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors". It reads: "It's not rocket surgery. First, get all your ducks on the same page. After all, you can't make an omelette without breaking stride. Be sure to watch what you write with a fine-tuned comb. Check and re-check until the cows turn blue. It's as easy as falling off a piece of cake. Don't worry about opening up a whole hill of beans: you… Text on a pale yellow background: "When I was in 7th grade, our teacher put on a video and told us to take notes. Ten minutes in, she threw the lights on and shouted at Steven Webb Sladki, telling him he wasn't taking notes and he should have been. But the thing was, Steve was taking notes. I saw it. We all saw it. The teacher asked if anyone wanted to stand up for Steve. A few of us choked out some words of… Black text on a off-white textured background: "What's the difference between a kleptomaniac and a literalist? The literalist takes things literally. The kleptomaniac takes things, literally." Text post titled "Things you can say in response to literally anything, when you have nothing else to say:" followed by bullets: As the prophecy foretold. But at what cost? So let it be written; so let it be done. So...it has come to this. That's just what he/she/they would've said. Is this why fate brought us together? And thus, I die. ...just like in my dream... Be that as it may, still may it be as it may be.… Screenshot of a Tumblr thread. User marcvscicero writes: "writing style: author from the 1800s with a severe love of commas whose sentences last half a page". User fencer-x replies: "I came out here, to this point, to this place, hoping against all hope and despite signs and portends suggesting otherwise that I might, somehow, find myself having a pleasant experience, and yet here I stand, alone against the world,… A text-only list of grammar and literary jokes that each begin with something walking into a bar. Examples: "A bar was walked into by the passive voice." "An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening." "A dyslexic walks into a bra." "A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony." A light gray band across a dark gray background holds centered black text: "The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink - and in drinking understand themselves." A numbered list of eight writing rules in black text on white. 1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. 2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. 3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. 4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action. 5. Start as close to the… A large black opening quotation mark above gray bold text: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Below, in black: George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists. Chart titled "The Periodic Table of Storytelling" laid out like a periodic table of color-coded boxes, each a TV Tropes trope with an abbreviation, name and popularity number, e.g. Ae An Aesop, Cal Call to Adventure, 4wl The Fourth Wall. Footer: "All these tropes and twenty thousand more are detailed on tvtropes.org". A blurred hand types on a laptop keyboard. Text above reads: "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." —Professor Robert Wilensky Comic panel on a tan background. A small figure in a space helmet and a big gray rocket-shaped jetpack blasts off in a cloud of black smoke, pointing and saying in a speech bubble: "YOU'RE ALL JUST JEALOUS OF MY JETPACK." An arrow labels the figure "SCIENCE FICTION." Below, three drawn figures, one with a pipe, one bald with round glasses, one with a bun, say "TUT TUT." An arrow labels them "PROPER LITERATURE." Infographic titled "Find & Cure Common Writing Flaws", subtitle "A guide for editors". A three-column table: Problem, Symptoms, Treatment. Writing too long: Prose meanders and bores the reader. Suggest what to cut; reorganize what remains. (4). Buried lede: Partway in, you spot the main point. Cut opening paragraphs; move main idea up; rewrite title. (5). Passive voice: It's not clear who's doing what. Rewrite… Color-highlighted text attributed to Gary Provost. Text: "This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety." Next paragraph: "Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The…