The Romantic Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance: Claude McKay

The Romantic Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance: Claude McKay
 by: Mary Arnold

Claude McKay (1890-1948) was born in Jamaica to “relatively prosperous peasants” (Hathaway 489). In his youth he “studied classical and British literary figures and philosophers as well as science and theology” (Hathaway 489). McKay’s earliest poetry was written in traditional English forms, but later he was encouraged by his mentor Walter Jekyll to write “dialect poetry rooted in the island’s folk culture” (Hathaway 489). His first two volumes of poetry, Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912), are primarily written in dialect. McKay immigrated to the United States in the fall of 1912, and after studying agriculture at Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State College, he moved to New York City in 1914 (Hathaway 490).

In New York, McKay became “increasingly involved with political and literary radicals” (Hathaway 490). His third volume of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire (1920), reflects his changing political stance; his previous use of dialect is gone, and the poems are divided between commentary of race relations in America and nostalgic images of life in Jamaica (Hathaway 490). Dissatisfied with American leftist efforts to combat racism, McKay escaped to the Soviet Union in 1922 and spent six months traveling throughout the country, attending Communist symposiums and lecturing on art and politics (Hathaway 490). While in Russia, McKay “republished a series of articles he had written for the Soviet press” under the title Negroes in America (1923), which delivers a “Marxist interpretation of the history of African Americans” (Hathaway 490).

Web Writing - Dont Lose Your Visitors Attention!

Did you know that your writing can have a huge impact on how successful your site will be? If you’re trying to sell a product or a service, what you say and how you say it is extremely important because you don’t want to lose your visitor’s interest before they get to your order form.

Here are some tips to help you improve your writing skills in order to keep your visitor’s attention.

Stress The Benefits Early

If the goal of your site is to sell a product or service, don’t focus on what you want, focus on what your visitor wants. Whether you realize it or not, when a person lands on your homepage, there’s a little voice inside their head that constantly asks, “What’s in it for me?” They came to your site because they are searching for something, and it’s your job to help them find it.

Now, this next sentence is going to sound a little harsh, but there is a lot of truth to it…

Your visitors don’t care about you until they find out what your site can do for them.

The Book Signing

Tomorrow night is my first Local Writers Fair. I’ve been looking forward to this one for a long time. Ten authors will gather in a little room behind tables full of books in a historic library in Canandaigua, N.Y. It’s been advertised heavily and the excitement has been building for weeks.

Just for this occasion, I bought a new table cover from the fabric department at Walmart. It’s a deep, cobalt blue with a fine pattern. The black-framed photos of the Genesee Valley will stand against the blue. I hemmed and hawed, solicited "how to buy this stuff" help from the nice lady behind the counter (who, by the way, is an avid mystery fan) and finally bought four yards of it. Twelve feet????? Yeah, but it’ll work. Better to have too much than too little. Kind of my gardening philosophy extended into the world of fabric!

Anyway, this morning I started to worry about what to wear. What to wear? Not typically a subject I get too concerned about? I looked in the closet and sighed. What do "authors" wear? Black turtlenecks and corduroys? Heck no, not for May. A plaid wool shirt and a pipe to chew on? Nope. It’s spring, for goodness sakes! So, I settled on a long-sleeved black button down shirt and camel-colored Dockers.

The Romantic Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance: Nella Larsen

The Romantic Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance: Nella Larsen
 by: Mary Arnold

Like her contemporary Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen also fictionalized middle class society; however in Larsen’s works, there are undercurrents that imply middle class values are not always ‘good.’ Nella Larsen’s only two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) were ‘novels of passing’ but unlike their predecessors, these two novels are “more complex and ambitious” (Davis 560). In these works, Larsen “explores the relationships between appearance and reality, deception and unmasking, manipulation and imaginative management, aggression and self-defense” (Davis 561). Perhaps Larsen is able to delve deeper into the consciousness of people torn between two worlds because she herself had experienced living in both the ‘white’ world and the ‘black’ world.

Larsen’s mother was an emigrant from Denmark, and her father was from the Virgin Islands. During her early childhood, she lived in a “white working-class neighborhood of Chicago,” and attended an elementary school which consisted mainly of the “children of German and Scandinavian immigrants” (Wall 91). However, Wall reports that Larsen suffered “alienation” in her home life, and was “ostracized at school and in the neighborhood” (Wall 91).

7 Steps Toward Successful Article Writing

As you write the outline for your next article, there are seven steps for you to consider in order for you to write successfully. I have put these steps into an acrostic, PURPOSE, which can help you write something that your readers will find interesting, informative, and memorable.

Passion. If you do not show passion [or interest] in the topic at hand, do not expect your readers to be interested either! Either stay with those topics that interest you or get interested in those that don’t by educating yourself about the topic. Chances are your research will spark your interest.

Understanding. You cannot expect to persuade or educate your readers if you do not fully understand the topic. You need not be an expert on the topic but you need to be at least a learned student of the experts.

Responsibly. Oh, how I wish everyone would write trustworthy material. Do not get sucked in by the crowd who would want you to produce rubbish based on conjecture, gossip, slander, etc. Stick with the facts and as much as possible leave your opinion out. Finding it difficult to avoid expressing your opinion? Well, at the very least, do not let your opinion take center stage!

The Romantic Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes

The Romantic Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes
 by: Mary Arnold

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was a true Renaissance man, being a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, autobiographer, and writer of children’s books (Rampersad 368). He was born in Joplin, Missouri, and spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, but also lived in Illinois, Ohio, and Mexico (Rampersad 368). Hughes’ earliest influence was his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, who intrigued the young Hughes with stories of her first husband who died at Harper’s Ferry and her second husband, Hughes’ grandfather, who was also a “militant abolitionist” (Rampersad 368). His literary influences include Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Claude McKay (Rampersad 368). From his familial and literary influences, Hughes derived a love for personal expression, free verse, black dialect, and racial pride.

Hughes’ first two volumes of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) exhibit Hughes’ experimentation with fusing “jazz and blues with traditional verse” (Rampersad 369). While these volumes were “received reasonably well by the white press,” the black community generally condemned the poems as presenting “racial defects before the public” (Taylor 93). But Hughes was not one to let his peers’ critical judgment hinder his artistic freedom. In his 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes attempts to prove that one can exhibit racial pride and still maintain artistic integrity:

To Get Paid What You Are Worth, Don’t Say a Word

To Get Paid What You Are Worth, Don’t Say a Word
 by: Kathleen Poole

If you’re like most freelance copywriters and other solo entrepreneurs, you get rattled when it’s time to talk about money with your clients. You may feel like you are being greedy or sleazy, or you might worry that your fees are too high or too low. Inevitably, though, you must state a price for your service or product. And if you’re serious about making a good living in your solo enterprise, you must command a reasonably healthy price.

After 20 years as a freelance copywriter, I feel very comfortable stating my fees. In fact, I even enjoy it. With some practice, you may grow to enjoy it, too. And you’ll certainly reap economic rewards if you do it right.

Stating a good fee for a project is a skill you can learn. I can’t teach you everything you need to know about it in one brief article. But I can give you what I think is the number one rule for successful fee-stating:

After you tell a client your desired fee, stop talking. The first one who talks loses.

The Lead: Sinking The Hook Into Your Prospect

You only have an instant to capture your prospect’s attention. No matter the medium ? a sales letter, print ad, or commercial ? she’s going to make an almost instantaneous decision about whether you are worth her time or not. So you’d better start off with a bang.

Hopefully, you already have a good headline. The words that come after it are your lead, and it’s their job to sink the hook into your prospect and keep her reading or listening until you can convince her that you are the answer to her prayers.

Here you introduce your Big Promise. Not just another benefit, but the Granddaddy of all benefits. The One that will reach down into her heart and stimulate some emotion. The One that taps into her core desires.

But you don’t just tell her how your widget will change her life. And you absolutely, positively, never talk about yourself or your company here. Here, you show her what it will be like when she’s experiencing that Big Benefit.

Help her to see herself lying on the beach, sipping a Pina Colada because she took your correspondence course. Show her lying in the grass, looking at the clouds with her five-year-old because your widget saved her so much time.

How to Cash in on the Huge Online Demand for Writers

Currently many online writers and would-be online writers, feel very much like folks in a ship that is out at sea somewhere but which has run out of drinking water. The fact is that although there is so much water everywhere, getting drinking water becomes a challenge because the water is salty and probably needs some sort of purification and processing to be made drinkable.

That is exactly what led the writer to pen those famous words, water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.

The growth of the net cannot be described using any word that is weaker than the word explosive. Every day new websites are launched and new blogs started. All of them without exception require the services of a writer. In many cases the site owner does the writing for themselves but quite often, when the site becomes successful, they get so busy that they cannot keep up with the writing chores.

In many other cases, the webmasters or blog owners cannot write and require somebody to write for them from the inception of the site.

How To Deal With Your Prospect’s Objections In Your Web Copy

How To Deal With Your Prospect’s Objections In Your Web Copy
 by: Bruce Carlson

One of the more difficult things for inexperienced copywriters

seems to be how to deal with possible objections that a prospect

might have about a product or service.

It can be hard to make the leap into your prospect’s mind like

that…

And so, the objections sometimes just don’t get dealt with in the

copy.

Which means you lose sales.

In this short article, I’d like to show you a simple technique for

dealing with your prospect’s objections. Using this method will

clear the way for you to start making a lot more sales with your

Web copy.

1. Make A Nice Big List

Before you even begin to write your copy (including your headline

or lead copy or bullets), sit down and write out a list of ALL the

possible objections your prospect could have about the product or

service you’re pitching.

Every single one of them…and then some.

Get silly about it. Come up with far-fetched and off-the-wall objections.

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