Simpson, Peter. “Galleries on the move. “ the Ottawa Citizen. 28 April 2014. D1.
Langston, Patrick. “Evolution Theatre wins top Rideau prize.” Ibid. D2.
POSTMEDIA NEWS. “Aliens stars gather to celebrate sci-fi classic.” Ibid. D3.
A text in which each word has one letter less than the preceding one, and the last word only one letter. From your newspaper, select a starting word, and then continue adding words of decreasing length from the same source article or passage. Challenge yourself further by only using words in order as you encounter them in the text.
I couldn’t use just one source for this one because I couldn’t find enough long words to stay in sequence. I would have ended up moving from the 16-character “post-apocalyptic” to the 13-character “self-portrait.” Besides, it was just more interesting to blend articles on different subjects. The Arts section was ideal for this assignment because the language was colourful. Note that instead of just counting letters, I counted all characters, including the hyphen. I haven’t had much sleep, I’ve come down with a cold. I found counting letters impossible. I used SortMyList.com, sorted the list according to length & chose words, then pasted them into Excel & used the Len function, which returns the number of characters in a text string. Some kind fellow Ouliposter whose name escapes me taught me that earlier this month. Thank you, kind Ouliposter! Apparently I can’t count more than the number of fingers I have on my own.
See more snowballs melt over here.