Thursday, August 9, 2007

Writing and Language Podcasts

This post is regularly updated. It gives a list of literary podcasts with the accompanying thoughts I have about them. Most reviews on these podcasts can be found under the label language, fiction, creative writing, or TWN (specifically about The Word Nerds) or Writing Show (specifically about the Writing Show).

7th Son (review, site, feed)
A thriller trilogy so compelling I couldn't stop listening.

University of Arizona: Intro to Language (review, site, feed)
Lecture series for undergraduate students to be had through iTunes U. You can subscribe to the feed, but it takes iTunes to lead you to the URL.

University of California San Diego: Language (review, site, feed)
A language course focusing on formal logic. Note that the first 7 lectures were not podcast.

Rhetoric 10 (Berkeley) (review, site, feed)
Daniel Coffeen tries a provocative approach to get you to know rhetoric, not just by learning it, but also by experience. Coffeen is not a regular university professor and the style and form of the course this is tangible and make a refreshing impact.

Oy Mendele! (review, site, feed)
A discontinued podcast ironically subtitled Jewish Media Conspiracy

Sonic Society (review, site, feed)
Podcast dedicated to audio drama. The style is very cartoonish - you have got to like that.

The Word Nerds (review, site, feed)
The ultimately relaxed podcast about language and why we say the things we do.

Writing Show (review, site, feed)
The podcast where writing is always the story. All angles and aspects on writing, getting published and making a buck out of your greatest passion.

Midwest Writer (review, site, feed)
Here is a podcast that will help you write your novel. Writer Jean Tennant takes you step by step through the process. There is nothing specifically Midwest about this, other than that Tennant is from the Midwest.

English 117s (Berkeley) (review, site, feed)
Lecturer Charles Altieri has a voice with frequent upper pitches. He is very passionately introducing the Shakespeare course, but the high squeak is tough to suffer on an MP3-player. I like the enthusiasm, I like how he explains we must read (at least twice) in order to understand. So I will stick around and accept the pitch.

Grammar Girl (review, site, feed)
Tips, tricks and short lessons about writing correctly.

Structure of English Words (Stanford) (review)
William Leben about the English Language

Tolkien Professor (review, site, feed)
Professor Corey Olsen from Washington College teaches the works by J.R.R. Tolkien in a way, as he claims, would have been approved by Tolkien himself.

2 comments:

The Bent Branch said...

You might want to take a look at Latinum, the podcast for teaching spoken conversational Classical Latin. It has had over one million file downloads since it started up 12 months ago.
http://latinum.mypodcast.com

Anne the Man said...

Thank you, that is a very good point. I am aware of this podcast. It is part of a whole world of language podcasts that in general is the most successful of educational podcasts: the language learning podcasts. They come for many, many languages. I have tried several of them, but have not yet opened that niche for reviewing. If ever I do, I will tackle many of them and Latinum will certainly be one of them.
An outstanding resource for finding the podcasts is Open Culture.