2. 外语
  3. Bosses would do well to be alarmed. November is here, and with it a good chance that the back office isn’t processing data, but

Bosses would do well to be alarmed. November is here, and with it a good chance that the back office isn’t processing data, but

admin2013-09-23  58
问题     Bosses would do well to be alarmed. November is here, and with it a good chance that the back office isn’t processing data, but knocking out a novel on the sly. It’s " National Novel Writing Month" , a peculiar American invention that has improbably become an eagerly anticipated rite around the world.
    Knock out a novel in a month: it can’t be hard. The premise of the NaNoWriMo, as it’s known, is that all writers need a deadline and a kick in the backside. In 30 days contestants have to knock out 50, 000 words. How else to get those 1, 666 words a day, except on company time? Twenty-one Californian writers started the online writing spree in 1999. Last year more than 200, 000 joined in worldwide, though fewer than a fifth completed a full manuscript. If growth continues at the present rate, each American citizen will attempt to write a short novel by the year 2027, according to one calculation. The organizers call it all empowering and harmless fun. But still there’s something in the enterprise that feels annoyed.
    NaNoWriMo relies on the peculiarly American belief that every person has a story—or a novel, or a book of any kind—inside. There is no analogous drive to write the Great French Novel, or the English, or the German. The very notion that a novel is in everybody’s grasp, and could be knocked out as a draft in just a month, is far more likely to induce some cringing in other countries.
    Their horror can be summed up in a revelation shared by NaNoWriMo’s founder, Chris Baty, who found to his delight that " novel-writing, we had discovered, was just like watching TV. You get a bunch of friends together, load up on caffeine and junk food, and stare at a glowing screen for a couple of hours. " Most writers who are dedicated to the craft would beg to disagree. The more apt metaphor is that used by a New York columnist in the 1940s; "It’s easy: you simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed. "
    Some argue there is nothing wrong with building a small city in the Republic of Letters, populated with mostly 20-something enthusiastic amateurs. That, after all, is what NaNoWriMo really is, with its forums and pep talks and town meetings worldwide. Professional heavyweight authors such as Neil Caiman, Jonathan Lethem and Audrey Niffenegger cheerfully encourage all these scribblers, reasoning that forcing writers to sit down and write is no bad thing. The web has the power to unlock untapped riches of untutored talent, so the thinking goes. Indeed, Sara Gruen’s bestselling novel "Water for Elephants"(2006)began as a NaNoWriMo draft. So too did Erin Morgenstern’s debut "The Night Circus" , recently reviewed in The Economist.
    Others are more dubious. Laura Miller at Salon has attacked the program for its " nar-cisstic commerce" , complaining that the last thing the world needs is 37 , 500 more awful novels every year. Mr. Baty acknowledges that the vast majority of first drafts are utter rubbish , but he says that no one is imposing this nonsense on the marketplace—at least not yet.
    What’s new now is that many can. No longer must these green hand authors simply file their manuscripts away when NaNoWriMo ends. We instead expect to see them flooding Amazon and Lulu as self-published e-books. Thus enters a new oversupply of product on a saturated market. In recent years the pay for writing novels has been on the decline; it stands to reason that few established writers welcome a small army of amateurs biting into that shrinking pie.
What does the word "cringing" in Paragraph 3 mean?
选项 A、Craze.
B、Fear.
C、Disgust.
D、Doubt.
答案B
解析 语义题。根据第三段“‘全国小说写作月’基于独特的美国理念：每个人内心都有一个故事，或者小说，或者是其他任何形式的书。没有去创作伟大的法国小说、英国或德国小说的类似动力。但是小说在每个人的掌握之中，并且可以在一个月内以草稿的方式被匆匆创作出来，这种观念很有可能在其他国家引发一些cringingo”而接下来第四段第一句提到“‘全国小说写作月’的创始人克里斯·巴蒂分享的一份启示录可以将这种恐惧进行很好的概括。巴蒂发现，令他高兴的是‘我们已经认识到小说创作，就像看电视一样。’”可知，第四段中的“horror”就是上文的“cringing”的同义转换，故[B]为正确答案。
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