Famous Literary Greats Who Had Mental Illness

Their works have inspired generations. Their words have been a solace for millions of souls. Their personalities have served as cannon fodder for literature enthusiasts and historians for ages. They continue to intrigue people because they make them laugh, cry and become emotionally invested with their contributions to literature. But what most people don’t know about these larger-than-life personalities is that they were flawed. Some of them had their personal demons, some of them endlessly wresting with the pitfalls of mental illness, all the while lending credence to the fact that creativity is linked to mental health. Let’s take a look at some of these literary greats with a history of mental illness. They may have achieved greatness with their works but they were still hostage to oftentimes the most debilitating mental illness issues. 1.  Sylvia Plath She’s famous for writing many great books, with morbidity and depressive episodes a recurring theme in her works. When she was in college, she fell into a depressive episode and had to be administered shock treatment therapy. Her hospitalization was a precursor to how bad her mental illness would get with the passage of time. During this time, she wrote her most famous work, The Bell Jar. And it’s easy to see how her own experience with mental illness factored into her magnum opus. Today, there’s a whole term named after her – The Sylvia Plath effect. The premise behind this term was that creative people are more prone and susceptible to fall into depressive tendencies. She made numerous suicide attempts and finally succeeded in 1963. Her doctor used to prescribe her medication for clinical depression. Sylvia Plath had her fair share of mood swings, impulsive tendencies and a hot-headed temper. Even the slightest hint of rejection would push her into an extreme bout of dejection and a heightened state of unwanted-ness. All these aspects figure heavily in her poems, lending her works an authentic flair of having experienced issues, like self-loathing, suicide and dysfunction firsthand. 2.  Leo Tolstoy Leo Tolstoy’s troubles with depression and mental illness began well into the middle age. He produced a literary work that detailed his discontentedness with the world at large in A Confession. His illness, when it reared its ugly head, was intense and not gradual. His rumination proved to be the driving force behind his themes about philosophy, art and life. By looking at his own distress, his literary works became a reflection of his overall mental state. Unlike Plath, he never contemplated suicide, because he thought he didn’t have the courage for it. He mocked himself as a moral failure due to this fact. Tolstoy, however, was lucky to escape his mental maladies. He eventually found God, became devout and gave up the notion of suicide once and for all. He died aged 82, leaving the literary world all the poorer for it. 3.  Virginia Woolf The celebrated writer was beset with depression from a young age, some studies putting her first brush with mental illness at 15. Where most writers celebrated their depression in their works, Virginia Woolf found her illness frequently interfered with her creative moments, hindering her works with intermittent mood swings, sleeplessness, migraines and hallucinations. Virginia Woolf ended her life in 1941, her fights with mental illness issues eventually getting their way with her. These are three famous literary greats who had a tryst with mental illness. There are several others, but that is a story for another day.

Learning Theories Of Learning Through Conditioning And...

A learning theory is an explanation of how information is absorbed, processed and then stored in the brain. Two Learning theories of learning are Behaviourism and Constructivism. Behaviourism is the theory of learning through conditioning and association. It focuses on how environmental factors influence a child’s behaviour. Behaviourism is no associated with factors such as emotions and thinking and more on observable behaviour. Another theory of learning is known as constructivism. This theory tells us how we are able to receive and earn knowledge. It argues that the all learners are in fact not blank canvases, however they use their past experiences and cultural factors. Both of these learning theories have had positive contributions when applied to classroom practice and help the manage both the behaviour of the children and the way in which they are taught information allowing them to gain the highest amount of knowledge that they are capable of. One theorist who has contributed to behaviourism was John B. Watson who had the idea that all behaviours can be trained, measured and changed. One theorist who has contributed to the theory is Pavlov. He came up with the idea of classical conditioning which is the process of learning behaviours through association. There are 3 stages of classic conditioning. The first stage involves an unconditioned stimulus when produces an unconditioned response. This means that the response to the unconditioned stimulus has not been learntShow MoreRelatedClassical Conditioning And Operant Conditioning1249 Words   |  5 PagesLearning theories are the structural foundation used to label how information is processed, stored and encoded during learning. Retention of knowledge is subjective and influenced by outside factors such as, an individual’s cognitive ability to process or retain information. 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Website Evaluation for Better Business Free Essays

The question is, can you write an effective letter to a major corporation and get your point across in way that your information stands out over the multiple documents that a CEO may be receiving. Just think about what you would do if you were in a singing contest, how you could shine above all the other contestants. There are great examples online of business writings that we can access 24 hours a day. We will write a custom essay sample on Website Evaluation for Better Business or any similar topic only for you Order Now I just want to touch on the importance of good communications and how far it will take you in the business community. Most professionals are inundated with reading tons of material everyday often without knowing what the writer was trying to convey. The book talks about effective communication when writing a business letter. The fact the most readers will not read long sentences or large paragraphs, this makes it important to develop a method of writing that is informative but yet effective. The information I ‘m going to provide for you will help you in this quest. I’m going to show is how the use of this website (http://www. powa. org/) to give you an advantage over other business writers, and have a successful outcome. First, the book (Business Communication Today) gives some concrete pointers that seem to be the same emphases throughout chapter #6, meaning that the more we read it, speak it, use it, we’ll remember it. The book talks about having a clear message, breaking up long sentences, rewrite hedging sentences, clarify sentence structure and shorten overly long words. The web site explains the subject-verb/complement pattern and shows how you can expand that pattern almost indefinitely with a few simple principles such as coordination and subordination. In the website we’ll look at some more advanced sentence strategies. Again the aim is to increase your versatility as a writer, to help you see the full range of options for solving writing problems. As your flexibility increases, you’ll not only satisfy minimal standards of clarity and correctness, you’ll express yourself with new-found energy and power. While the S V/C pattern, with agent as subject, is by far the most common pattern for building English sentences, it’s by no means the only one. Nor is it best in every situation. Sometimes you may wish to turn things around in order to create a particular kind of emphasis or rhythm. Second, the chapter further goes into design elements and paragraph length and margins around the text which effects what you’re reading and gives the document overall readability. There was a list of four writing techniques that improve the readability of the message: * Varying sentence length. * Keeping paragraph short. * Using list and bullets. * Adding heading and subheading. The challenge is to keep your thought process while attempting to follow the main direction which is to get your message across while having the correct format. The writing a strong business letter will take some practice and a great deal of patience. The web site goes on to enhance the topic and seems to go deeper into developing your paragraph. Your topic sentences indicate the major support areas for your thesis, and the guide sentences show how you can develop each paragraph. Still, your paper is far from complete. While you’ve opened up your main idea to expose its parts, you have yet to get down to giving the specifics; the precise details that will help your reader feel the full weight of your thought. You must show the foundation of specific evidence that your general ideas are built upon. The following suggestions for paragraph development will help you coax forth details that will make your writing solid and substantial. Notice how often a paragraph will say, in the second or third sentence, â€Å"for instance† or â€Å"for example. † This is how writers introduce an actual incident or object to prove or illustrate the point under discussion. The example may be a brief physical description: I can still remember her imitation of a frog. Puffing out her cheeks and hopping around the room, she seemed almost amphibian as she croaked out a mating call. Sometimes a point made in your thesis sentence, a topic sentence, or a guide sentence needs elaboration and clarification. That is, the reader may pick up the general outline of what you’re saying, but a second sentence or two may be needed before the full meaning comes across. The first two sentences of this paragraph work like that. The second one explains the first, and the next two (including this one) carry the process even further. Each sentence, after looking back at the previous one to see if it tells the whole story with perfect clarity, goes on to fill in the gaps and make the meaning more precise. In the introduction paragraph I made an example to get you the reader to draw a comparison, and inspire you to think. Third, Chapter #6 helps us along by telling us that we need to proof read everything we intend to send out for others to read. As I read the books definition of proofreading I discovered eight tips for improving the message quality. Proofreading should be a little more than a quick glance, we all have made mistakes in this area, for an example; I recently wrote how our brains can figure out how to determine what is being conveyed even if the content of the text seems totally incorrect. I’d failed to proofread one of my papers but discovered the problem only after sending it to the boss to read. I’d misspelled the word â€Å"indicated† later the document went to the district manager for review. I then re-read the document and found the error and felt so unprofessional. Now the time was right for me to step up my game and proofread all documents. The eight tips are as follows; * Make multiple passes, checking for any problem * Read aloud or read backward * Double check high priority names, dates, address and financial data * Take a break for a while then start again Read the small sections * Stay focus on your work * Review complex document * Take your time It is a fact that we look at the same document over and over our brains tells us that there are no mistakes, but when we allow a second set of eyes to take a look the mistakes are found that we didn’t see, so even after proof reading sometimes it’s possible to overlook errors. The above steps are very important. The website touch on proofreading is equally important; producing a clean, error-free final draft isn’t easy. Even the most carefully edited professional publications contain occasional typos. Most readers understand this and aren’t bothered by such infrequent problems. Yet when errors occur often, they undermine the writer’s authority and disrupt communication. The following guidelines are easier for some to follow than for others, but they can, with a little work, be learned by almost anyone. Once learned, they’ll become part of your permanent knowledge base like the multiplication tables or your best friend’s phone number. You won’t have to learn them twice. Take time then, even if you’re fairly confident about your grammar, to see if you need to work on any of these six areas. If you do, try to understand the logic of the rule, what its purpose is. Six Problem Areas are; * Subject/Verb Agreement * Pronoun/Antecedent Agreement * Pronoun Reference * Shift in Tense * Shift in Person * Misrelated Modifier There are parts of the website that I believe to be very useful for me in my personal struggle to learn to write more professionally. The class has all the tools to push you to progress, however this website helps as do many other tools we use in learning to write effectively. The part of the site that impacted me the most was the grammar section which I mentioned in the above paragraph. I am very weak in this area that’s why this site was very informative for me. Although this website was very informative there were some areas that could be improved. The first page layout does not hold your attention as do other sites I’ve visited. There should be some video interactivity because as the site proclaimed, people don’t want to read huge amounts of text when the technology exist to allow some video format to occur. When I was looking for further information in reference to the first page tabs I didn. t see the tabs on the top for the page, a better way to present the tabs would be to make them larger and use a different color to attract attention. Some of the colors that are on the page should express key points, for an example; when you study and you want to remember a key point in the text you highlight it, so I think key points should be highlighted to bring attention to what the writer was trying to convey. The website definition of my earlier observation is, if writing is like making a movie, emphasis could be compared to a photographer’s zoom lens, moving in for a close-up one moment and backs for a wide-angle shot the next. Emphasis allows you to create similar special effects by magnifying, reducing, or even eliminating certain details. By controlling emphasis, you can focus your readers’ attention on what is most important. 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