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Ways to Use Figurative Language to Add Dimension and Color to Writing

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Understanding the definition of figurative language and ways to use it will help you add color and dimension to your writing.

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It is dated, but the content is good.

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Ba-Da-Bings--Or Getting Your Reader to See Things the Way You Do

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Active vs. Passive Voice | Grammar Lessons

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Watch more Grammar Lessons videos: http://www.howcast.com/videos/515781-Active-vs-Passive-Voice-Grammar-Lessons One of the fastest ways to improve your writing is to learn the difference between the active voice and the passive voice, and to adopt the active voice as often as you can. But before we can start to write in the active voice, we do need to know the difference.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Different types of Hooks.

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College Essay Guy - Personal statement and college essay tips, guides, resources, consulting, and webinars for students, parents and counselors.

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another of the best brainstorming exercises I've ever found, useful for identifying both your core values and your aspirations.

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100% personal narrative 8th grade- Korea.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Slides 1-9 only

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Lots of example sentences, but monotone audio.

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Finding theme/purpose in your life experience.

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Finding theme/purpose in your life experience.

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Writing Exercises to Reframe and Transform Your Life
From New World Library (publisher of Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, Dan Millman's The Peaceful Warrior, and the Deepak Chopra's The 7 Spiritual Laws of Success)
Our lives consist of stories that can be told in infinite ways. Every time we open our mouths, turn on our Ipads, or "put pen to paper," we make choices about how to tell a tale, about highs and lows, relationships and jobs, heartaches and joys.

But if there are many ways to tell the same story, how do we choose the best version so that the telling leaves us feeling hopeful and empowered? How do we find the redemptive, silver-lining narrative in the situations life throws at us?

In this groundbreaking book, therapist and writer Kim Schneiderman offers a story lens on life that help us see ourselves as ever-evolving characters growing through changes and challenges that show up in our narratives, which are works in progress. Chock full of life-affirming, liberating writing exercises designed for novices and habitual writers alike, this groundbreaking book will help you embrace the subtle, often unrecognized personal victories that build character - facing a fear, changing an attitude, or kicking a bad habit. As you write new scripts for old stories, you'll come to understand big-picture story lines in ways that allow you to steer your actions and relationships towards redefined, realistic and genuinely "happy endings."

Sample Exercise:
In this exercise, you will write a plot summary of the current chapter of your life. The Plot Summary Exercise is this book's cornerstone exercise. It sets up the remainder of the writing exercises and will become the focal point of your transformational work. You will use it to play with your story's mood and tone, identify the antagonist, and explore how narrative tension creates opportunities for character development and attitudinal change. Please answer the following two-part question in the third-person narrative: If you were reading the story of your life in a novel, the current chapter would be called: and would be about [summarize chapter in 8 to 10 sentences] "We are all constantly telling ourselves stories about our lives. Often we do this without being aware that we are not merely characters to whom things just happen, but the creators of our story as well. Through an ingenious series of exercises, Kim Schniederman shows us how to make this unconscious storytelling process conscious, and to use this new-found awareness to take control of our lives. Read this book, do the exercises. You will discover that you can step out of your story, and create it as you live."
_________________________________________________________________________________________.

- Albert J. Bernstein PhD, author of Dinosaur Brains and Emotional Vampires

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Step Out Of Your Story: Writing Exercises to Reframe and Transform Your Life

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Our lives consist of stories that can be told in infinite ways. Every time we open our mouths, turn on our Ipads, or "put pen to paper," we make choices about how to tell a tale, about highs and lows, relationships and jobs, heartaches and joys.

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Writing advice for writing a memoir/narrative

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Writing advice for writing a memoir/narrative

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Memoir is not just a fancy literary term for an autobiography. I say that from the start, because I so often hear the terms incorrectly interchanged.

Your memoir will be autobiographical, of course, but it can't be about you.

Confused yet? Stay with me.

Autobiography vs. Memoir: What's the Difference?

An autobiography is your life story from birth to the present.

A memoir is theme-oriented with anecdotes from your life that buttress a specific theme.

Too many authors write a memoir because they believe their lives are so interesting that even strangers would enjoy a detailed account.

Don't misunderstand, maybe you are interesting.

All of us are, to a degree. I hardly know anyone who doesn't have a story.

But unless you're a celebrity, a household name, most people beyond your family and close friends aren't likely to care.

They care about themselves and what your book offers them.

So your theme must be reader-oriented, offering universally true transferable principles that will help them.

The closest I have come to writing my own memoir, Writing for the Soul, uses selected anecdotes about famous and interesting people I've met to illustrate points I make about writing.

Had I merely written an autobiography and not offered writing instruction, it would've been largely ignored.

So your memoir should draw on anecdotes from your life selected to show how you progressed from some unlikely place to where you are today.

In that way, it's about you, but it's for the benefit of the reader.

Maybe you're:

From the other side of the tracks

From a broken home

A victim of abuse

A recovered addict

An orphan

Yet you have achieved:

You might start with how bad things once were for you and how unlikely it was that you would escape your situation.

Then you would show pivotal experiences and people important to your transformation, what you learned, and how your life changed.

Naturally, the better your stories and the more significant your change (in fiction we call this character arc), the better your memoir.

However, great stories are not the point - and frankly, neither is the memoirist (you).

The point is reader takeaway.

Readers should be able to apply to themselves and their own situations the larger truths and principles your theme imparts.

That way, you don't have to awkwardly try to apply your message to them. Ideally, they'll do it for themselves.

They may be enduring something entirely different from what you did, yet your story gives them hope.

What Publishers Look For

Don't buy into the idea that only famous people can sell a memoir.

Memoirs by previous nobodies succeed all the time-and for one reason: they resonate with readers because readers identify with them.

Truth, especially the hard, gritty, painful stuff, bears transferable principles.

Such candor attracts readers, and readers are what publishers want.

An astute agent or acquisitions editor recognizes how relatable a memoir will be and takes a chance on one.

Agents and editors tell me they love to discover such gems - the same way they love discovering the next great novelist.

So, when writing your memoir...

You may be the subject, but it's not about you.

It may seem counterintuitive to think reader-first while writing in first-person about yourself, but readers long to be changed by your story.

Give them insight about life through your experiences. Give them the tools they need to overcome their own struggles, even if they're not at all like yours. Give them a model for overcoming.

Couch it in entertaining, educational, and emotional stories, and they'll not only stay with you till the last page, but they'll also recommend your memoir to their friends.

Want to save this guide to read whenever you wish? Click here.

How to Write a Memoir

Step 1. Settle On Your Theme

Your unstated theme must be, "You're not alone. If I overcame this, you can overcome anything."

That's what appeals to readers. Even if they do come away from your memoir impressed with you, it won't be because you're so special - even if you are. Whether they admit it or not, readers care most about themselves.

They're reading your memoir wondering, What's in this for me? The more transferable principles you offer in a story well told, the more successful your book will be.

Cosmic Commonalities

All people, regardless of age, ethnicity, location, and social status, share certain felt needs: food, shelter, and love. They fear abandonment, loneliness, and the loss of loved ones. Regardless your theme, if it touches on any of those needs and fears, readers can identify.

I can read the memoir of someone of my opposite gender, for whom English is not her first language, of a different race and religion, who lives halfway around the world from me - and if she writes of her love for her child or grandchild, it reaches me.

Knowing or understanding or relating to nothing else about her, I understand love of family.

How to Write a Memoir Without Preaching

Trust your narrative to convey your message. Too many memoirists feel the need to eventually turn the spotlight on the reader with a sort of "So, how about you...?"

Let your experiences and how they impacted you make their own points, and trust the reader to get it. Beat him over the head with your theme and you run him off.

Avoid being preachy by using what I call the Come Alongside Method. Show what happened to you and what you learned, and if the principles apply to your reader, give him credit for being smart enough to get it.

Step 2. Select Your Anecdotes

The best memoirs let readers see themselves in your story so they can identify with your experiences and apply to their own lives the lessons you've learned.

If you're afraid to mine your pain deeply enough to tell the whole truth, you may not be ready to write your memoir. There's little less helpful - or marketable - than a memoir that glosses over the truth.

So, feature the anecdotes from your life that support your theme, regardless how painful it is to resurrect the memories. The more introspective and vulnerable you are, the more effective your memoir will be.

Create a list of events in your life and their impact on you. These may be major events like a war, your parents' divorce, a graduation, a wedding, or the loss of a dear friend or relative.

But they may also be seemingly mundane life events that for some reason affected you deeply. Just make sure they support your theme.

Who is unforgettable and what role did they play in making you the person you've become?

Interview family and friends for different perspectives. Peruse photographs, revisit meaningful places, research dates, the weather, and relevant history.

Step 3. Outline Your Book

Without a clear vision, trying to write a memoir will likely end in disaster. There's no substitute for an outline.

Potential agents or publishers require in your proposal a synopsis of where you're going, and they also need to know that you know.

One that changed the course of my writing career is novelist Dean Koontz's Classic Story Structure, spelled out in his classic How to Write Bestselling Fiction. Though obviously intended as a framework for a novel, I discovered it applies perfectly to almost any genre (including TV sitcoms, if you can believe it).

And fortunately, for the purposes of my subject today, Koontz's classic story structure serves a memoir beautifully too.

Here it is in a nutshell:

1 - Plunge your main character into terrible trouble as soon as possible

2 - Everything he does to try to get out of it makes it only progressively worse until...

3 - His situation appears hopeless

4 - But in the end, because of what he's learned and how he's grown through all those setbacks, he rises to the challenge and wins the day.

You might be able to structure your memoir the same way merely by how you choose to tell the story. As I say, don't force things, but the closer you can get to that structure, the more engaging your memoir will be.

For your memoir, naturally you're the main character.

And the Terrible Trouble would be the nadir of your life. (If nadir is a new word for you, it's the opposite of zenith.)

Take the reader with you to your lowest point, and show what you did to try to remedy things.

But what about that "as soon as possible" caveat?

Maybe your terrible trouble didn't manifest itself until later in life.

Fine, start there. The backstory can emerge as you progress, but you'll find his structure and sequencing will make for the most compelling read.

Important in fiction as well as in a memoir is to be sure your reader is invested in the main character enough to care when he is plunged into terrible trouble.

While in fiction that means some hint of the stakes - he's a husband, a father, has suffered some loss, etc. If that's also true of you, subtly inject it.

Also in a memoir, you want to promise a good outcome, some form of your own wonder at who you are no compared to who you once were or destined to be. That way readers can take from your story that things can dramatically change for the better in their lives too.

One of the reasons this structure works so well in fiction is because it's often true in real life.

If you've become a successful, happy person despite an unfortunate background, it's likely that you tried many times to fix things, only to see them deteriorate until you developed the ability to break through.

All Koontz, and I, are saying is to emphasize that.

Keep your outline to a single page for now.

Then develop a synopsis with a sentence or two of what each chapter will cover.

Write this is present tense. "I enroll in college only to find that..."

And don't worry if you've forgotten the basics of classic outlining or have never felt comfortable with the concept.

It doesn't have to be rendered in Roman numerals and capital and lowercase letters and then numerals, unless that serves you best.

Just a list of sentences that synopsize your idea works fine too.

And remember, it's a fluid document meant to serve you and your book. Play with it, rearrange it as you see fit - even during the writing.

Step 4. Write It Like a Novel

It's as important in a memoir as it is in a novel to show and not just tell.

Example:

Telling
My father was a drunk who abused my mother and me. I was scared to death every time I heard him come in late at night.
Showing
As soon as I heard the gravel crunch beneath the tires, I dove under my bed. I could tell by his footsteps whether Dad was sober and tired or loaded and looking for a fight. I prayed God would magically make me big enough to jump between him and my mom, because she was always his first target...
Use every trick in the novelist's arsenal to make each anecdote come to life: dialogue, description, conflict, tension, pacing, everything.

Worry less about chronology than theme.

You're not married to the autobiographer's progressive timeline.

Tell whatever anecdote fits your point for each chapter, regardless where they fall on the calendar.

Just make the details clear so the reader knows where you are in the story.

You might begin with the most significant memory of your life, even from childhood.

Then you can segue into something like, "Only now do I understand what was really happening." Your current-day voice can always drop in to tie things together.

Character Arc

As in a novel, how the protagonist (in this case, you) grows is critical to a successful story. Your memoir should make clear the difference between who you are today and who you once were. What you learn along the way becomes your character arc.

Point of View

It should go without saying that you write a memoir in the first-person. And just as in a novel, the point-of-view character is the one with the problem, the challenge, something he's after. Tell both your outer (what happens) and your inner (its impact on you) story.

Setups and Payoffs

Great novels carry a book-length setup that demands a payoff in the end, plus chapter-length setups and payoffs, and sometimes even the same within scenes. The more of these the better.

The same is true for your memoir. Virtually anything that makes the reader stay with you to find out what happens is a setup that demands a payoff. Even something as seemingly innocuous as your saying that you hoped high school would deliver you from the torment of junior high makes the reader want to find out if that proved true.

Make 'em Wait

Avoid using narrative summary to give away too much information too early. I've seen memoir manuscripts where the author tells in the first paragraph how they went from abject poverty to independent wealth in 20 years, "...and I want to tell you how that happened."

To me, that takes the air right out of the tension balloon.

Many readers would agree and see no reason to continue reading.

Better to set them up for a payoff and let them wait.

Not so long that you lose them to frustration, but long enough to build tension.

Step 5. Avoid Throwing People Under the Bus

If you're brave enough to expose your own weaknesses, foibles, embarrassments, and yes, even your failures to the world, what about your friends, enemies, loved ones, teachers, bosses, and coworkers?

If you tell the truth, are you allowed to throw them under the bus?

In some cases, yes.

But should you?

No.

Even if they gave you permission in writing, what's the upside?

Usually a person painted in a negative light - even if the story is true - would not sign a release allowing you to expose them publicly.

But even if they did, would it be the right, ethical, kind thing to do?

All I can tell you is that I wouldn't do it. And I wouldn't want it done to me.

If the Golden Rule alone isn't reason enough not to do it, the risk of being sued certainly ought to be.

So, What to Do?

On one hand, I'm telling you your memoir is worthless without the grit. On the other, I'm telling you not to expose the evildoers.

Stalemate? No.

Here's the solution:

Changing names to protect the guilty is not enough. Too many people in your family and social orbit will know the person, making your writing legally actionable.

So change more than just the name.

Change the location. Change the year. Change their gender. You could even change the offense.

If your own father verbally abused you so painfully when you were thirteen that you still suffer from the memory decades later, attribute it to a teacher and have it happen at an entirely different age.

Is that lying in a nonfiction book? Not if you include a disclaimer upfront that stipulates: "Some names and details have been changed to protect identities."

So, no, don't throw anyone under the bus. But don't stop that bus!

Common Memoir Mistakes

Making it too much like an autobiography (missing a theme)

Including minutiae

Bragging

Glossing over the truth

Preaching

Effecting the wrong tone: funny, sarcastic, condescending

How to Start Your Memoir

Start slowly by setting the stage or explaining family dynamics and your reader will soon lose interest.

Hook your reader from page one by beginning in medias res - in the middle of things. That doesn't mean it has to be slam-bang action, but something must be happening.

Memoir Examples

Thoroughly immerse yourself in this genre before attempting to write in it. I read nearly 50 memoirs before I wrote mine ( Writing for the Soul). Here's a list to get you started:

1. All Over But the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg (my favorite book ever)

2. by Lara Casey

3. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

4. Out of Africa by Karen Blixen

5. Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

6. Still Woman Enough by Loretta Lynn

7. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

8. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

9. This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff

10. by Benjie Molina and Joan Ryan

11. Undone by Michele Cushatt

12. Will the Circle Be Unbroken? By Sean Dietrich

Want to save this guide to read whenever you wish? Click here.

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How to Write a Powerful Memoir in 5 Simple Steps

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Memoir is not just a fancy literary term for an autobiography. I say that from the start, because I so often hear the terms incorrectly interchanged. Your memoir will be autobiographical, of course, but it can't be about you. Confused yet? Stay with me. An autobiography is your life story from birth to the present.

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Start at 2:20

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Good example of topic sentences and reflection within a paragraph. Pacing of the narrative is good as well.

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common app prompt 2- topic sentence & reflection; personal narrative - Google Docs

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Pacing, punctuation as voice

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Compare/contrast; reflection

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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She does an excellent job of using a narrative from her own life to lead up to the message of her talk.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story | TED

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Shows how to use an anecdote in writing an essay.

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Early one morning, Linsey Marr tiptoed to her dining room table, slipped on a headset, and fired up Zoom. On her computer screen, dozens of familiar faces began to appear. She also saw a few people she didn't know, including Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization's technical lead for Covid-19, and other expert advisers to the WHO. It was just past 1 pm Geneva time on April 3, 2020, but in Blacksburg, Virginia, where Marr lives with her husband and two children, dawn was just beginning to break.

Marr is an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech and one of the few in the world who also studies infectious diseases. To her, the new coronavirus looked as if it could hang in the air, infecting anyone who breathed in enough of it. For people indoors, that posed a considerable risk. But the WHO didn't seem to have caught on. Just days before, the organization had tweeted "FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne." That's why Marr was skipping her usual morning workout to join 35 other aerosol scientists. They were trying to warn the WHO it was making a big mistake.

Over Zoom, they laid out the case. They ticked through a growing list of superspreading events in restaurants, call centers, cruise ships, and a choir rehearsal, instances where people got sick even when they were across the room from a contagious person. The incidents contradicted the WHO's main safety guidelines of keeping 3 to 6 feet of distance between people and frequent handwashing. If SARS-CoV-2 traveled only in large droplets that immediately fell to the ground, as the WHO was saying, then wouldn't the distancing and the handwashing have prevented such outbreaks? Infectious air was the more likely culprit, they argued. But the WHO's experts appeared to be unmoved. If they were going to call Covid-19 airborne, they wanted more direct evidence-proof, which could take months to gather, that the virus was abundant in the air. Meanwhile, thousands of people were falling ill every day.

On the video call, tensions rose. At one point, Lidia Morawska, a revered atmospheric physicist who had arranged the meeting, tried to explain how far infectious particles of different sizes could potentially travel. One of the WHO experts abruptly cut her off, telling her she was wrong, Marr recalls. His rudeness shocked her. "You just don't argue with Lidia about physics," she says.

Morawska had spent more than two decades advising a different branch of the WHO on the impacts of air pollution. When it came to flecks of soot and ash belched out by smokestacks and tailpipes, the organization readily accepted the physics she was describing-that particles of many sizes can hang aloft, travel far, and be inhaled. Now, though, the WHO's advisers seemed to be saying those same laws didn't apply to virus-laced respiratory particles. To them, the word airborne only applied to particles smaller than 5 microns. Trapped in their group-specific jargon, the two camps on Zoom literally couldn't understand one another.

When the call ended, Marr sat back heavily, feeling an old frustration coiling tighter in her body. She itched to go for a run, to pound it out footfall by footfall into the pavement. "It felt like they had already made up their minds and they were just entertaining us," she recalls. Marr was no stranger to being ignored by members of the medical establishment. Often seen as an epistemic trespasser, she was used to persevering through skepticism and outright rejection. This time, however, so much more than her ego was at stake. The beginning of a global pandemic was a terrible time to get into a fight over words. But she had an inkling that the verbal sparring was a symptom of a bigger problem-that outdated science was underpinning public health policy. She had to get through to them. But first, she had to crack the mystery of why their communication was failing so badly.

Marr spent the first many years of her career studying air pollution, just as Morawska had. But her priorities began to change in the late 2000s, when Marr sent her oldest child off to day care. That winter, she noticed how waves of runny noses, chest colds, and flu swept through the classrooms, despite the staff's rigorous disinfection routines. "Could these common infections actually be in the air?" she wondered. Marr picked up a few introductory medical textbooks to satisfy her curiosity.

According to the medical canon, nearly all respiratory infections transmit through coughs or sneezes: Whenever a sick person hacks, bacteria and viruses spray out like bullets from a gun, quickly falling and sticking to any surface within a blast radius of 3 to 6 feet. If these droplets alight on a nose or mouth (or on a hand that then touches the face), they can cause an infection. Only a few diseases were thought to break this droplet rule. Measles and tuberculosis transmit a different way; they're described as "airborne." Those pathogens travel inside aerosols, microscopic particles that can stay suspended for hours and travel longer distances. They can spread when contagious people simply breathe.

The distinction between droplet and airborne transmission has enormous consequences. To combat droplets, a leading precaution is to wash hands frequently with soap and water. To fight infectious aerosols, the air itself is the enemy. In hospitals, that means expensive isolation wards and N95 masks for all medical staff.

The books Marr flipped through drew the line between droplets and aerosols at 5 microns. A micron is a unit of measurement equal to one-millionth of a meter. By this definition, any infectious particle smaller than 5 microns in diameter is an aerosol; anything bigger is a droplet. The more she looked, the more she found that number. The WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also listed 5 microns as the fulcrum on which the droplet-aerosol dichotomy toggled.

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There was just one literally tiny problem: "The physics of it is all wrong," Marr says. That much seemed obvious to her from everything she knew about how things move through air. Reality is far messier, with particles much larger than 5 microns staying afloat and behaving like aerosols, depending on heat, humidity, and airspeed. "I'd see the wrong number over and over again, and I just found that disturbing," she says. The error meant that the medical community had a distorted picture of how people might get sick.

Epidemiologists have long observed that most respiratory bugs require close contact to spread. Yet in that small space, a lot can happen. A sick person might cough droplets onto your face, emit small aerosols that you inhale, or shake your hand, which you then use to rub your nose. Any one of those mechanisms might transmit the virus. "Technically, it's very hard to separate them and see which one is causing the infection," Marr says. For long-distance infections, only the smallest particles could be to blame. Up close, though, particles of all sizes were in play. Yet, for decades, droplets were seen as the main culprit.

Marr decided to collect some data of her own. Installing air samplers in places such as day cares and airplanes, she frequently found the flu virus where the textbooks said it shouldn't be-hiding in the air, most often in particles small enough to stay aloft for hours. And there was enough of it to make people sick.

In 2011, this should have been major news. Instead, the major medical journals rejected her manuscript. Even as she ran new experiments that added evidence to the idea that influenza was infecting people via aerosols, only one niche publisher, The Journal of the Royal Society Interface, was consistently receptive to her work. In the siloed world of academia, aerosols had always been the domain of engineers and physicists, and pathogens purely a medical concern; Marr was one of the rare people who tried to straddle the divide. "I was definitely fringe," she says.

Thinking it might help her overcome this resistance, she'd try from time to time to figure out where the flawed 5-micron figure had come from. But she always got stuck. The medical textbooks simply stated it as fact, without a citation, as if it were pulled from the air itself. Eventually she got tired of trying, her research and life moved on, and the 5-micron mystery faded into the background. Until, that is, December 2019, when a paper crossed her desk from the lab of Yuguo Li.

An indoor-air researcher at the University of Hong Kong, Li had made a name for himself during the first SARS outbreak, in 2003. His investigation of an outbreak at the Amoy Gardens apartment complex provided the strongest evidence that a coronavirus could be airborne. But in the intervening decades, he'd also struggled to convince the public health community that their risk calculus was off. Eventually, he decided to work out the math. Li's elegant simulations showed that when a person coughed or sneezed, the heavy droplets were too few and the targets-an open mouth, nostrils, eyes-too small to account for much infection. Li's team had concluded, therefore, that the public health establishment had it backward and that most colds, flu, and other respiratory illnesses must spread through aerosols instead.

Their findings, they argued, exposed the fallacy of the 5-micron boundary. And they'd gone a step further, tracing the number back to a decades-old document the CDC had published for hospitals. Marr couldn't help but feel a surge of excitement. A journal had asked her to review Li's paper, and she didn't mask her feelings as she sketched out her reply. On January 22, 2020, she wrote, "This work is hugely important in challenging the existing dogma about how infectious disease is transmitted in droplets and aerosols."

Even as she composed her note, the implications of Li's work were far from theoretical. Hours later, Chinese government officials cut off any travel in and out of the city of Wuhan, in a desperate attempt to contain an as-yet-unnamed respiratory disease burning through the 11-million-person megalopolis. As the pandemic shut down country after country, the WHO and the CDC told people to wash their hands, scrub surfaces, and maintain social distance. They didn't say anything about masks or the dangers of being indoors.

A few days after the April Zoom meeting with the WHO, Marr got an email from another aerosol scientist who had been on the call, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Colorado Boulder named Jose-Luis Jimenez. He'd become fixated on the WHO recommendation that people stay 3 to 6 feet apart from one another. As far as he could tell, that social distancing guideline seemed to be based on a few studies from the 1930s and '40s. But the authors of those experiments actually argued for the possibility of airborne transmission, which by definition would involve distances over 6 feet. None of it seemed to add up.

Marr told him about her concerns with the 5-micron boundary and suggested that their two issues might be linked. If the 6-foot guideline was built off of an incorrect definition of droplets, the 5-micron error wasn't just some arcane detail. It seemed to sit at the heart of the WHO's and the CDC's flawed guidance. Finding its origin suddenly became a priority. But to hunt it down, Marr, Jimenez, and their collaborators needed help. They needed a historian.

Luckily, Marr knew one, a Virginia Tech scholar named Tom Ewing who specialized in the history of tuberculosis and influenza. They talked. He suggested they bring on board a graduate student he happened to know who was good at this particular form of forensics. The team agreed. "This will be very interesting," Marr wrote in an email to Jimenez on April 13. "I think we're going to find a house of cards."

The graduate student in question was Katie Randall. Covid had just dealt her dissertation a big blow-she could no longer conduct in-person research, so she'd promised her adviser she would devote the spring to sorting out her dissertation and nothing else. But then an email from Ewing arrived in her inbox describing Marr's quest and the clues her team had so far unearthed, which were "layered like an archaeology site, with shards that might make up a pot," he wrote. That did it. She was in.

Randall had studied citation tracking, a type of scholastic detective work where the clues aren't blood sprays and stray fibers but buried references to long-ago studies, reports, and other records. She started digging where Li and the others had left off-with various WHO and CDC papers. But she didn't find any more clues than they had. Dead end.

She tried another tack. Everyone agreed that tuberculosis was airborne. So she plugged "5 microns" and "tuberculosis" into a search of the CDC's archives. She scrolled and scrolled until she reached the earliest document on tuberculosis prevention that mentioned aerosol size. It cited an out-of-print book written by a Harvard engineer named William Firth Wells. Published in 1955, it was called Airborne Contagion and Air Hygiene. A lead!

In the Before Times, she would have acquired the book through interlibrary loan. With the pandemic shutting down universities, that was no longer an option. On the wilds of the open internet, Randall tracked down a first edition from a rare book seller for $500-a hefty expense for a side project with essentially no funding. But then one of the university's librarians came through and located a digital copy in Michigan. Randall began to dig in.

In the words of Wells' manuscript, she found a man at the end of his career, rushing to contextualize more than 23 years of research. She started reading his early work, including one of the studies Jimenez had mentioned. In 1934, Wells and his wife, Mildred Weeks Wells, a physician, analyzed air samples and plotted a curve showing how the opposing forces of gravity and evaporation acted on respiratory particles. The couple's calculations made it possible to predict the time it would take a particle of a given size to travel from someone's mouth to the ground. According to them, particles bigger than 100 microns sank within seconds. Smaller particles stayed in the air. Randall paused at the curve they'd drawn. To her, it seemed to foreshadow the idea of a droplet-aerosol dichotomy, but one that should have pivoted around 100 microns, not 5.

The book was long, more than 400 pages, and Randall was still on the hook for her dissertation. She was also helping her restless 6-year-old daughter navigate remote kindergarten, now that Covid had closed her school. So it was often not until late at night, after everyone had gone to bed, that she could return to it, taking detailed notes about each day's progress.

One night she read about experiments Wells did in the 1940s in which he installed air-disinfecting ultraviolet lights inside schools. In the classrooms with UV lamps installed, fewer kids came down with the measles. He concluded that the measles virus must have been in the air. Randall was struck by this. She knew that measles didn't get recognized as an airborne disease until decades later. What had happened?

Part of medical rhetoric is understanding why certain ideas take hold and others don't. So as spring turned to summer, Randall started to investigate how Wells' contemporaries perceived him. That's how she found the writings of Alexander Langmuir, the influential chief epidemiologist of the newly established CDC. Like his peers, Langmuir had been brought up in the Gospel of Personal Cleanliness, an obsession that made handwashing the bedrock of US public health policy. He seemed to view Wells' ideas about airborne transmission as retrograde, seeing in them a slide back toward an ancient, irrational terror of bad air-the "miasma theory" that had prevailed for centuries. Langmuir dismissed them as little more than "interesting theoretical points."

But at the same time, Langmuir was growing increasingly preoccupied by the threat of biological warfare. He worried about enemies carpeting US cities in airborne pathogens. In March 1951, just months after the start of the Korean War, Langmuir published a report in which he simultaneously disparaged Wells' belief in airborne infection and credited his work as being foundational to understanding the physics of airborne infection.

How curious, Randall thought. She kept reading.

In the report, Langmuir cited a few studies from the 1940s looking at the health hazards of working in mines and factories, which showed the mucus of the nose and throat to be exceptionally good at filtering out particles bigger than 5 microns. The smaller ones, however, could slip deep into the lungs and cause irreversible damage. If someone wanted to turn a rare and nasty pathogen into a potent agent of mass infection, Langmuir wrote, the thing to do would be to formulate it into a liquid that could be aerosolized into particles smaller than 5 microns, small enough to bypass the body's main defenses. Curious indeed. Randall made a note.

When she returned to Wells' book a few days later, she noticed he too had written about those industrial hygiene studies. They had inspired Wells to investigate what role particle size played in the likelihood of natural respiratory infections. He designed a study using tuberculosis-causing bacteria. The bug was hardy and could be aerosolized, and if it landed in the lungs, it grew into a small lesion. He exposed rabbits to similar doses of the bacteria, pumped into their chambers either as a fine (smaller than 5 microns) or coarse (bigger than 5 microns) mist. The animals that got the fine treatment fell ill, and upon autopsy it was clear their lungs bulged with lesions. The bunnies that received the coarse blast appeared no worse for the wear.

For days, Randall worked like this-going back and forth between Wells and Langmuir, moving forward and backward in time. As she got into Langmuir's later writings, she observed a shift in his tone. In articles he wrote up until the 1980s, toward the end of his career, he admitted he had been wrong about airborne infection. It was possible.

A big part of what changed Langmuir's mind was one of Wells' final studies. Working at a VA hospital in Baltimore, Wells and his collaborators had pumped exhaust air from a tuberculosis ward into the cages of about 150 guinea pigs on the building's top floor. Month after month, a few guinea pigs came down with tuberculosis. Still, public health authorities were skeptical. They complained that the experiment lacked controls. So Wells' team added another 150 animals, but this time they included UV lights to kill any germs in the air. Those guinea pigs stayed healthy. That was it, the first incontrovertible evidence that a human disease-tuberculosis-could be airborne, and not even the public health big hats could ignore it.

The groundbreaking results were published in 1962. Wells died in September of the following year. A month later, Langmuir mentioned the late engineer in a speech to public health workers. It was Wells, he said, that they had to thank for illuminating their inadequate response to a growing epidemic of tuberculosis. He emphasized that the problematic particles-the ones they had to worry about-were smaller than 5 microns.

Inside Randall's head, something snapped into place. She shot forward in time, to that first tuberculosis guidance document where she had started her investigation. She had learned from it that tuberculosis is a curious critter; it can only invade a subset of human cells in the deepest reaches of the lungs. Most bugs are more promiscuous. They can embed in particles of any size and infect cells all along the respiratory tract.

What must have happened, she thought, was that after Wells died, scientists inside the CDC conflated his observations. They plucked the size of the particle that transmits tuberculosis out of context, making 5 microns stand in for a general definition of airborne spread. Wells' 100-micron threshold got left behind. "You can see that the idea of what is respirable, what stays airborne, and what is infectious are all being flattened into this 5-micron phenomenon," Randall says. Over time, through blind repetition, the error sank deeper into the medical canon. The CDC did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In June, she Zoomed into a meeting with the rest of the team to share what she had found. Marr almost couldn't believe someone had cracked it. "It was like, 'Oh my gosh, this is where the 5 microns came from?!'" After all these years, she finally had an answer. But getting to the bottom of the 5-micron myth was only the first step. Dislodging it from decades of public health doctrine would mean convincing two of the world's most powerful health authorities not only that they were wrong but that the error was incredibly-and urgently-consequential.

While Randall was digging through the past, her collaborators were planning a campaign. In July, Marr and Jimenez went public, signing their names to an open letter addressed to public health authorities, including the WHO. Along with 237 other scientists and physicians, they warned that without stronger recommendations for masking and ventilation, airborne spread of SARS-CoV-2 would undermine even the most vigorous testing, tracing, and social distancing efforts.

The news made headlines. And it provoked a strong backlash. Prominent public health personalities rushed to defend the WHO. Twitter fights ensued. Saskia Popescu, an infection-prevention epidemiologist who is now a biodefense professor at George Mason University, was willing to buy the idea that people were getting Covid by breathing in aerosols, but only at close range. That's not airborne in the way public health people use the word. "It's a very weighted term that changes how we approach things," she says. "It's not something you can toss around haphazardly."

Days later, the WHO released an updated scientific brief, acknowledging that aerosols couldn't be ruled out, especially in poorly ventilated places. But it stuck to the 3- to 6-foot rule, advising people to wear masks indoors only if they couldn't keep that distance. Jimenez was incensed. "It is misinformation, and it is making it difficult for ppl to protect themselves," he tweeted about the update. "E.g. 50+ reports of schools, offices forbidding portable HEPA units because of @CDCgov and @WHO downplaying aerosols."

While Jimenez and others sparred on social media, Marr worked behind the scenes to raise awareness of the misunderstandings around aerosols. She started talking to Kimberly Prather, an atmospheric chemist at UC San Diego, who had the ear of prominent public health leaders within the CDC and on the White House Covid Task Force. In July, the two women sent slides to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. One of them showed the trajectory of a 5-micron particle released from the height of the average person's mouth. It went farther than 6 feet-hundreds of feet farther. A few weeks later, speaking to an audience at Harvard Medical School, Fauci admitted that the 5-micron distinction was wrong-and had been for years. "Bottom line is, there is much more aerosol than we thought," he said. (Fauci declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Still, the droplet dogma reigned. In early October, Marr and a group of scientists and doctors published a letter in Science urging everyone to get on the same page about how infectious particles move, starting with ditching the 5-micron threshold. Only then could they provide clear and effective advice to the public. That same day, the CDC updated its guidance to acknowledge that SARS-CoV-2 can spread through long-lingering aerosols. But it didn't emphasize them.

That winter, the WHO also began to talk more publicly about aerosols. On December 1, the organization finally recommended that everyone always wear a mask indoors wherever Covid-19 is spreading. In an interview, the WHO's Maria Van Kerkhove said that the change reflects the organization's commitment to evolving its guidance when the scientific evidence compels a change. She maintains that the WHO has paid attention to airborne transmission from the beginning-first in hospitals, then at places such as bars and restaurants. "The reason we're promoting ventilation is that this virus can be airborne," Van Kerkhove says. But because that term has a specific meaning in the medical community, she admits to avoiding it-and emphasizing instead the types of settings that pose the biggest risks. Does she think that decision has harmed the public health response, or cost lives? No, she says. "People know what they need to do to protect themselves."

Yet she admits it may be time to rethink the old droplet-airborne dichotomy. According to Van Kerkhove, the WHO plans to formally review its definitions for describing disease transmission in 2021.

For Yuguo Li, whose work had so inspired Marr, these moves have given him a sliver of hope. "Tragedy always teaches us something," he says. The lesson he thinks people are finally starting to learn is that airborne transmission is both more complicated and less scary than once believed. SARS-CoV-2, like many respiratory diseases, is airborne, but not wildly so. It isn't like measles, which is so contagious it infects 90 percent of susceptible people exposed to someone with the virus. And the evidence hasn't shown that the coronavirus often infects people over long distances. Or in well-ventilated spaces. The virus spreads most effectively in the immediate vicinity of a contagious person, which is to say that most of the time it looks an awful lot like a textbook droplet-based pathogen.

For most respiratory diseases, not knowing which route caused an infection has not been catastrophic. But the cost has not been zero. Influenza infects millions each year, killing between 300,000 and 650,000 globally. And epidemiologists are predicting the next few years will bring particularly deadly flu seasons. Li hopes that acknowledging this history-and how it hindered an effective global response to Covid-19-will allow good ventilation to emerge as a central pillar of public health policy, a development that would not just hasten the end of this pandemic but beat back future ones.

To get a glimpse into that future, you need only peek into the classrooms where Li teaches or the Crossfit gym where Marr jumps boxes and slams medicine balls. In the earliest days of the pandemic, Li convinced the administrators at the University of Hong Kong to spend most of its Covid-19 budget on upgrading the ventilation in buildings and buses rather than on things such as mass Covid testing of students. Marr reviewed blueprints and HVAC schematics with the owner of her gym, calculating the ventilation rates and consulting on a redesign that moved workout stations outside and near doors that were kept permanently open. To date, no one has caught Covid at the gym. Li's university, a school of 30,000 students, has recorded a total of 23 Covid-19 cases. Of course Marr's gym is small, and the university benefited from the fact that Asian countries, scarred by the 2003 SARS epidemic, were quick to recognize aerosol transmission. But Marr's and Li's swift actions could well have improved their odds. Ultimately, that's what public health guidelines do: They tilt people and places closer to safety.

On Friday, April 30, the WHO quietly updated a page on its website. In a section on how the coronavirus gets transmitted, the text now states that the virus can spread via aerosols as well as larger droplets. As Zeynep Tufekci noted in The New York Times, perhaps the biggest news of the pandemic passed with no news conference, no big declaration. If you weren't paying attention, it was easy to miss.

But Marr was paying attention. She couldn't help but note the timing. She, Li, and two other aerosol scientists had just published an editorial in The BMJ, a top medical journal, entitled "Covid-19 Has Redefined Airborne Transmission." For once, she hadn't had to beg; the journal's editors came to her. And her team had finally posted their paper on the origins of the 5-micron error to a public preprint server.

In early May, the CDC made similar changes to its Covid-19 guidance, now placing the inhalation of aerosols at the top of its list of how the disease spreads. Again though, no news conference, no press release. But Marr, of course, noticed. That evening, she got in her car to pick up her daughter from gymnastics. She was alone with her thoughts for the first time all day. As she waited at a red light, she suddenly burst into tears. Not sobbing, but unable to stop the hot stream of tears pouring down her face. Tears of exhaustion, and relief, but also triumph. Finally, she thought, they're getting it right, because of what we've done.

The light turned. She wiped the tears away. Someday it would all sink in, but not today. Now, there were kids to pick up and dinner to eat. Something approaching normal life awaited.

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