Turky City Lexicon: A classifications of common sf tropes

"Turky City Lexicon" is apparently a very well known document in some circles - only I discovered it just now. Written by Lewis Shiner & Bruce Sterling, & with some of the classifications credited to such names as John W Campbell, Damon Knight, ...

It's intended primarily for aspiring sf writers, but I could see useful stuff for both critics & readers. A few are even common to any kind of writing - including programming & college project reports!

It's a long document that catalogs common tropes, including the ones that make bad stories, in 4 categories: "Plots", Common Story Types, "Paragraphs and Prose Structure", & "Words and Sentences". I found the first two particularly interesting (I'm not a writer - aspiring or otherwise).

[Via jz@rasfw]