Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Elisa Doucette

@elisadoucette.bsky.social

650 followers 210 following 1.1K posts

🧰 (Word) Fixer. Language lover. 😎 Most days I'm an editor. Some days I get around to writing as well.

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · Jan 14

Elisa is one of those people...she seems like the person you call at 3AM after you accidentally murdered someone, and she'd just be like "Ok, I know a guy. I'll be there in 40 minutes. No judgement. No questions. We got this."

Post from the official Threads account: "Story time: What's the best compliment you've ever received?"

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 5m

Grangerize is the reminder that some of the best books are the ones we make our own.

#GlossaryOfTheForgotten — because life’s too chaotic for bland words.

9/

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 5m

📚 Sorta Synonyms: annotate, extra-illustrate, scrapbook
🧰 Modern Equivalents: a Pinterest board for your manuscript project, Become a Master Writer notebooks, quote-posting with purpose

8/

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 5m

⚒️ Use It For
Remixing someone else’s framework until it fits your mind.
Turning your notes and highlights into something new and alive.
Transforming a client report into a bespoke artistic endeavor with added data and context.

7/

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 5m

🔥 Why We Need It Back
Because collaboration has always been baked into creativity.
Because some ideas are so compelling you have to glue them into the text.
Because it perfectly describes the beautiful chaos of turning a standard-issue text into your own masterpiece.

6/

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 5m

By the early 1800s, “Grangerizing” had become a cultural phenomenon. Book lovers defended it as a creative pursuit; purists decried it as literary abuse. Transforming mass-produced objects into one-of-a-kind artifacts, the practice is also called "extra-illustration."

5/

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 5m

Those readers went wild! They began cutting illustrations from other books and pasting them in, crafting sprawling, personalized hybrids that blurred the line between scholarship and scrapbook.

4/

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 5m

This eponym (word that is created from the name of someone or something) comes from James Granger, an English clergyman and biographer whose 'Biographical History of England' (1769) included blank pages for readers to add their own portraits and notes.

3/

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 5m

Grangerize [GREYN-juhr-ahyz] (v.): turning your reading into a collaborative art project

Some readers highlight, others annotate. Then there are the ones who take scissors to literature and start remixing.

2/

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 5m

Ready for a word that celebrates creative vandalism in the name of readerly love?

🗝️ Glossary of the Forgotten: Grangerize

1/

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 1d

All I'm saying is that if bats are allowed to shriek at things around them to determine how close they want to get, I should be able to do the same.

1 2

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 1d

The only thing that would make this piece even better is a follow up on Substack itself, and how their growth and TFP growth are symbiotic offshoots of Andreessen's (and SV as a whole's) continued thumb-pushing of media manipulation. Can't have one without the other.

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 2d

The daily urge I have to post this as a reply to the absolutely unhinged ridiculousness I see online.

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 2d

*Chef's Kiss* 😏

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 3d

I share more in the essay at the end, but my first website and online "persona" was 'Ophelia's Webb"...so you could say I've been into Ophelia's story and symbolism for a long while now. 😉 (So glad you enjoyed, thank you!!)

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 3d

I was REALLY confused how Jane Goodall's mom had recently dropped new advice. 😆 Obviously it was "a throwback" (I'm guessing‽)

Reposted by Elisa Doucette

Molly Ringle @writermollyringle.bsky.social · 3d

How about if AI stuck to solving problems like telling the printer that even though it’s out of magenta, it really can still print a document that has nothing but black text.

1 7

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 6d

People being all weird about Taylor Swift getting freaked out that the person she loves the most is playing a game that can at times be a brutal sport have OBVIOUSLY never seen Regina King's [should have been Oscar nominated] performance as Marcee Tidwell, "a football wife" in Jerry Maguire.

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 6d

Ophelia didn’t get to rewrite her story, but she made sure the truth flourished.

Taylor keeps rewriting hers, one coded lyric at a time. So Tay, I guess thank you for the lovely bouquet. 🌸

You can read the full WILF essay: craftyourcontent.kit.com/posts/what-i...

10/

What I Learned From The Fate of Ophelia About Hidden Languages

Writers hide secrets everywhere: Shakespeare in bouquets, Swift in Easter eggs. Ophelia’s flowers teach us the craft of smuggling meaning into stories

craftyourcontent.kit.com

1 1 1

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 6d

For writers, symbolism isn’t decoration, it’s depth.

It’s how we write for two audiences at once:

The Casual Reader who feels the story
The Careful Decoder who sees it

9/

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 6d

Taylor Swift gets it.

Capital letters, costume changes, numerology, lyric callbacks...every Era, every Easter egg: her own secret code.

Details that thrill the observant, it’s a language for the digital age, and Swifties are fluent speakers.

8/

Album cover: Taylor Swift, The Life of a Showgirl (2025). Taylor Swift poses submerged in teal water wearing a jeweled, netted costume resembling pearls or scales. Red glitter text reads “The Life of a Showgirl.” The image evokes glamour, performance, and spectacle.

1 1

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 6d

Shakespeare didn’t need exposition or explanation, he trusted his audience to listen between the lines.

He gave them floriography, the language of flowers: a secret reward for those who cared enough to decipher it (in his time, plenty of people would have known what it all meant!)

7/

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 6d

And then, when the story swallows her whole, the flowers return.

Gertrude describes her drowned body tangled in garlands of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples.

Even in death, Ophelia gives one last monologue – silent, but perfectly delivered.

6/

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 6d

Fennel for false flattery and columbine for deceit, aimed at King Claudius.

Rue for regret, offered to Queen Gertrude and some kept for herself.

A daisy for innocence lost. Violets for faithfulness that withered as corruption bloomed.

Every petal was a pointed remark.

5/

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 6d

She enters the court singing simple songs, her hands filled with imaginary blooms.

Rosemary for remembrance, pansies for thoughts; both for Laertes, her brother. A plea to remember their father’s death, and not to forget the truth beneath the palace’s polished lies.

4/

Elisa Doucette @elisadoucette.bsky.social · 6d

She was surrounded by people who treated her like a pawn: her father, her brother, her boyfriend, her mother-figure, her king.

Each demanded loyalty, but none offered it.

When her voice was dismissed, she stopped speaking directly and started speaking in symbols.

3/