Task: Sentiment Analysis
Input (English): Good Advice to Be Sure... . The advice Rand gives writers in this transcription of a series of living room lectures is sound in places: anchor your abstractions in the concrete; remember that art is selectivity; show, don't tell; use actions to illuminate your character, etc, etc, etc. All good advice, to be sure, but to say that Rand is proposing anything new or different from what is taught in writing seminars across the country is a little disingenuous. Add to this her refusal to praise the work of any author besides herself and Victor Hugo, her casual dismissal of prominent writers without convincing evidence (and, even more interesting, the relative paucity of authors she even brings up) and a few didactic guidelines (her ban on profanity, slang, and references less than one century old), and there's rather too much extraneous stuff here to be worth the effort of wading in to try to get to the good bits.    If it's advice you're looking for, there's an excellent essay called "Dogma" in "The Writing Life," a collection of essays and interviews with a number of authors put together by the National Book Award that I found both more helpful and less self-absorbed
Output (English): NEG