teaching writing
Paying the Piper – the failure of American high schools
Tweet A second semester college student included this language in the third, and final, draft of her essay on “love and marriage.” I like many other people are surprised by the amount of time couples stay together. Not to mention adopting a child. After the final drafts had been turned in, I culled 22 similarly […]
Playing with language
Tweet A recent article in The New York Times, “My Life’s Sentences,” by the author Jhumpa Lahiri, mentioned one of her favorite sentences. It is in the short story Araby, by James Joyce: “The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.” Since we had just read this story in class, I […]
Journals: a comment on literacy
Tweet This weekend I saw Dr. Andrew Weil speak about mental health at the Book Fair in Tucson, Arizona. Dr. Weil is a well known author and doctor who advocates integrated health care, using both traditional and modern medical techniques. Among the many elements of maintaining mental health, he mentioned gratitude. We should be grateful, […]
Fiction Exercise: Final part
Tweet The fiction-writing exercise described in the posts of February 2, 7, 13, 16, and 21 was the first assignment of a class in which the students would later write essays on assigned subjects, using works of fiction and poetry as sources. The goal was to provide the students with some insight into what it takes to write fiction. (Poetry […]
Fiction Exercise: Part 5
Tweet The fiction-writing exercise described in the posts of February 2, 7, 13, and 16 was the first assignment of a class in which the students would later write essays on assigned subjects, using works of fiction and poetry as sources. The goal was to provide the students with some insight into what it takes to write fiction. (Poetry […]
Fiction Exercise: Part 4
Tweet The fiction-writing exercise described in the posts of February 2, 7 and 13 was the first assignment of a class in which the students would later write essays on assigned subjects, using works of fiction and poetry as sources. The goal was to provide the students with some insight into what it takes to write fiction. (Poetry […]
Fiction Exercise: Part 3
Tweet The fiction-writing exercise described in the posts of February 2 and 7 was the first assignment of a class in which the students would later write essays on assigned subjects, using works of fiction and poetry as sources. The goal was to provide the students with some insight into what it takes to write fiction. (Poetry writing was […]
Where do ideas come from?
Tweet One area of linguistics, Psycholinguistics, concerns itself with how the mind creates the matter which produces ideas. Ideas are a precursor to the words which express them — a Chinese speaker and an English speaker can view a work of art or a car accident and have the same “idea,” but the words which […]
Fiction Exercise: Part 2
Tweet The fiction-writing exercise described in the post of February 2 was the first assignment of a class in which the students would later write essays on assigned subjects, using works of fiction and poetry as sources. The goal was to provide the students with some insight into what it takes to write fiction. (Poetry writing was […]
Writing fiction to study literature
Tweet The fiction-writing exercise described in this series of posts was the first assignment of a class in which the students would later write essays on assigned subjects, using works of fiction and poetry as sources. The goal was to provide the students with some insight into what it takes to write fiction. (Poetry writing was […]