Michael Lydon makes an eloquent case for the central role of assonance in the craft of fine writing: "More than a device we can apply by rule or rote, assonance comes to us as a gift from language itself, from our deep animal urge to communicate with our voices."  Continue reading...

Machines can grade essays as accurately as human readers. According to the New York Times, a competition sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation produced software able to match human essay readers grade for grade, and a study of commercially-available automatic grading programs showed that computers assessed essays as accurately as human readers, but a whole lot faster, and cheaper, to boot. But that's just the start: computers could lead to a reading-free future.  Continue reading...

What keeps writing alive? The truth of life. Getting the truth into words is our only hope for immortality. Writing that speaks falsely about life dwindles down to death in a matter of decades.  Continue reading...

To be or not to be, that is the question.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Happy families are all alike, unhappy families are unhappy each in their own way.

What do these famous sentences have in common? They are all general statements.  Continue reading...

On the Sunday morning of Hurricane Irene, I sat in a long line of folding chairs set up in a barn-like rehearsal hall at the Peterborough Players, a fine summer theater deep in the New Hampshire woods. Before me, an eager troupe of actors and musicians, still in sweatshirts and blue jeans, worked their way through Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, their first full run-through before an invited audience.  Continue reading...

Last week, the College Board reported that SAT reading scores have reached an all-time low. The Class of 2011's SAT reading scores dipped another three points from the previous year (down to 497), and that makes it a whopping 33-point drop since 1972. The bleak news should leave teachers and administrators taking a hard look at how we are preparing students (or not) for the skills that are tested on the reading section of standardized exams.  Continue reading...