Several times throughout this school year, I've filled readers in on what's been going on in my Beginning Playwriting classroom, an 11th grade level class I introduced this year at my school. You can read about those updates here and here. At the end of March, we finished up the test run of this class with a final production, and I thought you'd like to read a bit about that experience as well as my final (for now) thoughts about why Playwriting belongs in the classroom. Call this my 11 o'clock number!  Continue reading...

In honor of National Poetry Month, we present some valuable tips for introducing poetry to students from Michele Dunaway, who teaches English and journalism at Francis Howell High School in St. Charles, Missouri, when she's not writing best-selling romance novels.  Continue reading...

When Margaret Hundley Parker teaches writing at the college level, she finds that the papers submitted by students often fall prey to the most basic errors of presentation. Here she reveals five persistent formatting flaws in student papers and explains how to fix them.  Continue reading...

I don't naturally love short stories, even though I do like small things: fairies, marshmallows and babies all come to mind. But in my personal reading, I prefer the meatiness of a long book, be it fiction or non-. Even in my magazine reading (and I am a devoted magazine reader), I catch myself flipping ahead to see how long an article is before I start. To my mind, the longer the better, which is why I am inordinately fond of Malcolm Gladwell's articles in The New Yorker.  Continue reading...

Learning grammar doesn't have to be dreary! Long gone are the days of sentence diagramming, or so it seems if you check out the fun interactive content on these grammar sites:

Grammaropolis

Grammar Bytes

Grammar Gorillas

Michele Dunaway teaches English and journalism at Francis Howell High School in St. Charles, Missouri, when she's not writing best-selling romance novels. Here Michele continues her discussion from last month about how choosing the right literature to read is the key to getting students excited about books.  Continue reading...