|
|
When we ran a post called "Short Words Are Best" a few weeks ago, subscribers jammed our Inbox with comments. One in particular caught our attention:
"Sure, short words are more readable, but what about the joy that comes from solving the innermost puzzle of a long word? For a linguaphile like me, the purest ecstasy arises from finding the Latin or Greek roots in a word, putting them together, and discovering the story of a word. For example, the word "peninsula" comes from "paene" and "insula," which mean "almost" and "island," respectively. So the word peninsula literally means "almost island." Sure, it's a long word, and some students may not like to read it, but the pleasure of the shape of the word and the story of its creation makes reading it worth the while."
We appreciated this spirited defense of long words, plus we noticed the word "students" in the comment. So we emailed this person, a teacher obviously, to find out more about how she teaches language. Well, maybe not so obvious. Here was the reply:
"You just made my day! I'm no English teacher -- I'm a high school freshman!"
Continue reading...
Click here to read more articles from Wunderkind.
Los Angeles teacher Linda Slater wrote us to say, "Did you know that Bob Sipchen, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at the LA Times now has a powerful blog all about the public school system in Los Angeles?" Thanks for the heads up, Linda, we didn't know. But when we checked out School Me, we thought it would be useful to any teacher, in Los Angeles, or beyond. We encourage you to check it out, too: School Me
Click here to read more articles from Blog Du Jour.
As the executive editor of the award-winning magazine Saveur and author of the soon-to-be-released W. W. Norton book Cradle of Flavor , on the cooking of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, James Oseland is celebrated for his writing about food -- just don't call him a "food writer." We caught up with James to ask him to parse this distinction, and tell us what makes for compelling writing on the subject of food:
VT: Is there such a thing as "food writing?"
James: We have a tendency to categorize in our culture, so we think of "food writing" as a thing, "science writing" as a thing, the work of a novelist as a thing. But good writing is good writing. It's essentially all the same thing, you know what I'm saying?
Continue reading...
Click here to read more articles from Word Count.
A List Apart, a terrific site that "explores the design, development and meaning of web content" argued the case for web storytelling last August. Author Curtis Cloninger writes, "Much ink has been spilt lately bemoaning the lack of quality content on the web. 'Sure the site flashes and whizzes and startles, but what does it have to say?'" Read the entire entry here.
Click here to read more articles from Blog Excerpts.
|
|
