Welcome to the November-December 2007 WordMasters Challenge, the first of this school year. Over four thousand school teams from every state participate each year in this popular national competition for Language Arts students in grades 3 to 12. Click on www.wordmasterschallenge.com to learn more about the Challenge and to participate using the word lists posted here.

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Shannon Reed is an award-winning playwright who teaches high school English to a large pack of bright young women at a private school on the beach in Queens, New York. She graciously contributed this column:

Last spring, the faculty at the small private school where I teach gathered in the traditional faculty meeting place -- a circa 1960's Home Ec room that probably shudders each time we refer to it as the "Consumer Sciences Department" -- to learn, from an exceedingly cranky member of the New York City Board of Education computers-in-the-classroom team, how to log into a website. As the woman snapped and snarled at everyone, I wondered, disinterestedly, what was her problem? Then I watched the faculty try to complete the simple tasks of accessing the internet and setting up a password and user name at the website. It quickly turned disastrous.

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Can't tell your beserker from your Dyson sphere? These websites are devoted to the peculiar, fascinating -- and delicious -- argot of Science Fiction fandom and literature, many words of which have filtered into our mainstream language...

Fanspeak Glossary

Prototype Worlds

Fannish Reference Works

Turkey City Lexicon

That extra bit of dust floating about this month is from some venerable old tomes we pulled down from the Lounge library shelves to investigate a word pattern brought to our attention by a Lounge visitor. We hope that he will find the results of our investigation... splendid!  Continue reading...

Want to get your students (or children) excited about reading? We thought so. So we called up Georgia Scurletis, the amazing curriculum expert -- and veteran New York City high school English teacher -- who puts together our Visual Thesaurus lesson plans, for her advice. Georgia's picks:

A classic: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre
"A love story that even a feminist can love... This novel turns the Cinderella tale on its head and allows students to see the Victorian Age through the eyes of the young impish narrator Jane. It's chock full of challenging and rich vocabulary, but the kids are motivated to keep reading since the narration is so compelling."

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The protagonist in Laurel Dewey's novel Protector has some, well, issues. But this character also exudes a deep sense of humanity, a feeling that has truly moved so many of the book's readers. So how did Laurel pull give her "damaged" character texture, dimension -- and soul? We asked the author for her insights, the latest of our series of conversations with Laurel about the novel-writing craft. Read on:  Continue reading...

Becoming a Writer Seriously, a blog that shares "tools and trade secrets for aspiring writers," offers a list of websites that "encourage active writing" through online collaboration between authors. Check out the post here.