Need we say more? Check out this site and enter the words you want to sloganize. Click the button and this website will spit one out, as if by magic!

In Part One and Part Two of this series I shared six tools that professional name developers use to turn words into business and product names. In this final installment I'll describe three more-advanced strategies. Don't worry: you don't need special training to use them. Just be aware that implementing them successfully is often trickier than you might think.  Continue reading...

"O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?" On the World Wide Web, that's wherefore! Teaching Shakespeare, studying Shakespeare or just interested in the Bard's classics? Check out these websites:

Shakespeare Online

Everything Shakespeare

The Hamlet Site

Shakespeare and Food

Since 1922, a division of the American Library Association awards the Newberry Medal each year to the top American literature for children. The 2008 winner and honor books were announced earlier this month. They are... drum roll, please...

Winner
Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz

Honor Books
Elijah Of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis

The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmid

Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson

The Visual Thesaurus can show more than just synonyms. It also reveals the relationships between meanings. Connections between meanings are displayed as dashed lines. You can roll over these lines to view the nature of relationship between two meanings. For instance, when you roll over the line connecting "a writing implement with a point from which ink flows" to "an implement that is used to write," you learn that a pen is a type of writing implement.

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In this lesson, your classroom will celebrate "opposite day" by using the VT to match a list of vocabulary words to their antonym counterparts. Then, students can use their knowledge of these antonym pairs in a game of "antonyms bingo."  Continue reading...

When I began No Place Safe: A Family Memoir, I didn't expect it to be a memoir at all. It was going to be me telling my mother's story of being a cop on a 1980s serial murder investigation. New to nonfiction, I wasn't sure if it should be a biography or a true crime story. Interviewing my mother helped me figure out exactly what story I was going to be telling. I also spent time looking through a box of files, notes and pictures she kept about the case, expecting someone eventually would write about it. She had hoped it would be me, but I resisted for years because I was a novelist, though I hadn't yet sold a novel.  Continue reading...