These nonprofit groups aim to empower kids and grownups through writing and storytelling. Please check them out - and give them your support!

WriteGirl

826LA

StoryCorps

If you're interested in writing about music, these books will give you guidance and inspiration:

A Short Guide to Writing About Music

Best Music Writing 2007

Writing About Music

Writing About Music: An Introductory Guide

This sub-panel is where you can control most of the aspects of how the main display of the Visual Thesaurus looks.

Display. Allows you to toggle between a 2-D and 3-D display of the Visual Thesaurus

Scale. Allows you to increase or decrease the size of the Visual Thesaurus display. This is a useful when the display fills with densely related words and meanings. By increasing the scale, you can zoom into the cluster in greater detail.

Font Size. Allows you to increase or decrease the font size of words in the VT display.

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With this column, we introduce the Visual Thesaurus' newest columnists, Simon Glickman and Julia Rubiner of Editorial Emergency! Read our recent interview with Simon here.

We brand ourselves. It's what human beings do. Whether we wish to conform to some social or cultural norm (the traditional blue button-down worn by generations of IBM programmers) or stand out as rugged individualists (the prescription bottle in the earlobe hole of a kid I saw on a Los Angeles sidewalk), we are forever distinguishing ourselves.

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I was sitting on my grandfather's lap. I understood the part about getting the page you're reading done. Getting it done was exactly what I wanted him to do. Seven-year-old boys are not big on patience. Or poetry either. I was about to suggest we do the Three Little Pigs all over again. But when I craned my head to look up at him, I saw a tear forming in the corner of his eye.  Continue reading...

Ever wonder where, exactly, words are stored in your brain? We thought so! Read the Sharp Brains blog's fascinating explanation, plus give your own gray matter a workout with a word-associations exercise. Check it all out here.

My Juniors are beginning research papers this month, so last week, I broke the news to them, as I do every year: For their papers, they'll have to get up from their computers, go to an actual library building, and do some of their research with old-fashioned paper sources: newspapers, magazines, books. The horror in their eyes grows stronger every year, for each subsequent class I encounter lives more and more enmeshed in the online world. Yet, like my fellow teachers, I persevere with my insistence, for we know that research is a skill best learned in a library.  Continue reading...