Teachers, are you having trouble finding a way to set the proper tone for an interactive writing class? Writing teacher Margaret Hundley Parker has tips for starting things off on the right foot.  Continue reading...

Many secondary school teachers may be dismissive about using manipulatives in the classroom. They may think of word cards and word puzzles as belonging in the elementary school realm, along with crayons and counting cubes. However, when it comes to vocabulary learning, it can sometimes be a more engaging way to teach words as individual manipulative units rather than lists of tiny words printed out on 8 ½ x 11 sheets of paper. After all, why do so many adults have fridge doors covered in magnetic poetry?  Continue reading...

Erin Brenner of Right Touch Editing provides "bite-sized lessons to improve your writing" on her engaging blog The Writing Resource. We previously heard from Erin about basic uses of the apostrophe, and now she takes a deeper look at apostrophe usage. You, too, can become an apostrophe superhero!  Continue reading...

We writers about writing mostly write about "good" writing; we give our readers helpful hints on how to write well and point them to masters like Homer and Dickens to show them how it's done.

Good writing, however, does not form the bulk of writing. Like islands lost in the vast Pacific, writing's great works rise as rare peaks above endless oceans of bad writing, books and journals in which the writing is so poor or feeble or dull or trivial or trite or pompous or false or malicious or stupid that it lives for a day and dies away.  Continue reading...

I was born organized. In fact, I'm the kind of nut-bar who writes a family meal plan once a week. As a child, I longed to sort our family's books by size and color (no one would let me!). Now that I'm the mom, my spice drawer is alphabetized.  Continue reading...

The Baltimore Sun raised a ruckus among its readers by printing a certain four-letter word in a front-page headline on Tuesday. Here is the offending headline:

Opposing votes limn differences in race

Limn (pronounced like "limb") means "trace the shape of," "make a portrait of," or simply "describe." It isn't a word you see every day in newspaper headlines, and that bothered some Baltimoreans.  Continue reading...

Facebook wants to trademark the word "face." The social networker which connects more than 500 million users has already shown how we can all live together as one big happy set of FBF's by forcing other sites to drop "book" from their names, and now, in application no. 78980756 to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Facebook is asserting its ownership of the word "face" as well.  Continue reading...