On the Sunday morning of Hurricane Irene, I sat in a long line of folding chairs set up in a barn-like rehearsal hall at the Peterborough Players, a fine summer theater deep in the New Hampshire woods. Before me, an eager troupe of actors and musicians, still in sweatshirts and blue jeans, worked their way through Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, their first full run-through before an invited audience.  Continue reading...

When I was a sullen high school student, many of my teachers demanded that we submit outlines with every essay. Forty years later, I still remember how we fooled most of them by writing our essays first and creating the outlines afterwards.  Continue reading...

I was having coffee with a friend of mine recently and she started telling me about the "voices" inside her head. As soon as she described the voices, I laughed in recognition, "Oh, we all have devils on our shoulders!" I said.  Continue reading...

Writing, a form of speech, may be read aloud; writers of merit develop personal voices we hear speaking through the text. Yet much prose lies flat on the page and speaks to our eyes more than our ears.  Continue reading...

In my column "The Dead Letter Classroom," I argued that we needed to be teaching students how to write letters. In this piece, I'm going to tell you specifically how I do it and how I use letters to teach English skills in a timely, relevant manner.  Continue reading...

The Chronicle of Higher Education has launched a group blog called "Lingua Franca: Language and Writing in Academe." The all-star lineup of bloggers includes Geoffrey K. Pullum, Ben Yagoda, Allan Metcalf, Carol Fisher Saller, and Lucy Ferris. In the first post, Metcalf debunks the notion that sentences should never start with "and" or "but." Read it here.