The title story of my collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, began with me falling in love with a word: Madagascar. I fell head-over-heels for the cadence, for the way it evoked a Jacques Cousteau-esque sense of adventure and mystery.  Continue reading...

Have you used any of these words in your writing?

• Low-hanging fruit
• Learnings
• Efforting

They are buzzwords, popular industry words that people use to impress others.  Continue reading...

Teacher/novelist Michele Dunaway has some provocative thoughts on how essay-writing is traditionally taught to students.

For a site that thrives on vocabulary and words, the idea that the essay must die may be akin to blasphemy. We writers often cite the essay as our first foray into discovering our individual voice; it's our first official step towards being able to express ourselves through prose.  Continue reading...

Years ago, after I'd graduated from grade 12 and moved on to higher learning — English 100 and Philosophy 120 — I discovered that my university had a recording library. Hallelujah! Sounds quaint now, I know, but this was more than a generation before iPods, and I was ridiculously excited about getting to hear music via headphones.  Continue reading...

Here is the latest contribution from Michael Lydon on the writer's art.

My recent Visual Thesaurus essay, "Realism: The Truth of Fiction," set off a brisk debate in the comment section, the gist of which was, "Okay, Michael, realism is the truth of fiction, but what is this 'reality' that realism describes?"  Continue reading...

A specter is haunting English — the specter of abused quotation marks. We notice this more and more in our reading and editing in the Lounge: the unthinking or misguided use of quotation marks where they are not required or serve no clear purpose seems to have become epidemic, perhaps nowhere more so than in the recently well-publicized open letter that the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers posted on the team's website, in which he responded to star player Lebron James' move to another team.  Continue reading...