My students treat grammar as an exotic species of butterfly to be frozen and pinned on the page. They can label the type of sentence and all the bits and pieces with studied precision, fretting the difference between verb or verbal, or degrees of adjective and adverb. Thirteen-year-olds shouldn’t know…
The night your dream comes true, everything should go according to plan. Your groomsman zooms your pumpkin coach along the carpool lane past traffic, and finds the site of the ball without GPS. The hipster clerk greets you warmly, and one of your besties is already there with her daughter….
It. It. It. It is a pronoun. And it troubled me in a friend’s piece of writing recently. She was trying to create a sense of mystery and suspense by referring to some grisly “it” that had not yet been named. But unlike JK Rowling’s He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, whose name we…
A cyclist rear-ended by an SUV so hard he flipped onto his back and skidded 20 feet frets about the frantic driver, and whether the man will lose his license. A girl hides her stoner Dad’s stash and lies about his activities to the point where she develops amnesia and…
I’m in the process of selecting three finalists in each class for our personal essay contest. At stake: a $35 Amazon card (thanks to parent donations). I have many F students who pulled As and Bs and made the finals, and many more A students who got Cs and Ds….
I spent the first day of Spring Break sleeping and playing video games. I read a few personal essays and learned a lot about puke, snot, and blood. It would seem 8th grade boys shed these particular bodily fluids quite profusely and take it quite seriously. At least their stories…
I’m sorry I had to give you that F on your rhetorical analysis. It’s a difficult thing, ripping apart someone else’s words in the search for meaning. You had a hard time with Martin Luther King’s “Dream” speech, and now Frederick Douglass has you stumped. But free speech doesn’t come…
The brain loves it some mighty rhythms. You know when you’ve connected to a song, you can feel it. Your foot does its tap-tap, your heart thumps to that bass. You nod. You clap. The music is all around and in you. What if you could achieve that same effect…
I teach writing, or I try to. My 8th grade students can prove fairly resistant to such time-honored techniques as revision, turning on spellcheck, and, um, that whole thing where you, like, don’t write run-ons and stuff because that would be wrong or something. Like that. Plus fragments. I give…
“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” –E.L. Doctorow I had to become a character myself in order to write halfway readable fictional people. For most of my life, but particularly from ages 12-40, which is, come to think of it, most of my life, I wanted so desperately…
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