Time to fess up a little: My freshmen had reached that point in the semester where they clearly felt the grammar and punctuation was getting tedious (because they were still getting so beaten up over it). So for their most recent assignment, I told them to write a letter to the editor arguing that good grammar and punctuation were unnecessary. In ( Read more... )

"Basically, there are two things I want you to learn about writing: good grammar doesn’t matter and punctuation is stupid."

-- from a student paper tonight...made me laugh out loud!

“Your intuition knows what it wants to write, so get out of the way.”

-- Ray Bradbury

“If someone couldn’t clearly explain their ideas in writing they probably hadn’t fully and clearly considered their own view of things."

-- S. Bodhesako

(sent to me by one of my students, Caitlin McClare)

"Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence. "

-- John Cage

A central metaphor in my teaching is the phrase "Take the time to take the walk." I guide the students on a walk on the first day of class, and then we go through a series of activities that develop that into a metaphor for writing--but it takes some time to internalize. For their final paper, I asked them to tell me what that phrase now means to ( Read more... )

On FB, I gave a shout-out to my friend, Tom Breen, who's the manager of the bookstore at the Chancellorsville Battlefield Visitor Center. He went out of his way during a VERY busy week to help Kris and I sell a lot of books. Tom offered an interesting response ( Read more... )

From Emerging Civil War:

If you’re looking for a good battlefield companion for Chancellorsville during this week’s sesquicentennial, we encourage you to take a look at Chancellorsville: Crossroads of Fire by our own Chris Mackowski. However, we also urge you to buying these books only at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, ( Read more... )

“I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.”

-- Fitzgerald

"I was so taken with the story and so swept up in that world that I had to write it."

-- Khaled Hosseini