Most Valuable Writing Lesson

A few days ago, my son Jonathan proudly announced that he had received a 98 on his major research paper for his eighth-grade English class. My English-professor husband and I had spent a lot of time and energy offering assistance and advice for this project, and we...

Memorial Day (Non)Memories

Every Memorial Day, I find myself musing about a man I never met. He was my husband’s uncle, but Michael never met him either. This would-have-been uncle-in-law died while fighting in the Pacific Theater sometime during World War II. The man I’ve only heard about was...

Quoteable

As an editor, I spend a lot of time perfecting punctuation marks and verifying information. Determining where an author’s words end and a quote from another source begins can be one of my most difficult challenges. And yet, protecting an author from claims of...

Writing With Legos

Scared of writing? Don’t know how to start? Or don’t know where to go after you do start? Try this little trick: pretend you’re building with Legos, those irresistible, interlocking, brightly colored, toy building bricks. Whether you want to build a skyscraper or a...

Fearing the Pen (or the Keyboard)

In my last post, I talked about people who struggle with writing because they are convinced it should be easy. At the other end of the spectrum are the folks paralyzed by the fear that written communication is too difficult for them to even contemplate. These are the...