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...

Harder Than It Looks?

I have a good friend whose son is a gifted young computer programmer; he seems to instinctively understand complex equations and willingly spends hours stringing together code to animate a computer game or function. But writing doesn’t come so naturally for him, and...

Celebrating Martin Luther King

This is a slightly revised version of a column I wrote several years ago that was published in the Ventura County Star. I think it’s worthy of revisiting this MLK weekend. For many years, I considered Martin Luther King, Jr., to be a hero–for somebody...