Category Archives: Writing Lessons

Adapt from your Proposal +5 (10)(15) The Annotated Bibliography is an assignment you are already prepared to post if you’ve been adding bibliographic information to your Proposal +5 since the day you first posted it. Most likely you have consulted … Continue reading →

First, a Word about Quotation Citation is different from Quotation. To quote is to use the very words that have appeared in an earlier publication, in the same order, without omissions or additions. The word for this type of reproduction … Continue reading →

Titles that start the argument Imagine if the show had been called The Thing Most People Don’t Know About Buffy. She seems to be a normal, awkward high school girl, but after classes she’s up most of the night slaying … Continue reading →

Kindness Kills Tonight, I’m asking you to do the hard thing: criticize a fellow writer who has made an effort to persuade us of a truth. Last week you were permitted to both praise and critique, but we’ve run out … Continue reading →

Video of Traffic Stop and Shooting 52-year-old Walter Scott was shot eight times while fleeing an encounter with police officer Michael Slager in South Carolina. He died on the scene of his wounds. Many commentators have tried to find some … Continue reading →

Assertion When several things are asserted, the author is presumed to have individually asserted each of them, not necessarily the sum total of them. For example: The prosecutor asserts that the defendant, a Mr Sweeney Todd, born and raised in … Continue reading →

Lecture Text Readers can bail on us after any word: this one, or the next. Their time is precious; the world is lively with distractions; and increasingly the page where we meet them is studded with seductive links. Re-read the … Continue reading →

Get rid of those that can go. Most of them can go. One popular way to complicate a simple expression is to add unnamed people and place them into a confusing and unnecessary cause/effect situation. Readers can be misled into … Continue reading →

I wrote two sentences recently that contain a paragraph of material each. They’re not perfect sentences, but their advantages over the paragraphs they represent make them fit models of writing that earns better grades. The magazine Mother Jones publishes a … Continue reading →