Writing

“…any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.” —Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle Use common words when communicating to an anonymous audience. You want your reader to get your point, not get mired in your vocabulary until their attention is depleted (Sierra, 2015).  As previously noted, you may want…

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” *—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Communicative writing is simple, clear, elegant, and engaging, typically prioritized in that order. Unfortunately, entertainment writing — from Shakespeare to Rowling — is the basis of how students are taught…

Toady we are going to revisit the very basics of sentence structure to discover a wierd pscyhological trick that can corrupt your writing. I’m aiming for a more foundational starting point than usual since “If students don’t yet know how to write a good sentence, they’ll never write good paragraphs, let alone good essays” (Wexler,…

“I once did hold it, as our statists do, / A baseness to write fair, and labored much / How to forget that learning; but, sir, now / It did me yeoman’s service.” –Hamlet (Act 5, scene 2), on being able to write under pressure. You have said that you’re not confident in your writing…

Part 1: Pattern, Sumbolon There is a common technique in dramatic storytelling of building the action of the story over a truth that has been hidden and fragmented. Over the course of the story, characters will encounters pieces of that hidden truth but it is only when they share their incomplete knowledge with each other…