Most popular cocktails for summer Mojito Cosmopolitan Margarita Least popular cocktails for summer Brocco-tini Beef Nog Listerine & Tonic Most popular ice cream flavors Vanilla Chocolate Butter Pecan Least popular ice cream flavors Chutney Fudge Swirl Uncooked Pork Explosion Ben & Jerry’s “Does This Smell Like It’s Gone Bad To You?” Most popular family vacation […]

Quick!  Pop-quiz, hotshot: Where does the thesis go in your students’ essays?   Go ahead and answer out loud.  The FBI agent watching you through your camera will let me know what you said. I’m kidding, of course, I don’t need Phil to tell me what you said.  You said “End of the intro paragraph.”   Well done.  […]

The other day a student asked me a question. Very quiet kid, been in my classes for 2 years, and 95% of his contributions have been smiling and nodding. Then, with no context, he asked me, “What do you think is going to happen to books?” I had many responses, but asked him to elaborate, […]

We spend a lot of time talking about modes of writing. What kind of writing is it? Informative? Persuasive? Rogerian? Definition? Narrative? We also spend a lot of time in our education system not teaching creative writing, which is – to use a pedagogical term – cuckoo-bananas. “Hey, you know the thing that’s great about […]

In rhetoric, there is something called “affect transfer.” Usually used in visual composition, it’s when you generate an emotional response, and then immediately put it with something to which you’d like people to connect the emotion. In writing, it’s a simple matter of sentence structure. Visually, we tend to be drawn to the center of […]

“This Is Just To Say” By William Carlos Williams I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox   and which you were probably saving for breakfast   Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold   This is Just To Say… Under no circumstances eat The plums That are in The […]

I managed to find the tiny gravel fire-road in the middle of the woods where we were going to be filming the first shots for a commercial I’d been cast in. How the location scouts had found these roads to begin with, I had no idea. I drove down and found the crew setting up. […]