During the past decade, I’ve spent a fair amount of time evaluating student writing and teaching SAT prep essay workshops and online high school literature classes. I’ve had the chance to read hundreds of papers from students all over the...
As parent-teachers, we’ve all seen boring writing assignments — a grammatically-correct report that simply paraphrases an encyclopedia entry or a five-paragraph essay that piles one trite cliche on another, and concludes without a glimmer of an original thought. If you’re anything like...
I’ve been thinking about writing persuasively this week. There are many times in life when you want to write persuasively, and it pays to know how do it. Sometimes, nothing more than a refund is at stake, but at other...
“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge Have you ever thought about the part that enthusiasm plays in the learning process? I have noticed that when I’m interested in something, I learn it so much more easily...
I’m working on a small book on evaluating writing, so in my last e-mail newsletter, I asked if anyone had questions on the subject. One mom sent in the following question, and I thought I’d share it, along with my...
