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Teaching to the Text Message

Andy Selsberg explores his vision for freshman composition classes in Teaching to the Text Message: “I’ve been teaching college freshmen to write the five-paragraph essay and its bully of a cousin, the research paper, for years. But these forms invite font-size manipulation, plagiarism and clichés. We need to set our sights not lower, but shorter.”

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On arriving

Jennifer Lawler pens a beautiful piece On arriving, one that lovingly explores the reasons why “being a writer is a hard, confusing, thankless kind of life, except for the times when it isn’t.”

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Idea Testing

In a post about the validity of testing ideas for a novel, Jessica Faust reminds us that creative writing is actually a laboratory science: “Unfortunately there are no shortcuts in this business. You can use your writing group as a sounding board for your ideas, but ultimately you need to sit down and execute the book and then see if it works.”