Reading time: Less than 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about some similes and metaphors from John Green…. I first heard about John Green (pictured above) about eight years ago, when my kids were still teenagers. He was famous to them as […]
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: inchoate…. I’ve long held a particular fondness for the adjective inchoate. Perhaps it’s the idiosyncratic pronunciation that charms me — the CH sound is not soft, as in
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Reading time: About 3 minutes Perhaps your writing — or writing practice — seems inadequate to you? Here are some ideas about how to get from where you are to where you want to be…. I was almost 30 years old when I first visited the UK. To this day, I still remember standing on
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Reading time: Less than 2 minutes This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a blog post advocating using fiction techniques in memoir… I recently stumbled across a terrific blog post on Joanna Penn’s site
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes from novelist Claire Messud…. American novelist and creative writing professor Claire Messud (pictured above) is best known for her novels The Emperor’s Children (2006) and The Woman Upstairs (2013). The first
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: precipitous…. Ophelia Dahl (pictured above) grew up in privileged and challenging circumstances. She was the daughter of movie star Patricia Neal and wildly successful writer Roald Dahl,
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Reading time: Just over 3 minutes Do you want to learn how to improve productivity as a writer? Here are eight counterintuitive ways…. I wrote a post headlined “13 ways to improve your writing productivity” a few years back. Since then, I’ve come up with eight more strategies you can use. Together, they give you
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a blog post about the editing style of Jane Austen…. When I edit on paper, I use a wickedly sharp red
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Reading time: Just over 1 minute Jesse Green writes for the New York Times. Today, I discuss his great facility with figurative language… I stopped paying attention to contemporary music in 1979 when I graduated from university. I didn’t stop listening but I stopped caring about the names of the songs and the performers and the
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: rebarbative…. I’m still reading the book Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (pictured above) and I can tell you already that it’s one of the
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