“A couple of weeks ago, EdWeek published an op-ed arguing that schools shouldn’t assign classic novels, titled “Stop Assigning Boring Books in English Class.” The piece was written by Erich May, superintendent of Brookville Area School District in Pennsylvania, and unintentionally serves as a primer on the misguided ideas that have drained middle and high school English […]
“It wasn’t until a writing friend with a background in publicity said to me that I’d written a “genre-bending” debut that I realised I had—or the ways in which broadening my reading changed my writing.”
“There’s not one word, there’s not one sentence that comes from AI… But I did use it for lots of other stuff. I used it to sort through lots of different notes… I also used it to analyze interviews that I did… When I was writing it, I would also use it for some editorial […]
“Writing, it turns out, is a difficult joy.”
“I am not alone in feeling that students who came of age at this time have been harmed, cognitively, by that combination of brainrot outside of school and the loss of a physical connection to classic works of literature in the classroom. Ironically, however, that very literature was once profoundly controversial. What we now call […]
“Many people assume AI writing means typing a prompt and getting back polished prose that you publish with minimal input. The human becomes a passive consumer of AI-generated content, while the AI does the creative and intellectual work. Sure, you can do that, but expect crap. I use AI differently, at several stages of the […]
“If you live where I do, in Oakland, California, and you cannot afford private education, you should be seriously considering moving to Mississippi for the substantially better public schools.”
“This season, I processed 28 lists, which collectively recommended a total of 466 books. 95 of these were included 3 times or more, and these I present to you in descending order of popularity. The list of list surveyed is, as ever, at the bottom. Have fun, and see you in the winter.”
“In her most recent book, the literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf noted that research from as far back as 2009 found that the average American reads what amounts to 34 gigabytes of information, or about 100,500 words, daily — from newspapers, magazines, books, games, messages and social media posts. For a bit of perspective, To Kill […]
“We’re just talking about fun here.”
“This is a list of writing and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, with real examples taken from Wikipedia articles and drafts. Its purpose is to act as a field guide in helping detect undisclosed AI-generated content. Note that not all text featuring the following indicators is AI-generated; large language models (LLMs), […]
“For these reasons we are “unapologetic about the book”: we believe that even—perhaps especially—in a digital age, books create a critical experience that can be created through no other means. Ensuring that students read books—excellent books, whole books, together in groups, often aloud to maximize the sense of connection they create—will maximize the chances that […]
“After Dan Pelzer died this month at 92, his children uploaded the handwritten reading list to what-dan-read.com, hoping to inspire readers everywhere.”
“So you wanna be a columnist, eh? Young aspiring journalists and wizened elders often ask how I scored this sweet gig. Truth is, I don’t entirely know. There’s no chance of replicating the particular mix of skill, work and (mostly) serendipity that contributed to my path here. Still, I can offer advice to other lucky […]
“We provided students with very detailed and personalised feedback reports which featured a mix of AI feedback, teacher feedback and resources designed by us. Here’s a brief summary of what was available – you can read more here.”
“The future isn’t predetermined between homogenization and hyperpersonalization: it depends on whether we’ll be conscious participants in that change. We’re seeing early signs that people will push back when AI influence becomes too obvious, while technology may evolve to better mirror human diversity rather than flatten it. This isn’t a question about whether AI will […]
“The death of the author is the birth of the critical reader… The authority for writing has always been a socially constructed artifice. The author is not a natural phenomenon. It was an idea that we invented to help us make sense of writing.”
“Rick, you’re touching on an aspect of this debate that I would argue leaves both sides exposed to some extent. Book “banning” and these content questions get the bases, left and right, all fired up. But most of these episodes conflate a few things. A big one is age appropriateness. Books that people would generally […]
“What if we over-plan teaching writing? What if we plan for the wrong problems? What if lengthy lessons or time teaching deprives students of valuable experience? What if action should precede explanations? And what if all learning start with dialogue?”
“She found that students have two main complaints. By far their biggest gripe, they told her, is that the assigned reading rarely gets talked about in class. If the professor doesn’t refer to it, they said, why should they think it’s important? The second reason — and perhaps a more complicated one — is that […]
“For thousands of years, we have been finding words for ourselves, we have been writing our own story and, in the process, have done something far more radical than expressed ourselves: We have invented ourselves. We have asked the essential question: Who are we, and what kind of people do we want to be? And […]
“Generative artificial intelligence technologies have made written assessments of knowledge all but useless outside of supervised conditions. That doesn’t mean that writing isn’t important. It doesn’t mean that thinking through writing isn’t important, either. But it means that my experience of moving in and out of different platforms, drafting verbally, and even bringing in multimodal […]
“Annotation—the seemingly simple act of marking a text—is often diminished as a marginal practice. It is prohibited in physical objects and considered irrelevant to social and political concerns. But what if annotation were reimagined as a critical and civic literacy that can inscribe public memory, struggles for justice, and social change?”
“What follows is not an explicit argument so much as a roadmap of distilled claims about the topic, with each successive entry sometimes recalling previous ones, or introducing new turns of the subject – all offering provocations to further thought.”
“To read slowly, attentively, without agenda or distraction is to resist. Not with noise or spectacle, but with the quiet, deliberate force of contemplation. In an economy built on speed and stimulus, deep reading becomes an act of principled refusal. It defies the algorithm’s logic of efficiency, the newsfeed’s velocity, the platform’s hunger for engagement. […]
“What’s causing this change? And how are instructors responding to it? Watch our explainer to understand the confluence of factors shaping Generation Z’s reading habits — and why higher ed is having to rethink longstanding assumptions about how to impart knowledge.”
“Since Caro graduated from Princeton in 1957, not a single further word of his fiction has been printed anywhere. But, as I researched Caro’s life and work, I discovered that this does not mean none was ever written. Occasionally I would stumble across fleeting mentions of a novel-in-progress.”
“He became known for obscure word choices — some extremely so. He preferred perscrutation rather than a simpler synonym, scrutiny; inconcinnate (unsuitable); and rodomontade (boastful talk).”
“Hundreds of administrative tablets – the earliest physical evidence of the first empire in recorded history – have been discovered by archaeologists from the British Museum and Iraq. These texts detail the minutiae of government and reveal a complex bureaucracy – the red tape of an ancient civilisation.”
“Caro leafs through the pages, and it all starts coming back. He points to a passage relating to some moment of New York political intrigue too arcane to even make his book (about Moses’ 1929 investigation of the City Trust Company). “This was a thing no one knows about—I had to decide to leave it […]
“Peter Elbow, an English professor whose struggles with writer’s block led him to create a new way of teaching freshman composition that emphasized free-writing exercises, personal reflection and peer feedback over rigid academic conventions that often stifled students, died on Feb. 6 in Seattle. He was 89.”
“Right now, periodic reading tests prompt students to “find the main idea” or identify a “point of view” — discrete standards and skills that don’t add up to reading comprehension. They are misaligned with the research on how kids learn to read well and ignore the foundational role of knowledge in reading comprehension… Assessments should […]
“According to this study, 92% of students had greater access to books because of Little Free Library boxes, 49% read more frequently (an average of 1.1 additional days per week), and 88% of children have built their own at-home book collections.”
Jokic: “You really brought a book?” Wemby: “I read before every game.”
“It will take more than long-form high school essays to save the world, but the cognitive endurance they require is one of the few institutional bastions that remain against the all-out melting of the mind into the machine. When students are accustomed to getting answers so quickly — and used to solutions coming through AI […]
“Student activists have been engaged in pro-library, pro-public education, and anti-censorship work in every generation where such work is necessary. It’s not different now. Student groups, some of which are highlighted here, here, and here as part of where and how anyone can get involved in anti-censorship work.”
““The fact is one’s own voice is not heard anywhere else. It’s a challenge to be yourself. It takes a lot of courage.” —Yusef Lateef”
“6. Secondary-school pedagogy, part 1: It was only in the 1960s that the first guides to “close reading” for secondary school teachers began to appear. A 1968 study of high school classrooms worried that the “‘bloodless’ exercises in the close reading of a work . . . were completely removed from literature, life, or anything […]
“This year more than usual, those of you who wrote to me asked where you should find hope. Where you should find joy. Where, at a minimum, you should find a reprieve. In language. That’s one of my answers. To read what some of the most talented writers can do is to be reassured of […]
“The 2023-2024 school year recorded the highest instances of book bans and highest number of unique titles banned – over 4,000 unique titles were removed in over 10,000 instances of book bans.”
“The number of children and young people who enjoy reading in their free time continues to decline.”
“1) Turn off the radio.”
“For me, the shared dreaming of tabletop RPGs have acted as the bridge between play and literature, between the promise of endless adventure and the endless demands of storytelling as craft and vocation. Sometimes writing is a less lonely process as a result.”
“For over 20 years, writers around the world have participated in National Novel Writing Month, or #NaNoWriMo, as it’s known online. The challenge is simple: Write 50,000 words in the month of November. Well, as simple as writing 50,000 words can be. (That’s 1,667 words per day, for those of you doing the math at […]
“Curated well, organized logically, illustrated with appropriate diagrams and maps, reference books can be a joy. And I suspect they’re a joy that many of us share, even if we are loath to say so publicly for fear of being labeled midwitted.”
““This is a good six-page speech,” he said. I was thrilled. He liked it! And then he added: “It would be a great five-page speech.” I chuckled. I thought he was teasing me. He wasn’t. “See if you can shave a page off,” he said, handing me the speech and walking back to his cabin. […]
“For the meta-analysis, the researchers drew on 119 studies published between 2010 and 2023 to examine the use of various digital interventions in kindergarten through fifth grade, including computer programs, e-books, online games, and videos… Their analysis found positive effects on elementary school students’ reading skills overall, indicating that generally, investing in educational technology to […]
“In Which James Folta Bravely Attempts to Rank the Iconic ALA Series”
“Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), the founder of source-based history, is usually credited with the “invention” of the scholarly footnote in the European tradition. Grafton describes von Ranke’s theory as sharper than his practice: his footnoting was much too sloppy to be a model for scholars today. But various forms of footnotes were used long before […]
“Just as John Warner argues that writing is thinking, Marc Watkins suggests on his substack that learning is friction. He makes the point that education stands at odds with technology in the pursuit of frictionless experiences, and argues that in order to fully appreciate what we learn, we need to slow down and examine it […]
“Harvard analysis reveals that online readers tend to avoid complexity.”
“Teresa Ibarra used Facebook Messenger to text with her now ex-boyfriend almost a decade ago. She exported the messages and analyzed keywords and topics used over the one-year relationship.”
“When he was editing Robert Caro’s 1,500-page omnibus on Robert Moses, The Power Broker, Bob Gottlieb agonized over the more than 300,000 words he cut from the original manuscript. Yet unlike cuts he made from the plethora of books he’d previously edited, these were words he loved just as much as those that remained. “Here […]
“But, first and foremost, she wants books by women, with women at the center of the action who save themselves. “Because that’s what women do,” she said. “No one’s coming to save us.””
“I’ve had this experience with reluctant writers again and again — when a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously.”
“The study delves into the reading habits of young people, and the factors impacting consistent reading practices. Here are some of the findings.”
“The implications of having an AI-reading assistant that can summarize anything into your language, at your reading level, can have immense benefits for neurodiverse learners and second-language learners. AI reading assistants could play an important role in equity and access to information. However, the uncritical adoption of AI reading tools poses an incredible risk to […]
“In 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies. That’s still the vibe… The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a […]
“But not very far into Baron’s Who Wrote This?, I realized I was being defensive—that I was arguing for a special exemption for writing and language because I consider them such immutable aspects of the mind, and of being human. Baron, with the dry eyes of an actuary, sets about deromanticizing writing.”
“Stories gain even more power when they are brought to life by reading aloud. In fact, this may be the book’s primary chance of salvation. If the book is going to survive its death struggle with the isolating and disconnecting technology of the smartphone, its best bet, I argue, will be if we can encourage […]
“Decades ago, studies conducted by reading researchers demonstrated the importance of knowledge to comprehension, as Hugh Catts (2021–2022) has noted. Knowledge, they found, helps readers supply information that authors inevitably leave out—in other words, it helps readers make inferences; take in, analyze, and retain new information; and make predictions. Having knowledge about a topic also […]
“Sometime in my late 20s I realised – I mean, it’s obvious in retrospect – that what I wanted was the maximal complexity of thinking in the clearest language that would support that thinking. Being avant garde isn’t about being unreadable.”
“In this meta-analysis, we examined if teaching writing improved the writing and reading of students in Grades 6 to 12, and what specific writing treatments enhanced students’ writing. Our review included writing treatments tested using an experimental or quasi-experimental design (with pretests) and published and unpublished studies, and computed effect sizes for all writing and […]
“Distant grass will always have a greener hue. You can fine-tune the appearance of distant grass in Settings > Graphics.”
“Over the last 50 years, there’s been a vast outpouring of research about reading development, drawing on insights from neuroscientists, psychologists, linguists, speech pathologists, educators and other experts. I’m sometimes asked to summarize, in plain language, what we’ve learned so far. These ten maxims represent my best attempt at doing that.”
“The generative text evokes a feeling in me not unlike the revulsion of hearing one’s own speaking voice in a recording. Do I really sound like that? The robot has made me acutely self-conscious. I recognize my A.I. doppelgänger, and I don’t like it.”
“Readers evaluate the intelligence of an author not only by the quality of their arguments but also by how well they understand what the author is trying to say. Using simple words and sentences makes the point clear. Big words don’t make writing sound intelligent; they make it hard to understand.”
“But first, step back and consider the anatomy of a typical business book. The components are almost always the same: Concepts (key ideas); Numbers (data and statistics); Tools (frameworks and diagnostics); Examples (stories and case studies to illustrate application). The job to be done is to extract insights to increase judgment and skills to increase […]
“All in all, the researchers suggest that the data represent an even outcome, with both learning modalities proving successful at increasing student growth and achievement in writing.”
“For example, the editors of Science have decided that authors should not use text generated by ChatGPT in a submitted manuscript. Fair enough. But can authors use ChatGPT to generate an early outline for a manuscript? …What feels most different about ChatGPT compared to other assistive technologies is the possible reduction of intellectual labor. For most professors, writing — even […]
“Colorado’s law – passed in 2019 – is pretty extensive. It requires school districts to completely overhaul their reading curriculum. As of this school year, all districts must use an “evidence and scientifically based” reading program, teachers all have to go through 45 hours of training on it, and they even banned curriculum rooted in […]
“The results showed that the relation between domain knowledge and reading is bidirectional and positive throughout the elementary years, providing empirical evidence that domain knowledge and reading may mutually enhance with each other.”
“Some writers write in the name of Art in general—James Salter for instance: “A great book may be an accident, but a good one is a possibility, and it is thinking of that that one writes. In short, to achieve.” Eudora Welty said she wrote “for it, for the pleasure of it.” Or as Joy Williams puts […]
“Nearly a century old, it’s still avidly read and discussed in MFA circles, thanks to its author’s meticulous dissection of the devices of fiction, likely more valuable than any of the most recent craft books on the shelves. Unquestionably, it has been a kind of ur-text for many fledgling novelists because it discloses so clearly […]
“If you’re new here, here’s how it works: 1. I read all of the Most Anticipated and Best Summer Reading lists that flood the internet this time of year (or at least as many as I can find). 2. I count how many times each book is included. 3. I collate them for you in […]
“The New Yorker sort of voice—or rather, the New Yorker voice I was using—is one that sounds on top, or ahead, of the material under discussion. It is a voice of intelligent curiosity; it implies that the writer has synthesized a great deal of information; it confidently takes readers by the hand, introduces them to surprising characters, recounts dramatic scenes, and […]
“True rhymes are marvels; a slant rhyme’s a sin. Or is it vice versa? Let the battle begin.”
“We all love things that other people think are garbage. You have to have the courage to keep loving your garbage. What makes us unique is the diversity and breadth of our influences, the unique ways in which we mix up the parts of the culture others have deemed “high” and “low.” When you find […]
“He saw the damage done by a teaching model that focussed on error and that proposed simplistic, mechanical “fixes” to student writing. This was an ostensibly scientific approach to writing composition that equated students with their “deficits”—and implicitly encouraged students to identify with them… Mike, on the other hand, provided writing studies with a heart: […]
“When I pressed the button asking Sudowrite to continue “Kubla Khan” in an “ominous” style, it generated the following… I find this beautiful, memorable. If you told me that Coleridge wrote it, I would believe you. The machine even put in the indents.”
“Aspiring writers should, by all means, read books, but those that grow up deprived of literature, in the absence of books due to wars, exile, and poverty, should not lose heart. They can find other ways to garner ideas and build their storytelling techniques. They could learn to read—with the same curiosity and intensity given […]
“I once asked what made her pick my manuscript all those years ago. “I didn’t like your book,” she said, without hesitation. I started laughing—her famous candor often had this effect on me, even if it was at my expense. “Why did you pick it, then?” I replied, incredulous. Her eyes widened: “Because I couldn’t […]
“Reading for teaching is a little like eating a meal and trying, afterward, to write up a recipe for each dish.”
“Right now, a machine is breathing for my father, buying time in a ward I can neither visit nor see. The doctors talk a lot about time: How fast or slow he breathes — COVID comes for your breath — and how quick or sluggish his blood pressure, the beat of his heart. There is […]
“It won’t be long before all living memory of a time before the personal computer is gone. People will no longer address the meaning of screens from the remembered background of a computer-free life.”
“Let us collectively weep for the dying art of letter writing. Then, let’s dry our tears and bring it back to life. Below, you’ll find snippets from historical love letters — some of which are centuries old — pulled from “Love Letters” and “A Love No Less.” You’ll also see tips for crafting your own […]
“After subscribing to a service called EssaySoft, you can tell its essay generator to write a paper on, say, “symbolism in the great Gatsby” (or whatever you need for class). Then you enter how many words you want the final paper to be, select other specs from drop-down menus (set research depth to “low” if […]
“I believe the formula I’ve given you, importance + novelty + correctness + strength, is the recipe for a good essay. But I should warn you that it’s also a recipe for making people mad.”
“My students have come of age during a decade when public discourse means taking a position and sticking with it. The most influential writers are those who create a dazzling moral clarity. Its light is meant to overpower subjects, not illuminate them… The imperative to take a position can be stunting. It makes writers less […]
“In a study we conducted with Yale University, we found that students are able to maintain writing tasks for longer and their writing and speaking fluency dramatically improve when they learn how to tell stories from their own lived experience.”
“Keeping the argument on track, and keeping it both civil and productive, is a key skill in critical thinking. It is helped by: making sure everyone is clear about what the point at issue actually is; bringing the conversation back to the point when it strays, or at least acknowledging that we are now talking […]
“The simple view is an equation that looks like this: decoding ability x language comprehension = reading comprehension. Notice that reading comprehension is the product of decoding ability and language comprehension; it’s not the sum. In other words, if you have good language comprehension skills but zero decoding skills, your reading comprehension will be zero, because zero […]
“In effect, narrative feedback is a personalized message giving individualized feedback for the student regarding his or her writing. That is a human interaction, not a bureaucratized one, as with a rubric.”
“Motivation seems to be the key… If students love to write, because their peers as well as their teachers are eager to see what they have to say, then they will write with energy and pleasure. Perhaps more than any other subject, writing demands a supportive environment, in which students want to become better writers […]
“That’s why we’ve put together this overview of the research on early reading, in grades K-2. It covers what’s known about how we should teach letter-sound patterns, and what we don’t know for sure yet. It touches on what else should be part of early reading programs. And it explains why we know that most […]
“Last year, the New York Public Library released an experiment to put the full text of novels in its Instagram Stories. Today, an estimated 300,000 people are reading books this way.”
“In hindsight, we can see how rarely one technology supersedes another: the rise of the podcast makes clear that video didn’t doom audio any more than radio ended reading.”
“Whether they crack open a book three times a month or every night without fail, all respondents said doing so promotes relaxation, reduces stress, induces sleep, centers the mind, and improves sleep quality.”
“Far from embodying an arc of unbroken concentration, books have always mapped their readers’ agitation—not unlike the way a person’s browsing history might reveal a single day’s struggle, for example, to focus on writing a book review.”
“Most kids agree their favorite books are the ones that they have picked out themselves. While we should be talking with students about books, we also have to let them advise how we can better help them find books on their passions and interests.”
“You never stop learning how to read — probably because you also never stop forgetting how to read.”
“This is an important shift to dissect because whether we tell our stories primarily from a sociological or psychological point of view has great consequences for how we deal with our world and the problems we encounter.”
“In fact, teens who only made it through high school but were raised in a bookish environment fared as well in adulthood as college grads who grew up in a house bereft of books.”
“The progression from a (nearly) innate theory of mind to a fixation on stories — narrative — was made in only a few short steps. We went from explaining how and why we did things in the present, to explaining how and why we did things in the past, to explaining how and why others did things in the […]
“The new feature is a bit like Google’s Smart Compose, which suggests email responses or phrases as you type. But instead of a few words, Textio Flow thinks up whole paragraphs.”
“Dispensing one, three and five-minute stories free to passersby at the touch of a button, the vending machines… already feature in locations across France, in Hong Kong and the US.”
“The quality varies, but there is plenty of comically or offensively banal work to be found on Instagram: genuinely insightful or distinctive work is the exception, not the rule. The same tropes and themes appear again and again: lower-case platitudes in typewriter fonts; earnest insistence of the importance of self-love; writing in the second person; […]
“Read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the Internet or watch too much television lose it… Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.”
Because editorial writing at newspapers is a collaborative process, you can write your entry as a team or by yourself — though, please, only one submission per student. When you’re done, submit it using the contest form below by Tuesday, April 2, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. Be sure to read the rules — also below — before posting. Our judges […]
“Then e-mail arrived and changed everything. First, you would only hook the computer up through your landline phone a couple of times a day, as if there were a special moment to send and receive mail. Then came the permanent connection. Finally, the wireless, and, of course, the Internet. In the space of perhaps ten […]
“A passion for politics, particularly among teenagers and young millennials, is fueling a dramatic growth in the popularity of poetry, with sales of poetry books hitting an all-time high in 2018.”
“Literary fiction, which tends to focus on the psychology of individuals, provides a window into the inner lives of strangers in other times and places. It’s this preoccupation with sensation and thought that makes the form a powerful tool for developing empathy. Stories that transport us also transform us, according to the study. Reading literary […]
We made under-26s and women aged 28 to 45 the focus of our innovation process. Over a year, we interviewed 85 people face-to-face. As well as giving their feedback on our prototypes, they told us about their news behaviours: where they find value, as well as their pain points. Based on these conversations, we developed […]
“The tiny editions are the size of a cellphone and no thicker than your thumb, with paper as thin as onion skin. They can be read with one hand — the text flows horizontally, and you can flip the pages upward, like swiping a smartphone.”
“There are the obvious benefits, like a boost in mindfulness, memory and communication skills. But studies have also found that writing in a journal can lead to better sleep, a stronger immune system, more self-confidence and a higher I.Q.
“The paper’s authors studied 160,000 adults between 2011 and 2015 and found that just having 80 or more books in a home results in adults with significantly higher levels of literacy, numeracy, and information communication technology (ICT) skills… Children from such homes who ended up attaining just a high-school-level education become as literate, numerate and […]
Since antiquity, teachers had held that scientific subjects were best learned through pictures and working models. Beginners needed to see, touch, and manipulate the objects of study. Teachers of astronomy and mathematics, for example, had long employed three-dimensional models and instruments in their classrooms.”
“Best-selling authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Cory Doctorow, comedian Stephen Colbert and… George R. R. Martin all played Dungeons & Dragons. It’s not surprising that burgeoning writers would be drawn to a storytelling game.”
“There are all sorts of varying factors in khipus: the colour of the strings, the structure of the knots and the direction in which they were hitched. Having spent countless hours poring over them, Urton began to think that binary differences in these features might be encoding information. For example, a basic knot tied in […]
There are thousands of studies, said Louisa Moats, an education consultant and researcher who has been teaching and studying reading since the 1970s. This is the most studied aspect of human learning.”
“John Milton could still pride himself without exaggeration on having read every book then available, the entire history of written thought accessible to a single mind. When I was in college, a friend and I worked on a short film, never finished, in which Milton somehow found himself brought forward in time to lower Manhattan’s […]
Parents looking to encourage reading look out for environments that are “impoverished”—that, places where kids might be a bit bored—and fill those spaces up with books.”
“The libraries, which were found in fashionable watering holes like Jane Austen’s fabled Bath, began as offshoots of bookselling. They became social gathering places that people subscribed to as soon as they got to their vacation destination.”
“You want credentials, I ain’t got em. If you want an MFA program or an editor or a publishing house, you’ll have to look elsewhere. But: I write. And, if I may be so bold, I do it halfway okay.”
When students understand that most writing in class is ungraded and meant to promote experimentation, thinking, and discussion, their volume of low-risk writing increases. The more they write, the more confident they become as writers.”
The reason writing a ‘good’ four page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20-page PowerPoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what.”
Somewhere along the way, these young people were told by teachers that who they are in their writing ought to be divorced from who they are on their phones, or as the writer Grace Paley may have said, with their families and on their streets… But no matter who they are in private, when I […]
The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two.”
“I sat in the dark staring at my laptop. I was well into my second hour of watching sword fights on YouTube. I switched between samurai movies, anime, medieval battle scenes, and pirate duels. Two of my students just kept writing about sword fights, and I was trying to be a better teacher. If I […]
A word problem, like an essay, is an argument. You start with the given information. You summarize it with symbols and expressions. You make a plan and follow some logical steps until you arrive at a conclusion. Along the way you’ll likely make mistakes. You might find you spent a disappointing amount of time on […]
See the top books read by 9.4 million K–12 kids based on data from Renaissance Accelerated Reader.”
The difficulty is the point… We all want the same things now: phones, clothes, and food to photograph. We are all consumers. Teenagers don’t want to stick it to the man anymore. They are the man… I want them to find something difficult and do it anyway. Then, I want them to notice what a […]
It is our mission as English teachers to teach writing as a method of thinking, to re-mediate their writing for current and future circumstances and technologies, and to help our students find a sense of agency and empowerment in the act of writing.”
For centuries, Europeans who could read did so aloud. The ancient Greeks read their texts aloud. So did the monks of Europe’s dark ages. But by the 17th century, reading society in Europe had changed drastically. Text technologies, like moveable type, and the rise of vernacular writing helped usher in the practice we cherish today: […]
This pattern raises the possibility that the invention of writing, a very recent innovation tagged on to the very last millennia of human evolution, can dramatically alter a language’s linguistic niche, spurring the development of elaborate sentence structure, and leading to the shedding of other features, on a timescale that cannot be achieved through biological […]
You shouldn’t feel safe. You should feel, “I don’t know if I can write this.” That’s what I mean by dangerous, and I think that’s a good thing to do. Sacrifice something safe.”
The underlying message of all this criticism is that Ms. Kaur’s work isn’t “real literature.” The literary world doesn’t have a great track record of embracing or even acknowledging artists like Ms. Kaur, who are different in some notable way, but who attract an enormous and fervent audience.”
The things [novelists] mean to describe and express when they write, the territory they wish to cover, may be very different from those elements that readers and students focus on. The author of a novel is not always the best placed to interpret it, and eventually others may become more familiar with the text than […]
It has long been thought, for instance, that the print revolution of the 18th century resulted in a shift from oral to silent reading, from shared reading to indulging in a book of one’s own, as books became more available to a wider range of people while leisure time also increased… On the contrary, reading […]
This brings us back to the personal essay. More than a fad and more than a form, we might think of the personal essay as a contract between reader and writer… This task is impossible, or at least impossible to derive pleasure from, without particularity and concreteness—a sense of reciprocity and respect… What we see […]
It was not that he disliked it. It was that he… hated it. I was taken aback—I had enjoyed the process of researching and writing the book. So, I had expected, a reader would too. No, Scott said, the way you’ve done this doesn’t work.”
Writing crystallizes ideas in ways thinking on its own will never accomplish.”
Here’s a tip: Choose a topic you really want to write about. If the subject doesn’t matter to you, it won’t matter to the reader. “
The tyranny of the urgent crowds in around me. If I yield to that tyranny, my life fills with mental clutter. Boredom, say the researchers, is when creativity happens. A wandering mind wanders into new, unexpected places. When I retire to the mountains and unplug for a few days, something magical takes place. I’ll go […]
By the end of the war it was clear that information warfare was a powerful weapon — it could raise armies, incite violent mobs, and destabilize whole nations. In response to this systematic manipulation of the truth, there was a concerted effort to create an institution of fact-driven journalism beginning in the 1920’s.
As a teacher, I’ve found that regardless of how open or resistant my literature students initially are to poetry, real progress begins when they get literal with the words on the page. I ask them to pick one interesting word, then go to the library and investigate that word.”
Precisely defined terms are often superior to poetic images for the purposes of science, but the opposite is true in our own personal experience of the world — the poetic image, while more vague, is also more meaningful and a better fit for understanding our own inner lives as well as the messy affairs of […]
Ohio State, the football-mad university of more than 60,000 students, could hardly be more different from Williams College, the prestigious liberal arts school in the Berkshires… But this summer, all of their incoming students received the same reading assignment”
There are no rubrics, no rules, no strategies. There is audience and need, and the problem must be solved.”
Stories that vault readers outside of their own lives and into characters’ inner experiences may sharpen readers’ general abilities to imagine the minds of others. If that’s the case, the historical shift in literature from just-the-facts narration to the tracing of mental peregrinations may have had an unintended side effect: helping to train precisely the […]
I’m baffled by the idea that reaching a wider audience involves using smaller words, as if there’s some inverse correlation between the size of your audience and of your vocabulary.”
“Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.”
It’s true that studies have found that readers given text on a screen do worse on recall and comprehension tests than readers given the same text on paper. But a 2011 study by the cognitive scientists Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith suggests that this may be a function less of the intrinsic nature of digital […]
Dear Match Book: I Need Short but Great Books for My Commute… Dear Match Book: What Books Are Best Savored by Reading Aloud?… Books for Those Who Love Sports or Just Love to Read About Them…”
Shortly after waking, they curl up with a journal and pen or pencil. They start writing, and they don’t stop until they’ve filled at least three hand-written pages—about 750 words. The routine is called Morning Pages, and people ranging from journalist Oliver Burkeman to entrepreneur Tim Ferriss say it’s changed their lives.”
Utterly contrived topic sentence revealing pretty much every flaw of structured essay writing. Therefore, supporting sentence invoking source that exists only in the bibliographies of other cited material (pp. arbitrary to arbitrary + 5). Contemplative question? Definitive refutation paraphrased from a blog found at 2AM.”