Is religious art an oxymoron these days? Can “great” art address matters spiritual in the modern era? Read more.
The Writing Room
I’m a writer who loves to talk about writing, so if you’re a writer or an aspiring writer I hope you'll stop by now and then and keep me company . . . You’ll find writing tips here as well as my thoughts on the writing life. Watch out, though. The Grammar Geek will be putting in her two cents from time to time.
Writing Room: A Week With Lauren Winner — Of “Girl (Woman) Meets God”
Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God, is anything but girlish. First of all, she’s a woman, not a girl — she’d like that to be clear. She also has a tough, incisive mind.
The Rhetorician in the White House — Or, How I Learned to Love the Passive Voice
The passive sentence gets a bad rap — it’s weak, it’s vague, it’s passive. But sometimes a neatly turned passive sentence is just what our ever-shrinking world needs. Obama’s Cairo speech is an example. Read more.
In the Garden With the Grammar Geek: Is It Ever OK to Use the Passive Voice?
Passive sentences can be wordy and vague — or useful. For me, a passive sentence is one that, like it or not, obscures the doer of the action. Read more.
The Writing Room: Splitting the Infinitive — How to Boldy Go There
“To boldly go where no man has gone before.” Nitpickers and pedants take exception to that stirring old Star Trek slogan. I don’t.
What’s Rhetoric? Let My Two-Year-Old Enlighten You
My daughter Christina discovered the art of rhetoric when she was being weaned from baby bottle to plastic cup. She’d say, “I want milk and I don’t want it in a cup” — an elegant illocutionary statement that usually got her what she wanted, her bottle.
The Writing Room: Writer’s Block and the Toxic Reader
Writer’s block? Not my problem. At least, that’s what I thought until I read Jane Anne Staw’s book, “Unstuck.” Read more.