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
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.
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.
The Writing Room: Writing About Your Mother? — Words of Caution from Lori Gottlieb
Planning to write about your mother? You might reconsider after reading Lori Gottlieb’s essay in today’s New York Times. Or are you a mother writing about your kids . . .
The Writing Room: To Niche or Not to Niche?
Where’s my niche – spiritually, philosophically, politically? As a writer? For a writer, nichelessness can be a problem. I’m a hopelessly open-minded, doubting, wondering, yearning skeptic who senses the Holy at work in all sorts of people — Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, atheists.
Writing Room: The Punch Line Always Goes Last
Everyone knows that the punch line goes at the end of a joke, not the beginning. A mystery writer knows to set the story up and get all the necessary events and clues in place before revealing that the pizza delivery guy did it. The same is true of a paragraph and a sentence.
The Writing Room: Is Less More? Or Is More More?
What’s wrong with this sentence? “It was a letter from my lover; my heart thumped, my stomach sank, my breath stopped, and my hands shook as I opened it.”
The Writing Room: Two Must-Have Craft Journals for the Literary Writer
Of all the books and magazines that come my way each week, my favorites are the ones that talk about writing — like Poets & Writers and Writer’s Chronicle. Read more.