In fiction writing, here’s one way of breaking down narrative modes: There’s description (of characters, of setting or of internal reaction), there’s summary and there’s scene. Of course the lines between the modes can be blurry, and of course a story can be in more than one mode, even in the same sentence. Still. We
In most classrooms across the country, a student is graded on the things he/she hands in. Maybe the teacher throws in “class participation” to calculate the final average. But a grade should be more than the evaluation of a product. A grade should reflect a student’s engagement, curiosity and intelligent risk-taking. It should reward the
Sometimes, a writer’s “instinct” is nothing more than the impulse to reach for the cliché phrase or the pre-packaged idea. We should assign exercises that force students to move beyond their “instincts” and to choose the second or third thing they think of, rather than the first… like this blog post I’ve assigned myself, which
