Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Winter Solstice!

I hope your holidays have been as enjoyable as mine have been. This December I’ve used my vacation to spend time with family and savor our Christmas traditions more than I have in many years. The presents were less plentiful this year, but I can’t say I missed them.  Good friends and family, happy dogs, and delicious food were all the gifts I needed (or wanted!). ...

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Editing Your Writing: Removing Pleonasms

Brevity is one of the characteristics of good writing; it’s also one of the hardest for writers (especially new ones) to achieve. Writers have a tendency to hang on to the words they commit to paper, even when editing them out would result in better prose (a process Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch called “murdering your darlings”). When the writing is your own, you’re often the...

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Topic Sentences: An Introduction

For those of us fortunate enough to have grown up during a time when game developers were just beginning to explore the potential of 8-bit graphics, the sight of an NES zapper calls to mind nostalgia. Duck Hunt was the very first first-person shooter I ever played, and it is still the most memorable. While pointing the light gun at anything was fun in the beginning, when...

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Why _The Man With The Iron Fists_ Is Bad Writing

  It has always been my belief that movies are descriptive essays come to life. I've taught students to watch film with a critical eye and to notice how closely screenplays follow the same requirements of academic writing. An introduction with an attention-grabbing element that will also appear in the conclusion, solid main points that are relevant and fully developed,...

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NaNoWriMo 2012 Kickoff!

A month brimming over with words is upon us as today marks the commencement of NaNoWriMo 2012! I wish I could be struggling to meet daily word goals with the other 200k+ people taking part in this year's National Novel Writing Month, but studying for tests and filling out graduate school applications takes priority this month.  If you do have the free time, I plead...

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Meet Martin!

  A Fateful Meeting On my way to a test the other day, I ran across this little guy on the outskirts of campus.  People were walking past him without a second glance while he sat under a tree and wagged his tail.  He looked so lonely, I just had to walk over for a closer look.  My original plan was to give him my lunch, pat him on the head, and continue...

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Happy First Week of Classes!

Sitting in the hallway outside a classroom waiting for my class time, I heard a Statistics professor say the following: “You don’t need to use a formal citation style for your papers. This isn’t a writing class and I don’t care about how fancy your vocabulary is.” There were, of course, cheers and scattered clapping in response to those words. It wasn’t the first time...

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New Facebook Page and Pinterest Account

Alison T. was nice enough to point out to me this past week that I have yet to join the rest of the online community in making a Facebook Page for Writing Simplified.  I got started right away on the project and managed to hash out a page that I’m mostly happy with. I’m still not exactly sure what I’ll do with the page, but looking at other blogs’ FB pages has given...

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How to Write a Thesis Statement

Looking over the posts I’ve written throughout the past two years, I realized I have yet to write one about one of the most fundamental requirements of writing an essay.  This post about how to craft thesis statements will rectify that most egregious oversight. An essay without a thesis statement is like a boat without a rudder, a car without a steering wheel, a...

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Collie Convalescing: Mofi’s Oral Recovery

Mofi saw how much attention Hugo received after his teeth cleaning and decided he wanted some of that loving too! Here he is recovering after having several places on his upper gums cauterized (to prevent bacterial growth). Even though Mofi didn’t have any teeth extracted, he was feeling out-of-sorts enough for Hugo to lend him his favorite squirrel toy to snuggle up with....

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Student Essay Example: The Word Saggin’ Spelled Backwards (Part 2)

  As indicated in this post’s title, this blog post is a continuation of Part 1. If you have not yet read the student essay posted in Part 1, you may want to so that the commentary in this post will be more meaningful. Overall Grade Gerard’s essay is in pretty good shape, but is still in need of both revision and editing.  The fact that it needs revision is what...

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Chihuahua Convalescing: Hugo’s Oral Recovery

Today I am staying home from work to nurse my little chihuahua back to health.  With a face that cute, who wouldn’t call in sick to stay home with the little guy?! Hugo had 6 teeth extracted yesterday during his teeth cleaning at Meyerland Animal Clinic, which, along with the 4 he had removed several years ago, makes him 10 teeth short of a full set of choppers. ...

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Student Essay Example: The Word Saggin’ Spelled Backwards (Part 1)

The Flash Fiction story I wrote for this week involved a girl rediscovering old treasured photographs her mother had stored away.  The nostalgia I felt when writing that story inspired me to go through treasures I, too, have stored away.  Instead of photographs, though, I’ve held on to student essays. The student who wrote this essay holds a special place in...

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Fifteen Minutes of Fiction: “The Hike”

My friend over at The Writing Righter has started a series of weekly freewriting prompts called Fifteen Minutes of Fiction.  If you don’t have time for a full blown scene (like the kind required to write a good flash fiction), freewriting for 15 minutes may be just the option you need. Instead of working over a story for several days, you have to limit yourself to...

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Flash Fiction Friday: “The Transfer”

This week’s Flash Fiction Friday prompt is much simpler than previous prompts. In the style of any genre, the story must start with the sentence “We need to talk about Kevin” and be no more than 1,300 words long.  Also different this week, we’ll be voting for which submission is the best. I can honestly say I will be surprised if I win the contest. I wanted to do...

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Marketing Ploys: Do You Really Know What Those Words Mean?

The teacher in me loves commercials. They make wonderful teaching material, not just because they illustrate rhetorical topics like ethos and pathos, but because they require savvy viewers to think. Thinking is a skill that takes practice and advertisements offer plenty of chances to flex your brain. Every commercial you watch on t.v. or hear on the radio is another chance...

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How to Find Main Points for Your Essay

Several weeks ago, a distraught student left this comment on my blog post “How to Write an Essay FAST”: How are you meant to come up with the 3 main points? Like, that makes no sense; I can't just pull them out of thin air! How is it meant to be done?! And if no one can tell me (which it seems every teacher just says I need to think about the text more), then it can not...

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