Learning from Twain

Samuel Clemens. Currently my students are reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel fraught with controversy, yet a novel with a message of hope.  My students are slowly getting into it as I allow them to record their favorite phrases from the novel on the board as we go through the novel. We are not

Crossing Out the Wrong Words

Mark Twain once wrote: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” Sure.  Sounds easy, right?  I suppose one could write an entire novel and then just go back erasing word after word until it is something that might be more presentable.  Of course, he didn’t mean this to be

Lessons in Fatherhood: 10 Reasons My Dad Was Awesome

I celebrate yet another Father’s Day without my Dad.  I thought today I would write about the ten things that made Daddy so awesome, things that I try my best to duplicate with my children, with my wife, and hopefully by doing so I can live up to the legend that was my Dad. My

Emulation: How Much Is Too Much?

We all have our favorite books as writers.  All of us have that author we would aspire to write like and have the successes that that particular writer has had.  One problem that plagues many amateur writers is their self-imposed need to be exactly like “so and so” because that author is successful or has

Good Writing Should Tell the Truth

One of my favorite writers is Wendell Berry, an essayist, poet, novelist, farmer, activist and environmentalist.  He is a wise sage of our time, pointing out our society’s problems and struggles with uncanny accuracy. In a letter to an English teacher who wrote to him about the subject, Berry writes: The thought that I keep returning to is