Rob King is the Editor in Chief at Sebranek, Inc., parent company of Write Source. He has 21 years of experience in the publishing industry, performing the primary edit on more than 100 nonfiction texts and 50 fiction titles. As a writer, he has contributed more than a thousand pages of instructional material to numerous projects and has published 20 novels, 4 novellas, 26 short stories, and 62 prose poems. In 1995, Rob founded the Alliterates, a group of fiction writers and poets who meet once a month to discuss writing. Rob has also taught two semesters of creative writing at Karcher Middle School in Burlington, Wisconsin.
When a cave person wanted to communicate the idea “Ugh,” there was just one option—saying it.
A few thousand years later, the clever folks of Ur developed cuneiform writing. Then people had two options: either say “Ugh” or write “Ugh.” You said it if the person was standing there, and you wrote it if the person wasn’t. The choice was clear.
What makes human beings different from other great apes? Here are some human capacities that have been suggested:
As promised in my last post, I’ve provided here a few practical strategies for connecting your writing and reading programs:
Let’s face it: Language arts instruction is tough. In history class, you have people, places, events, and dates to rely on. In science, you have theories and laws and pictures of the Horse-Head Nebula. What do you have in language arts? Words, words, words.
We’re all so familiar with clusters as prewriting tools that we’ve forgotten how they were originally intended to be used. In Dr. Gabriele Lusser Rico’s classic book, Writing the Natural Way, she says…
You may have read my other post about Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” but you probably have no idea how much that article frightened me. Carr wrote
In the Washington Post, Linton Weeks offers an entertaining account of the latest linguistic controversy: Whether text messaging is killing the sentence. Weeks quotes James Billington, a Librarian of Congress who fears that textspeak and abbreviated syntax are destroying the English language:
The cover for the most recent edition of The Atlantic asks provocatively, “Is Google making us Stoopid?” In his article within, Nicholas Carr laments that his Internet addiction has shortened his attention span, scattered his focus, made his thinking shallower, and left him less capable of slogging through War and Peace.
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