Writer’s Wisdom

Four-year-old Johnny was in bed, but he wasn’t ready for sleep—not until Daddy came to read him a story. His eyes brightened when he saw the red book in Daddy’s...

Creativity is the writer’s greatest asset, like peddle-car crusing can feel like a Nascar race. If we write the same old way, we get the same old results. To escape...

The first time Susan practiced clustering, the book she was studying gave her an assignment to write a story about the word “fence.” Her first response was, “There isn’t any...

Johnny went to a country school that had no cafeteria. Just like everybody else, he ate at his desk in the classroom, with the appropriate kind of lunch: a sandwich,...

Janelle felt an urge to write. In difficult situations, God became real and she knew her experiences would encourage others. She needed to tell her story. After preparing dinner, doing...

At the beginning of the year, Jim made another writing resolution. This would be the year he would finish his novel. A month later, he hadn’t made much progress. Not...

John wrote with confidence, aware of his superb ability for assembling great sentences with concrete nouns and active verbs. Because of many hours spent in research, he knew everything that...

By some estimates, less than 20 percent of communication is found in the words spoken. Some 80 percent of our understanding of what others say comes from facial expressions, tone...

Contrary to what grammar-checkers sometimes believe, a comma usually precedes ‘because” as a trailing clause. The trailer is separate from the truck. Sometimes, the comma doesn’t matter much. But at...

In conversation, we use some words interchangeably, as if they meant the same thing. But if synonyms meant exactly the same thing, we wouldn’t need different words, would we? If...