What does a Nature lover and adventure writer gift to friends for their wedding? It may not be what you think. The next installment in the How (Not) To series is a little funny, a little serious, and all good. Names and deets have been changed to protect the innocent.
Category: How To
How (Not) to Succeed at College
Transitioning from high school to college can often be a jarring experience. Students worry, have lots of questions: What will be the same? What will be different? Should I live on or off campus? How will I make friends? What will my professors expect me to know? Do I belong here? Am I smart enough? …
Lightning Lessons in Writing: How to Use the Comma
All too often, inexperienced writers view, or worse, use, the comma as a pause in a sentence. While it’s true that we pause at commas, as we would any mark of punctuation, that is not their function any more than the function of a period is a pause, or a semi-colon or colon are pauses. …
How to Interpret Dreams
Last night I had the strangest dream. I was driving in an SUV, ran over a lovely flower bed on some private land and momentarily got stuck in a man-made trough or pond. A trough the size of a coy pond but square in shape. I got out, but as I did, another vehicle coming…
Lightning Lessons in Writing: How to Improve Overnight
This “lightning lesson” in grammar, a super short but very helpful lesson on how to write clearly and correctly, won’t make you the next Shakespeare or Hemingway. It will, however, give your writing the edge it needs to be taken seriously. It’s not any one gift or tool that a writer has that makes them…
How to Write Anything (Part III)
In parts one and two of this mini-series on writing I discussed crafting an essay with a particular audience in mind, choosing a genre and writing with purpose, followed by the inner workings of how any and all essays are written: the rhetorical modes. For this third and final part of this mini-series, I address…
How to Write Anything (Part II)
In part one of this “how-to” mini-series I discussed some of the broader aspects of the initial stages of the writing process. In that essay I covered genre, audience and purpose: something every writer needs to think about as they write. In part two of this series, the current essay, I show writers how to…
How to Write Anything (Part I)
Writing is contentious. As someone who works in higher ed., I ought to know. Looking around the country at different universities and colleges it’s easy to notice some interesting structures in English departments. Some schools, such as the one I teach at, have a single department called English that handles all aspects of writing from…
A Man of Leisure’s Brief Guide to Understanding Wellness and Productivity
Change. Life’s great constant. Humans possess a remarkable ability to shape their circumstances in life. While there is no doubt that there exists a great many factors in life over which people have no control—circumstances of birth, the past, what others think, life and death, catching up with the Joneses—there also exists a good many…