In her 1989 book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard describes a fellow writer who was asked by a student if she thought he might become a writer. “Well, do you like sentences?” the fellow writer said.

Has the five-paragraph essay, long a staple in school writing curricula, outlived its usefulness? The venerable writing tool has largely fallen out of favor among influential English/language arts ...

When I write, I keep two primary principles in mind. First, I use as few words as necessary to convey an idea. Second, I ensure that every sentence is sequenced in the correct order. If a word is not ...

You may remember those kids in grade school who struggled to "get it." The concept of paragraphing seemed to elude them, so their words spilled out on paper in a haphazard frenzy. Their work became ...

"Write a paragraph on traffic jams." Have you been asked to do so in school? I was too. My teacher sometimes asked me, "Write a SHORT paragraph on a winter morning." A short paragraph! A paragraph on ...

You know the feeling. You open a blank document, reread the assignment for the fifth time, and somehow an hour disappears ...