I was talking to someone recently about some possibilities for presentation topics at a conference. She’d suggested a few options relating to work-life communications or social media. I said, “What I’d really love to do is a writing workshop.” “Writing?” she asked. “Who writes anymore?” I sort of understood what she meant. When we talk […]
Writing
Reflections on the Lowly ‘Graph
I’ve been thinking about paragraphs. Increasingly, I find my paragraphs devolving into single sentences, like the one above. Surely this isn’t how I was taught? I remember concepts like: “A paragraph is a collection of related sentences dealing with a single topic.” I remember something about a topic sentence, followed by at least three sentences […]
Some Tasty Links for Thanksgiving
This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for all the smart folks out there writing about writing. Back in a much earlier life I briefly studied photography, and one of my favorite practitioners was a guy named Duane Michals. If your idea of great photography is precision of structure, perfect lighting and gorgeous darkroom technique, a la Ansel […]
How Will it All End?
Beginnings are nerve-wracking. Middles can be tricky. But the highest circle of writing misery, in my book, resides in figuring out how to close. Ever since the days of high school essays, I’ve hated writing conclusions. In conventional essay writing, the role of the conclusion is to summarize. But if what I’m writing is a […]
What’s in a Word: Sandy Pulls Me Back to Earth
I’m writing this post from my home office in southwestern Queens, where we’ve been lucky. A couple of uprooted and scarily teetering trees on the street, spotty cell phone service and a complete breakdown of the transportation we rely on to get to school and work—but other than that, my family has survived Superstorm Sandy […]
Just Call Me The Woman With the Hammer
You know the saying, “To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail?” It came to mind last week when I was at the Working Mother Work Life Congress, an annual conference built around the release of the magazine’s famous “100 Best Companies” list. Sure, people were there to talk about work-life, but […]