Date Submitted: Jan 15, 2010 - 12:08:57 AM
Summary: Studying the style of authors, reading 10 hours a days, imitating your favorite writers, or memorizing grammar rules and syntax patterns will not help you a great deal. A little yes-but not a lot. We all benefit from studying, but the crux of the matter is to write every day no matter what. If you are a writer you must not lose your way.

Date Submitted: Jan 14, 2010 - 1:53:37 PM
Summary: Nothing can be more exciting to a reader than to get an eyeful of crisp monosyllabic text. Short, unpretentious words, with lots of active verbs will take the reader a long way. On the other hand, if you load your opening paragraph with adverbs -especially those ending in 'ly'- you will lose your reader in less than 5 seconds.

Date Submitted: Dec 19, 2009 - 3:18:36 PM
Summary: Taking a backward glance I imagine and see a sky studded with effulgent stars: Tolstoy, Flaubert, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and others-but I also see the Ed McBain twinkle in their midst. This is an appreciation for the man who was born to write.

Date Submitted: Dec 19, 2009 - 2:35:55 AM
Summary: Many times right in the heat of writing I come to an abrupt stop and find myself on the horns of a dilemma as to whether to use words or figures in expressing numbers.

Date Submitted: Dec 14, 2009 - 3:46:26 AM
Summary: If you want to find current references, events, and other information, there's nothing more useful than using Twitter hashtags. This is a clever tool, but you must be clever to squeeze the maximum benefit out of it.

Date Submitted: Dec 11, 2009 - 9:42:01 PM
Summary: This story is about Mrs. Poumier -not I- and I want to put it in paper right quick while I still have this sadness that is gnawing at my guts and heart. If I write it out I feel I will get it out of my guts, heart, and mind. And get some peace.

Date Submitted: Dec 8, 2009 - 10:21:21 PM
Summary: In 1981, Salman Rushdie published Midnight Children, a novel that one can say belongs to the genre of magic realism. Though the genre has been totally dominated by Latin American writers -Garcia Marquez, Juan Rulfo, Isabel Allende, and Laura Esquivel- the Indian author Rushdie holds his own.

Date Submitted: Dec 7, 2009 - 7:08:34 AM
Summary: In Book IV of Cicero's Ad Herennium we find a discussion of a rhetorical figure -climax or gradatio- that highlights a series of words that increment in ascending or descending order a particular situation. A writer may use this figure --to great advantage-- in fiction and essays.

Date Submitted: Dec 2, 2009 - 5:35:10 PM
Summary: While self-esteem and self-confidence are terrestrial and physical, for these attributes can be observed and apprehended by the senses. Poise is spiritual and seldom understood. A fair understanding of these three concepts will guide employees on the path to success.