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Building a Writing Habit that Works for You

There is no one right way to be a writer. Let’s start there. I don’t care if Brandon Sanderson accidentally writes whole novels while on vacation. I don’t care if Stephen King gets up early to write. I don’t care if you know someone who writes 2,000 words every day. They aren’t you. The importantContinue reading “Building a Writing Habit that Works for You”

Picking Perspective in Fiction Part 3: Narrative Structures

Perspective is one of the most important choices a writer can make in fiction. It’s also a complex concept with a lot of parts. In Part 1 of this discussion, we broke down the basic grammatical foundation for perspective, which accounts for the common 1st and 3rd person terms as well as past and present.Continue reading “Picking Perspective in Fiction Part 3: Narrative Structures”

Picking Perspective in Fiction Part 2: Limitations and Scope

Last week, we talked about the grammatical dimensions of picking a perspective (also called point of view or POV) for your story. For a quick recap, you basically get two viable options for “person” and two for “tense”: that is, you can write in 1st or 3rd person (I or they), and you can writeContinue reading “Picking Perspective in Fiction Part 2: Limitations and Scope”

Picking Perspective In Fiction Part 1: The Grammar

One question I see a lot in writing groups is “Which perspective should I use?” Frustratingly, the asker never gets a straight answer, no matter how much detail they provide. That’s because this is one of the fundamental questions for an author to decide, and really no one can decide it for them. It’s alsoContinue reading “Picking Perspective In Fiction Part 1: The Grammar”

Writing Software For Beginners: No Need to Specialize

In a writing group I joined recently online, the question of writing software for beginning writers came up. There’s a lot that beginning writers worry about because they haven’t found what works for them yet, but I don’t think software needs to be one of them. Not because there aren’t a lot of choices ofContinue reading “Writing Software For Beginners: No Need to Specialize”

Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 3: Coda

The quarter has ended and I’ve had a chance to reflect on what happened since I last reported on teaching AI in my classroom. It got weird at the end of the quarter. Some teachers would be alarmed. I’m actually encouraged and comforted. As I reported before, I taught lessons in which my students explicitlyContinue reading “Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 3: Coda”

Framing Matters: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 2

In my last post, I talked about how I explored what ChatGPT could and could not do with the assignments I give my students. Now I want to talk about another little “experiment” I did with my students themselves that showed so much about how we receive AI and what we perceive as good writing.Continue reading “Framing Matters: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 2”

Limits on AI: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 1

I recently did a sort of impromptu experiment with my three sections of English 101 that revealed quite a bit about how framing—not to mention knowing authorship—affects how our students perceive a text. It may, in fact, illustrate why it matters if AI-generated text is labeled as AI-generated. In any case, it was a reallyContinue reading “Limits on AI: Teaching and Assignment Design In The Age of ChatGPT Part 1”

Sneaking In Time To Write

Most writing advice for adults includes setting a routine that blocks out time for writing. If your brain knows that on Wednesdays at 10 am after you’ve taken the kids to school and the dog for a walk and gotten your second cup of coffee, it’s time to write, then you can pretty reliably expectContinue reading “Sneaking In Time To Write”

One Lesson Plan, Two Results

Stay tuned for the end-of-term life update below the main content! Conflicting Lesson Results One of the most frustrating things about teaching is just how unpredictable a lesson plan can be. If you’ve been teaching the same content to different groups of students for any length of time, you’ve probably had this experience: You carefullyContinue reading “One Lesson Plan, Two Results”