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100 Most Common English Nouns. What Makes A Sentence Beautiful? Sometimes, whether buried in a block of lengthy prose or a brief poem, a sentence can be a thing of true beauty.

What Makes A Sentence Beautiful?

On the surface, such a construction is nothing more than a string of words between periods, question marks, exclamation points, etc. We learn this at a young age. The One Writing Tip You Can’t Live Without — Life Learning. Maybe you don’t even want to be a writer.

The One Writing Tip You Can’t Live Without — Life Learning

Maybe you just want to be good at writing when you have to do it. Maybe you want to stop feeling humiliated every time you respond to a friend’s post on Facebook or write a thank you card to your aunt for the handmade sweater she knitted for your birthday. In either case, if you want to be a decent writer, the one thing you have to do is write. Book Chat Evolution. Seatedsyllabus. What's a Good ACT Writing Score? Ever since the SAT evolved to include a written component, more and more colleges have changed their policies to require ACT students to take the optional Writing Test (see the list of colleges that require ACT Plus Writing).

What's a Good ACT Writing Score?

Hundreds more colleges "recommend" the Writing Test, and if a selective college recommends something, you should probably do it. After all, strong writing skills are an essential part of college success. The ACT Writing Test uses a different scoring scale than the rest of the ACT exam. Whereas the Math, English, Reading, and Science Tests are each scored on a 36-point scale, the Writing Test is scored on a 12-point scale.

The numbers below show how each score measures up against other test-takers: You can see that an average SAT Writing Test score is about a 7. Four Guidelines for Summer Reading. In my previous post, I wrote about the research that links enjoyment of reading to reading achievement.

Four Guidelines for Summer Reading

Perhaps one of the most enjoyable times to read is over the summer. No reports. No tests. If Common Core Standards become our straight jacket, we'll hate what education becomes #ccchat. Global competency is vital part of being an educated 21st century citizen.

If Common Core Standards become our straight jacket, we'll hate what education becomes #ccchat

Two kinds of people exist today: people who build bridges and people who blow them up. Kids must be global citizens capable of building bridges. Even if you are under Common Core standards, I hope you have the maturity to see them as guidelines. The Common Core FAQ says: "Teachers will continue to devise lesson plans and tailor instruction to the individual needs of the students in their classrooms. " Use your head when evaluating curriculum. Most straight jackets worn in education are fabrications of the mind.

Are You Leading a Life of Quiet Desperation? Henry David Thoreau famously stated in Walden that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Are You Leading a Life of Quiet Desperation?

He thinks misplaced value is the cause: We feel a void in our lives, and we attempt to fill it with things like money, possessions, and accolades. We think these things will make us happy. When they don’t, we just seek more of them. Thoreau argues that the value we attach to possessions and status is misplaced. They aren’t the key to happiness, and they may hurt more than they help. Quiet Desperation. "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation" One night very early on in a life, a young boy lay back on the rocky New England soil, contemplating the heavens, "looking through the stars to see if I could see God behind them.

Quiet Desperation

" This quest became one of the primary motivators of his life — one might say he never stopped looking into nature for the ultimate truth. Quiet Desperation And Delusions Of Need. Quiet Desperation And Delusions Of Need "The mass of men," wrote Henry Thoreau, "lead lives of quiet desperation.

Quiet Desperation And Delusions Of Need

" "By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. " Log In - The New York Times. Poster Gallery. Errors: Why They Happen, How to Better Avoid Them. Essays. The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do. Writing is a muscle.

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do.

Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts. Think of your laptop as a machine like the one at the gym where you open and close your inner thighs in front of everyone, exposing both your insecurities and your genitals. Because that is what writing is all about. Procrastination is an alluring siren taunting you to google the country where Balki from Perfect Strangers was from, and to arrange sticky notes on your dog in the shape of hilarious dog shorts. Literary Fiction Must Go. I hate literary fiction.

Literary Fiction Must Go

Don’t get me wrong, I read a lot of books that would be considered literary fiction. And I often enjoy these books. I have nothing against serious books, or intelligent books, or realistic books, or books about educated middle class people cracking up. (I’ve written one or two of them myself.) No. What I am against is the idea of literary fiction. Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction. Image by Lloyd Arnold via Wikimedia Commons Before he was a big game hunter, before he was a deep-sea fisherman, Ernest Hemingway was a craftsman who would rise very early in the morning and write.

His best stories are masterpieces of the modern era, and his prose style is one of the most influential of the 20th century. Hemingway never wrote a treatise on the art of writing fiction. He did, however, leave behind a great many passages in letters, articles and books with opinions and advice on writing. Writers on Writing. The Urban Thoreau: A New Nature in the City. "None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin. " I was relieved to find these words in the early pages of Thoreau's "Walden. " Here we have the doyen of nature writers, environmentalists, and the radical simplicity movement telling us that we are allowed, at least, a chair. The chair should not come new from a warehouse, God forbid, as there are plenty of chairs of the sort Thoreau likes best in "the village garrets to be had for taking them away," an early version of Craigslist. With such riches at our disposal, pumpkin-sitting would be mere "shiftlessness. " But it must be noted that Thoreau equivocates on the subject.

College Applicants Sweat The SATs. Perhaps They Shouldn't. Standardized tests are an important consideration for admissions at many colleges and universities. But one new study shows that high school performance, not standardized test scores, is a better predictor of how students do in college. Amriphoto/iStockphoto hide caption itoggle caption Amriphoto/iStockphoto Standardized tests are an important consideration for admissions at many colleges and universities. But one new study shows that high school performance, not standardized test scores, is a better predictor of how students do in college. 4 Weird Side Effects of Learning How to Write. A few months ago, several years after beginning this column, I finally learned how to write, the last piece of the puzzle being someone showing me how semicolons work.

The Writing Revolution - Peg Tyre. VM_ImageGrammarPaintingImagesWithGrammaticalStructrures_Mar01. ACT Mini Lesson Workbook 2012 Teachers Edition.pdf. English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet - Megan Garber. 19 Jokes Only Grammar Nerds Will Understand. Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More. Welcome to Open Library (Open Library) Colon or comma before quotation (speech) marks? ’12 Years a Slave’ Will Become Part of Public High School Curriculum in the United States. Study: U.S. students struggle with vocabulary. Findings from a new federal study suggest that U.S. schoolchildren may not improve their reading skills until they have a better grasp of basic vocabulary. The study, out Thursday from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, looks at the vocabulary skills of students nationwide and finds that they closely track students' reading comprehension levels.

Blog Post: What Shakespeare Play Should I Read? An Infographic. William Zinsser, Author of ‘On Writing Well,’ at His Work. In newsrooms, publishing houses and wherever the labor centers on honing sentences and paragraphs, you are almost certain to find among the reference works a classic guide to nonfiction writing called “On Writing Well,” by Mr. Zinsser. Sometimes all you have to say is: Hand me the Zinsser.

“Clutter is the disease of American writing,” he declared in one passage that tends to haunt anyone daring to write about Mr. Famous Novels' First Sentences, Mapped [Infographic] The Wrong Way to Teach Grammar - Michelle Navarre Cleary. How Much Do You Care About Grammar. Ask the Writing Teacher: Novelists on First Drafts. Dear Writing Teacher,I am a published fiction writer who is about to start writing a new novel. Myth of FANBOYS.