Big Words Belong on the Playground
I have a confession to make. In one week recently, I used, mostly without forethought, the following words: disenfranchised, synchronicity, bildungsroman, and sinister. The middle two I used in my […]
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No Second Opinions for Dentists about pain
I don’t know that we pay attention to the way people talk–or don’t talk. But I think it is the stuff of great fiction. I disagree with people who say […]
On Building a Platform: Two Cases
I sometimes suspect that some things are easier to do than they look. I’m not talking about playing piano, hitting a major league fastball, or doing brain surgery. For at […]
A Call for the Enthymeme and a More Civil Discourse
One of the chapters in my textbook, Pretexts for Writing, goes out on something of a theoretical limb. Yes, I wrote a textbook–for first-year writing. My main reasons for thinking […]
Where are the Heroes?
Many years ago, as a new graduate student, I enrolled in a Milton seminar. Our focus for the entire course was to be Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost. Fewer and […]