Hi! My name is Emily O’Malley, and I’m Hannah’s roommate. I’d like to think that we lucked out; it isn’t every day that your roommate is also in your major! Since I didn’t plan on majoring in English before starting college, she and I didn’t coordinate it, but I love it. The most important thing…
Poor Grammar. It has such a strong, hateful stereotype, doesn't it? People call it unnecessary, ugly, devious, and even sadistic. But Grammar and its convention henchmen are actually quite helpful and vital to the English language, at least literarily. The trick is how to use it. Sometimes, people forget that the point of grammar is…
Conversations about my writing usually go something like this: "How is your book going?" "It's going." "When will it be published?" "It's a work in progress," I usually say with a sigh. And it is. Compiling a book of any kind takes months or, more often than not, years of work. For instance, the drafts…
The short answer? There isn't.
Happy Friday! This weekend, I'm planning on seeing a comedic play about the relationship between Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson, which made me think of doing something like this. Here's a humorous piece that places modern-day labels on famous late poets. Enjoy! Walt Whitman Whitman is known to walk into places barefoot and proclaim…
There is a librarian who organizes fluttering memories. The birds fly in with ebony words smeared on their wings and they always soar with more questions than answers; her thoughts are dust-covered dancers twirling behind crumbling books locked in skyscraper-shelves; she told me to look for your book yesterday and I peeled it open and…
I used to want to be an astronaut, floating above the earth and watching the stars; instead of a story teller, I wanted to be a listener. My great-grandmother wobbled over to the dining room table every morning to slip her mug in the microwave. She plopped down in the sunlight, dunk her tea bag,…
In writing, one may choose to use several different persons or perspectives to convey a story to a reader, including first person ("I"), second person ("you"), or third person ("they"). Many modern authors have experimented with writing in second person, in particular. But why? Why not just write traditionally, in more of an orthodox style?…
Between the crevices in the syntax, the sentence, the subject, punctuation serves as an altar to ideas that cannot be connected by splinters or nails. Exclamation marks that yell also scream out tales. Gentle commas swirl into periods, like silk but even softer and create something that serves the crevices between the icons and…
A couple years ago, I was given a Kindle for my birthday. I remember being excited; I was ready to read my favorite classics on the same device wherever I wanted, eager to swipe the touch screen, anxious to download dozens of applications from the app store. But, most of all, I was excited to…
