Youngest-ever National Spelling Bee competitor says fatigue, stress led to misspelling onstage

“Overall, it was just boring. Really boring! Really boring!” —The Washington Post. Similar:Yes, this is my 11yo daughter yodeling on stage.http://youtu.be/reyclH7zuHIAmusingMy Ouya arrived.My Ouya arrived — a Kickstarter-funded …CybercultureA Career-Aligned Major Isn’t EnoughI’ve taken over teaching the English dep…AcademiaAn afternoon with Ben Franklin. CultureChillax, Wikipedia, and bridezilla are not puns: Against adjoinagesSo if recessionista and…

National Headline Contest 2011

Great headlines from winner David Bowman. National Headline Contest 2011. Similar:Parallel Structure vs. Faulty ParallelismI just touched up a handout on Parallel …HumanitiesRussia is relying on unwitting Americans to spread election disinformation, US officials s…If I ever share something that turns out…CultureCollege Instructors Don't Require Enough WritingI was surprised a few years ago to learn…AcademiaFinland…

Reading in the Morning

To qualify for a day at the local water park, my daughter woke up early, and is now happily reading. Similar:I just realized I've been misspelling and mispronouncing "detritus" all my life. I’ve been a college English faculty …AcademiaWant a tech job? Study this. Advice from Mozilla, Reddit, Tumblr and moreStudents often say they hate…

Updated Journalism Handouts

I updated the journalism portal of my online writing site, and touched up some existing handouts: News Story vs. English Essay Your English instructor carefully reads your essay to evaluate the depth of your knowledge, the breadth of your vocabulary, and the loftiness of your ideas. Joe Sixpack glances quickly at your news story to…

Stage Right! Homeschool Musicals

My daughter was recently in the Stage Right! Greensburg homeschool preteen production of Once Upon a Mixed-up Fairy Tale, playing Little Red Riding Hood. Here the girls are singing “Astonishing.” My son played Marshal Cord Elam in the teen production, Oklahoma. He’s wearing the vest and white hat. Similar:The girl performed musical commercials for a…

The Evolution of Adventure: Make Game – Asio City

In the early 1970s William Crowther worked for the high-tech R&D company BBN Technologies as part of a team developing the ARPAnet; a computer network predecessor to the Internet. Crowther has never shown any desire to court celebrity for his achievements. Aside from a couple of interviews from books, Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Genesis II: Creation and…

How and Why to Make Your Digital Publications Matter

My intuition is that, even for the wary, recalcitrant, or skeptical, the ways individuals connect now online and learn from one another’s connections no longer represent the pathological or aberrant (i.e. the shallow, distracted, lonely, asocial, unprofessional digital generation:  you know the litany!), but “the future.”  Since many are worried about “the future,” those who…

Choosing Our Own Adventures, Then and Now

If you were a kid during the ’80s and read any books at all, you probably read at least one Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA), probably by either R.A. Montgomery or Edward Packard. And if you read one, you read more than one. They were addictive, candy for our brains, but also, they empowered us…

Is it time for a text game revival?

It’s also a cultural climate where audiences are increasingly used to thinking of books as media companions — popular film series like Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games, or TV series like Game of Thrones, all feel richer to fans if they read the books as well as enjoy the films. Designers of text-based…