Richard Nordquist’s blog entry, “Ten Pros on Prose” lists 10 accomplished writers (including the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and E.B. White) who have written about their craft. Hyperlinks direct readers to additional blogs that “nutshell” each writer’s thoughts on writing. In the first of these blogs, which focuses on Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, Nordquist addresses the point of achieving greatness as a writer.

The cover for the July 2008 edition of The Atlantic asks provocatively, “Is Google making us Stoopid?” In his article within, Nicholas Carr laments that his Internet addiction has shortened his attention span, scattered his focus, made his thinking shallower, and left him less capable of slogging through War and Peace. Hmm.

In the Washington Post, Linton Weeks offers an entertaining account of the latest linguistic controversy: Whether text messaging is killing the sentence. Weeks quotes James Billington, a Librarian of Congress who fears that textspeak and abbreviated syntax are destroying the English language: This assault on the lowly—and mighty—sentence… is symptomatic of a disease potentially fatal to civilization. If the sentence croaks, so will critical thought. The chronicling of history. Storytelling itself. I’m sympathetic to this concern. Sentences are, after all, the fundamental units of thought.

Alvin and Heidi Toffler—authors of such bestsellers as Future Shock, The Third Wave, and (my favorite) Creating a New Civilization—posit that human civilization has gone through several distinct stages, each culturally earthshaking. Humans started as hunter-gatherers, then settled as farmers, eventually underwent industrialization, and are now experiencing an information revolution.

You may have read my other post about Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” but you probably have no idea how much that article frightened me. Carr wrote as follows: Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back.

Over the past weeks, our editorial staff has been reading and discussing excerpts from several classic books about teaching writing, including so far Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers, Ken Macrorie’s Writing to Be Read, Donald Murray’s Learning by Teaching, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, James Moffett and Betty Jane Wagner’s Student-Centered Language Arts, Nancie Atwell’s second edition of In the Middle, and Donald Graves' Writing: Teaching and Children at Work. Our conversations have been rich, with each of us bringing to the table different insights into the texts.

This blog entry is in response to a June 6, 2008, article from The Atlantic entitled “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.” In the article, the author, Professor X, shares his thoughts and feelings about his latest teaching assignments. As Professor X puts it, he is employed at a college of last resort. Some might find that turn of phrase amusing, and that he teaches in the basement at such a college—well, ha! ha!, it can’t get any worse than that, can it?

We’re all so familiar with clusters as prewriting tools that we’ve forgotten how they were originally intended to be used. In Dr. Gabriele Lusser Rico’s classic book, Writing the Natural Way, she says… Writers need some magic key for getting in touch with these secret reserves of imaginative power. What we lack is not ideas but a direct means of getting in touch with them. Clustering is that magic key. In fact, it is the master key to natural writing.

In previous posts, I’ve argued that clear, straightforward language in writing is best. When you have something to say, presenting it in transparent language puts the focus on the content itself, allowing it to achieve its best effect. Contrariwise (if you’ll forgive my ironic vernacular) a person who employs elevated diction to articulate his or her reflections is quite often endeavoring to camouflage a poverty of substance.