by Deborah Lee Luskin | Oct 2, 2012 | Living in Place
In 1982, while a graduate student at Columbia University, I taught Introduction to Freshman Composition, a remedial course for bright but inarticulate young men just entering the college. (Columbia was still all-male back then.) I’d never taken Freshman Composition of...
by Deborah Lee Luskin | Sep 4, 2012 | Living in Place
For the past eight months, I’ve been diligently working at the first draft of Ellen, the working title of the current novel I’m writing. Back in January, I planned to spend one month reading and organizing the notes I’ve been collecting for years, and then...
by Deborah Lee Luskin | Aug 7, 2012 | Living in Place
For the second year in a row, I’ve served as a judge for a local writing contest, and for the second year in a row, I’ve been humbled by the variety and sincerity of the work submitted – and a bit horrified at the way the submissions have been formatted. So I thought...
by Deborah Lee Luskin | Jul 24, 2012 | Living in Place
Rather than make good on the promise with which I ended my last post [subordinate clause], to further explain coordination and subordination in prose [infinitive phrase] and risk losing my readers before the end of this complex, compound sentence...
by Deborah Lee Luskin | Jul 10, 2012 | Living in Place
I had two memorable professors in graduate school. One used to say, “and is the hardest word in the English Language to use well”; the other said, “The secret to good writing is subordination.” Essentially, they were saying the same thing. “And” is a...
