Advice about college essays from the winner of a top prize for children’s literature: Kelly Barnhill encourages teens to write about experiences that are uniquely their own, from a point of view that is theirs and no one else’s. Plus, why do we say...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski is pondering the degrees offered by various colleges and universities — or at least, the degrees those institutions should offer, considering their names. For example, at what Ivy League school might you expect a course in...
Liam in San Francisco, California, emailed to share a passage from Donna Tartt’s novel, The Secret History (Bookshop|Amazon). It’s a sensuous description of the sights, sounds, and smells of autumn in Vermont. This is part of a complete episode...
Miranda, a nurse in Altoona, Pennsylvania, had a patient who described her hospital food as the pits, meaning it wasn’t good. The expressions the pits and in the pits arose out of 1950s college slang, and derive from the notion of smelly armpits...
In just seconds, online text generators and chatbots can produce whole paragraphs of sophisticated prose. But what do advances in artificial intelligence mean for writers? What is lost and what’s gained when machine-writing replaces the work humans...
Matthew from Columbia, South Carolina, is curious about the word sirsee, a small gift or knickknack. Scattered through much of the American South, this colloquial term is sometimes spelled as surcy, or any of several other variations. The word may...