It's Mind

How to Write with Conviction I wrote my first persuasive essay while staring at a cartoon hamburger. While gesturing to the individual ingredients that made up a neon hamburger on the overhead projector, my elementary school teacher explained the “Hamburger Method” of writing a persuasive essay. The Hamburger Method starts with the top bun: the introductory paragraph and main point. Three paragraphs represented by the lettuce, the cheese, and the meat follow the first bun. These three paragraphs each cover a supporting argument to enhance the main point...

continuation of part I... When working on my creative projects, I again use Word if I’m not writing by hand. I really like writing out first drafts of poems by hand. Then I type them up in a Word doc so I can more easily play with line breaks. Then I print out the draft and do edits by hand again. I also prefer to revise and edit my prose by hand. It forces me to slow down and closely consider the changes I’m making. But I do it all in pencil so I can easily make changes to my changes. I spend a...

How a mom of two finds time to write both day and night. Who are you? Dianne Turgeon Richardson. I am a full-time technical/proposal writer for a government services contractor in the Orlando, FL area, and I occasionally take on freelance writing and editing work. In my spare time, I write creatively: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction/personal essay. What do you write? I started writing when I was seven with my own version of a Babysitters’ Club novel. Today, we’d call it fan fiction, but at the time, I really just thought, “This doesn’t look so hard...

Let me offer you some free advice… Hamilton is an international sensation. Fusing hip-hop and musical theater, Lin-Manuel Miranda created an impressive telling of Alexander Hamilton’s life story. As writers, there’s a lot we can learn from the show, its creation, and its namesake. As Aaron Burr says in Aaron Burr, Sir, let me offer you some free advice: 1. Inspiration Can Strike Anywhere I’m past patiently waiting. I’m passionately smashing every expectation. Every action’s an act of creation! I’m laughing in the face of casualties and sorrow...

If you’ve been writing for a while, you have some old ideas for novels or short stories kicking around. Here’s what to do with them. A while back, the New York Times published an article that talked about if you have a book in you. A small publisher in Michigan conducted a survey of 1,006 Americans and 81% of that group said yes. If I had taken the survey, I’d easily be able to say yes, since I do have some rather old and unimpressive manuscripts under my belt already. Regardless, since you’re reading this, I bet you’d say yes to that survey as well...