When’s the last time you wrote something significant? Was it in a long ago educational setting like high school or college? We’ve come to think of writing as something we suffer through in our learning years, but thankfully get to shed when we’re done, but as a college writing instructor, I can tell you that writing is so much more than a research paper. In college writing courses, the ultimate goal is to teach you to write specific types of texts so you can be successful in

Laying on the floor of my messy teenage bedroom, a Coke in one hand and Les Miserables in the other I fell in love with reading for the first time. I had procrastinated this particular reading until the end and some long-forgotten assignment loomed on the horizon. So, I had determined to stay up until I finished the book, hence the need for a Coke, but somewhere between the main character, Jean Valjean deciding he would live a changed life and sacrificing that life for the a

It took me 2 months of grueling effort to slog through Crime and Punishment. Since I normally read a book a week, this was very out of character. Of course, some of this could be the newborn daughter I often held in my arms when I read, but it wasn’t all her fault. It was also the fault of Dostoevsky and the literary market of the 1800’s which, true to form, had published the book in 12 installments in a literary journal, making it long and complicated. It was also because of