As my students (my own kids and a few others) have moved on into higher education, I have pondered their preparation, their writing skills, and whether I did all I could to prepare them sufficiently for other writing instructors. When … Continue reading
Blog Archives
The Beginnings of Summer Planning
There is something special about summer for those of us who educate. Summer not only marks a break from the normal routine, but for us who love teaching, it is a marvel of a time to review the year, think … Continue reading
Offense-sensitivity
Invective (also known as ‘vituperation’) is language that denounces or casts blame on somebody or something. Invective can be highly abusive, such as A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy … Continue reading
The Purpose of Language?
Persuasion The term ‘persuasion’ can be loaded. When we try to persuade someone, our persuasion may be loaded with our agenda, with our goals, and with our opinions—and that is a danger. It is a danger because we are flawed human beings. We make mistakes in our beliefs, … Continue reading
Discovering the Arguments: Artistic and Inartistic proofs
Disclaimer: At times I write what I would call an ‘advanced blog post’, one intended for those who have studied our advanced books. This is one such. When writing an essay you need to generate support for your thesis statement. … Continue reading
The Importance of Outlining
Generating an outline before working is not just a good idea, it is essential. Most of the thinking that goes into an essay should be done by the time the outline is written, so that when you actually sit down … Continue reading
Basic Rhetoric: The Canon of Invention and the Progymnasmata
Rhetoric has as its purpose to persuade. It is for the sake of persuasion that we educators torture our students with essay writing. We want them to be able to express their ideas persuasively and well. For the purposes of … Continue reading
Classical Ed ‘Lite’
This weekend I was talking to some folks about the different levels of rigor that may be employed in a classical education. Some were adamant that there is a lot of new ‘fad’ curriculum out there that calls itself classical … Continue reading
Preparing to Read the Great Books
Classical Writing’s recommended literature selections are now available on our website. But I have since received several emails about how to prepare for (as well as how to tackle) reading what we call “Great Books”. Well, let’s start by saying that every … Continue reading
Using Older Literature in Classical Education
Among those educators who honestly strive hard to teach kids to write well, who believe in punctuation, spelling, syntactical, and logical correctness, there are two schools of thought: 1. The correctness school: People in this school tend to prefer modern … Continue reading