All of my life, I have been a writer (not for pay, but for pleasure). Eventhough I am well into adulthood and truly older that I care to think about, my mom proudly displays my first writing assignment of my public school career on the refrigerator — to write one page on “If I Were a Magic Wand.” Ok— in my story, my brother did not fair so well but eventually recovered. However, poor Brian H, the red-headed little boy that proclaimed his undying love for me on the playground, was turned into a rock. Oh…. for the days when being turned into a rock was the worst image I could conjure.

I teach online classes at the graduate level. For the last few years, I have been disappointed how people with active minds and a good amount of intelligence do everything they can to avoid writing an original thought. Many is the time, that I get papers that are a series of lifted passages from a whole host of webpages. I had begun to wonder… is writing a lost art? Has writing gone the way of the handwritten thank you notes and hostess gifts?

Blogging and reading other’s thoughts has renewed my faith in the creative outlet of writing. Sometimes, it not so much what you say as it is that you say it in your own way. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t find blog diarys that interesting. I really don’t care what you ate for breakfast nor what crappy thing your boyfriend did on Thursday. However, I love a blog that has a personal tone of passion, introspection, analysis and creativity on a topic or series of topics. If comments are punctuated by a good dose of humor and a little sarcasm, all the better.

Now…. how do you teach this to graduate students?

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