LitLife: A Good Resource for Parents and Teachers

Since many readers of this blog—especially parents—expressed appreciation for my recent review of an excellent book about encouraging children to write, I thought I’d offer another helpful resource for parents and teachers of young writers. (For the link to that book review, click here: http://wordsontheline.blogspot.com/2007/01/essential-guide-for-parents-students.html).

My friend Kristie Breed, a master elementary language arts teacher, recently referred me to the website of an interesting company called LitLife (http://www.litlifeinfo.com/). Dedicated to guiding and supporting the teaching of reading and writing, LitLife has made its presence in numerous schools by providing curricula and materials and well as delivering instruction to literacy teachers. If you visit, I would recommend you to browse the “Lessons and Suggestions” tab. It lists instructional units and lessons, recommended children’s books, and grammar tips. Contacting LitLife directly (click “Ask Pam”) also may be a good idea for involved parents.


To purchase your copy of The Art of On-the-Job Writing by Philip Vassallo, click here: http://firstbooks.com/shop/shopexd.asp?id=144

Cheating? No, Crafting!

In The Art of On-the-Job Writing, I describe six techniques for overcoming writer’s block. The first, using boilerplate, enocurages writers to jumpstart the composition process not by obsessing over perfect phrasing but by using previously documented expressions—regardless of how trite they may seem. They can return later to the first draft and edit the tired phrases.

Leo Rockas’s A Creative Copybook (D.C. Heath and Company, 1989) even suggests copying entire passages to create an organic connection between your thought process and your linguistic expressions. He writes:

Don’t lose one second wondering how to start; just start copying. Once you’ve begun, your pen flows, the ideas begin coming from you don’t know where. If your own ideas don’t come right away, just keep copying. Copying to keep in practice, copying as a beginning to creating, copying until creating, copying while creating—these techniques are as old as writing itself. As you copy, magically you begin to create.

By no means does Rockas—or I, for that matter—endorse plagiarizing. He does encourage, however, using the writing process to get things going. I would agree that to speed up matters, we should distinguish between the phases of the composing process: the creative phase, which concerns only the writer at work, and the critical phase, which ends in the final product that our readers see.


To purchase your copy of The Art of On-the-Job Writing by Philip Vassallo, click here: http://firstbooks.com/shop/shopexd.asp?id=144

A Trip to Science, a Tip for Scientists

At Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory last week (www.cshl.edu), I had the great pleasure and privilege of working with brilliant international post-doctoral scientists and graduate students whose research interests lie in the challenging fields of cancer, neuroscience, plant genetics, genomics, and bioinformatics. Much of their writing is necessarily laden with passive descriptions of methodology, objective analyses of results, and detached statements of conclusion—hallmarks of the disinterested scientist.

Despite living in such an empirical world, these scientists realize that they must write convincingly for a successful funding proposal. To ground them on the difference between writing objectively and persuasively, I explained that the significance of the grant application appears not in the content language (the hard data) but in the context language (the interpretive expressions).

Much easier said than done? You bet. The content is the unchangeable, factual information; the context is the dynamic commentary that makes or breaks the writer. On the positive side, the context language could make writers appear insightful, focused, concerned, and credible; on the negative side, it could make them seem inobservant, careless, hyperbolic, or incredulous. A lot is at stake here.


To purchase your copy of The Art of On-the-Job Writing by Philip Vassallo, click here: http://firstbooks.com/shop/shopexd.asp?id=144

An Essential Guide for Parents, Students, and Teachers

BOOK REVIEW: Encouraging Your Child’s Writing Talent by Nancy Peterson. Waco: Prufrock Press, 2006. 161 pp. $14.95. Paper.

The question pops up frequently in my writing classes: “Phil, would you recommend a book I can read to help my child become a better writer?” My answer is always, “Yes,” but rarely is it “You must start with this book.”

Until now. Nancy Peterson’s Encouraging Your Child’s Writing Talent is a quick read, chock full of valuable information and eye-opening insights. In five quick chapters replete with illustrations, reference lists, and penetrating insights, and practical advice, Peterson manages to provide an excellent primer for parents of beginning elementary-age writers as well as useful material for the classroom composition teacher. Just a glimpse of the chapter titles should suffice in convincing a parent or teacher that the book is worth a look: Your Child—A Writer, What Your Child Needs as a Writer” Working with the School to Encourage Your Child as a Writer, What You Can Do at Home for Your Gifted Writer, and Enrichment Resources for Your Young Writer. Better yet, the author comes through on what she promises to deliver.

Peterson’s conclusion cleverly describes helping children “take off” as writers by borrowing from the Wright Brothers’ three-stage approach to flight: lift, control, propulsion—inspire them, hone their skills, and keep them energized. Undoubtedly, this metaphor relates to adult writers as well.


To purchase your copy of The Art of On-the-Job Writing by Philip Vassallo, click here: http://firstbooks.com/shop/shopexd.asp?id=144

Webcast: How To Write a Darn Good E-Mail

On October 6, 2006, I had the great pleasure of presenting a webcast with Richard Bradley, Faculty Practitioner of the American Management Association (AMA), titled How To Write a Darn Good E-Mail.

The premise of the 45-minute program was that e-mail presents numerous opportunities—as well as challenges—for employees to deliver their organization’s message. Richard and I covered several key points to help you maximize your e-communication skills:

• getting started quickly
• writing attention-getting subject lines, openings, and closings
• creating clear, concise e-mail that gets results
• maintaining a professional tone
• polishing your e-mail to perfection

I assure you: checking out this free webcast from your home or office is time well spent. Here’s the link to the webcast: http://www.amanet.org/editorial/webcast/darn-good-email/index.htm

We also previewed the new, exciting one-day seminar, AMA’s e-Communications Workshop, which I designed for the organization. It’s a great course because of its interactive, high-tech approach to training. There’s no other workshop like it. Here is the link to the seminar: http://www.amanet.org/seminars/seminar.cfm?basesemno=2821


To purchase your copy of The Art of On-the-Job Writing by Philip Vassallo, click here: http://firstbooks.com/shop/shopexd.asp?id=144

Executing Knowledge

In the introductory chapter of The Effective Executive (1966), management guru Peter Drucker (1909 – 2005) renders a prophetic insight into the role of corporate employees in an information age:

Every knowledge worker is an “executive” if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results.

Forty years later, we know Drucker’s premise to be reality. Anyone charged with communicating company information carries an enormous responsibility in fulfilling daily tasks. Whether returning that prospective client’s inquiry, explaining that product specification sheet, delivering that price quotation, or troubleshooting that complicated order, employees contribute profoundly to the vitality of their organization.

So what does this truth have to do with writing? Simply that we have to use the tools at our disposal to communicate purposefully, courteously, clearly, and concisely. The computer, the PDA, and any other writing instrument available to us afford the opportunity to express more than just the data but our interpretation of the data, more than the just facts but our spin on them, more than a statement of the problem but our proposed solution to it. The computers in our head—not the ones resting on our desk—must do the real thinking, and we express our thinking through writing. In the same book, Drucker concludes:

The greatest impact of the computer lies in its limitations, which will force us increasingly to make decisions, and above all, force middle managers to change from operators into executives and decision-makers.

Where do those decisions appear? In writing—and writing tools are useful only in the right person’s hands.


To purchase your copy of The Art of On-the-Job Writing by Philip Vassallo, click here: http://firstbooks.com/shop/shopexd.asp?id=144

You DO Have to Be Einstein

Albert Einstein was extremely generous about world opinion in general, and the American people in particular, when he said in a 1921 interview:

It is a welcome symptom in an age which is commonly denounced as materialistic, that it makes heroes of men whose goals lie wholly in the intellectual and moral sphere. This proves that knowledge and justice are ranked above wealth and power by a large section of the human race. My experience teaches me that this idealistic outlook is particularly prevalent in America, which is decried as a singularly materialistic country. (Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein, page 4)

How interesting that in the face of rising European Fascism, with its political motivations, Einstein persisted with such an optimistic viewpoint about humanity. I wonder, however, what he would say about the state of human affairs some 85 years later, in light of technological advances, which have created a world of virtual anythings that have insulated us from actual experience and insolated us from each other.

As a corporate trainer, I have had the privilege of discussing what our society most values with an impressive range of well-educated people from around the world and from diverse professional disciplines. I think the consensus is that Einstein would retract his statement today. As a society, do we prize intellectual and moral achievement over financial and political gain? If the newspapers we read accurately reflect what we value, then go no further than the entertainment, fashion, sports, society, stock, and scandal pages (did I leave out anything but the funnies?) to see what matters most to us. We are inundated with an information overload that gives us scarce time to reflect on the data’s value. In a sense, the lightning speed at which the information passes through our lives from the levels of high urgency to instant oblivion has become like a drug that devalues human interaction. Today, I’m sure Einstein would say, “Forget what the media and technology tell you is wisdom and find wisdom for yourselves.”

I usually recommend to participants of my writing seminars that they read inside their field to maintain their subject-matter expertise and outside their field to cultivate their knowledge of ideas and their command of language. Yet many people unabashedly confess that they do not read much. My response never varies: “You cannot become a good writer without becoming a good reader, and you become a good reader by reading regularly and eclectically.”

Here’s my advice for whoever is reading this note: To become a better writer, keep reading like a writer: read, reflect, respond (in writing, of course), repeat.


To purchase your copy of The Art of On-the-Job Writing by Philip Vassallo, click here: http://firstbooks.com/shop/shopexd.asp?id=144