writing | Jessica Cyphers

I post every Wednesday and Saturday about writing, editing, teaching, and travel.

Music as Writing

What is writing, anyway? A way to communicate, sure. But to communicate what? According to Webster's Dictionary, to communicate means...

On the Importance of Reading and Writing

In Composition 101 at the University of Tennessee, students learn the basic elements of rhetoric and about how it applies to writing they...

Narrative Distance in Romania

I've been thinking about the similarities between writing and photography lately. About how you can zoom in or out towards your...

Writing as a Way to Read Life

Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us...

Target Versus Actual Audience

In my last post on writing, I discussed the idea that there is no such thing as writing in general. Writing is always "in particular"...

The Plot of Our Lives

A few weeks ago, in my post Clutter, I discussed the opening lines of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler: You are about...

The Audience

So we're supposed to be ourselves when we write. But what about audience? If we're supposed to write as ourselves, are we writing to...

Clutter

Consider the opening lines of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables: Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England...

Simplicity

In 1942, during World War II, the United States government issued a blackout order: "Such preparations shall be made as will completely...

The Transaction

On the first day of every semester, before going over the syllabus, I ask my English 101 students to introduce themselves. “Tell us your...