It was 1967 and I had recently enrolled at the University of Kansas in Lawrence on the G.I. Bill after serving almost four years in the U.S. Army Security Agency. At the time I was working at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper in the composing room. My job was to “kill” …
The link below will take you to a podcast/radio interview I did a while back with C. P. Lesley of the New Books Network about writing historical fiction. Ms. Lesley is herself the author of six historical fiction novels set in 16th Century Russia during the reign of Ivan the …
Today is the 80th anniversary of Imperial Japan’s attack on America’s 7th Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. I lived in Japan and covered that nation for 10 years as the Chicago Tribune’s Chief Far Eastern Correspondent and Tokyo Bureau Chief. Naturally, Pearl Harbor was never far from the cusp of …
There is an anonymous quote about books and reading them that I recall from my English Literature class at the University of Kansas several centuries ago. It goes like this: “Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.” The meaning …
Once upon a time, America was a nation of laws. Thieves and thugs were punished when they were caught, arrested, and convicted. Those were the good ole days. Today, we live in a nation where smash and grab thieves are invading stores at will, cleaning them out, and walking away. …
I was getting ready to post today on the fully warranted Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal and then I read the column below by former Chicago Tribune colleague and columnist John Kass. John left the Tribune this past summer, the victim of “cancel culture” primarily because of a column he wrote that …
There is a lot of talk and controversy these days about how our children are being indoctrinated with such specious Marxist ideas as Critical Race Theory, the erroneous and debunked 1619 Project, and Critical Gender Theory that posits that gender division is a social construct and that there is no …
To conclude my series of posts on the English language in general and on rhetorical devices, oxymora, respecting the language, and writing well in particular, here is a post about how illogical and difficult it is to master the English language. As with those previous posts, this post was a …
As promised Saturday, here is another handout I used to give to my students when I was teaching journalism at the University of Illinois. I hope you find it useful. The contents of this post are an alphabetical arrangement of two lists that have been circulating among writers and editors for …
(When I was teaching journalism at the University of Illinois, I used to give this handout on Respecting the Language: 80 Do’s and Don’ts to the Reporting 400 class I taught. Students told me they found it helpful. Here it is for those of you who write or who are …