Many publishing professionals will tell a self-publishing author that, despite the high cost of hiring a professional freelance editor ($50/hour and up), he or she can’t NOT afford an editor. A poorly edited book will look unprofessional and amateurish.

Many of us take for granted the fact that we can read and understand a newspaper article. Did you know that, according to a 2011 study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, 29% of adults in the United States don’t read well enough to understand a newspaper story written at an eighth grade level?

In my creative writing course, I try to incorporate as many group writing exercises as possible. You may be thinking, “But isn’t writing a solitary act?” Writing can be both an individual and community effort. Two projects that my students particularly enjoy are the group novel and the class short story.

In the process of preparing and launching my campaign and also by backing other projects (mostly writers), I learned that Kickstarter can benefit writers in more than just the most obvious way, which is to help them raise money for their creative projects.

I can’t wait to send my short stories out into the world because I’ve poured my heart and soul into them. So what’s a young woman to do now that she’s ready to share her project with the world? A young woman cannot make demands on the world nor can she expect the world to be ready when she is.

When was the last time you hand-wrote an important document? Could you imagine hand-writing e-mails before typing and sending them? Would you consider hand-writing a term paper before formatting it according to your instructor’s specifications?

The comment I make most often to my writing students has nothing to do with grammar or punctuation. It has nothing to do with sentence structure or the number of sentences in a paragraph. I’ll usually write these two words on the board at the beginning of class to serve as a reminder. Can you guess them?

Working one-on-one with writing students, I’ve been shocked by the misconceptions they reveal. Some of these misconceptions were passed on by teachers who either don’t appreciate the craft of writing or don’t have the patience to work with students who require extra help.

A few years after my exploratory dips into writing, I came of age at the very same time that updating social networks and engaging constantly with a screen became part of a young person’s routine. I waddled through my formative years with one foot in the “boredom” that Feller describes and one foot in distraction.

Some contemporary personal essays and memoirs that I’ve been reading possess a quality that annoys me deeply, but I’ve been having trouble articulating that quality and would like to try to explore it here.