On Practical Action

What’s new with Write To SuccessThe Write To Success Substack is closing in on its first anniversary.Thank you for being here, and diving into its sea of think pieces, interviews, rants, etc. In the coming year, Write To Success will focus on delivering...

On the Crazy Writer Trope

How circumstances shape life chancesWhile I cherish the idea of autonomy, life experience and research argue persuasively that my choices (while still choices) are rooted in the soil of where I was born, to whom, how I was raised and what it took to get...

On Charting a Course

Why self-awareness never comes too late“I wish I could do it over again.”My husband looked askance: “You wish you weren’t here?”That wasn’t — isn’t — what I wish at all. But helping high school students craft college application essays had me wishing that someone had...

On Women's Language

Or, Why it’s hard to be heardI’ve been preparing course materials for an A-level English Language course and, among a slew of handouts left over from previous teachers, found this assessment of Robin Lakoff’s ‘Language and Woman’s Place’:“As you can see, [hers...

Write Like A Pro: Andrew Doty

Writing insights from the Editwright Publishing Consultancy founder Welcome to Write Like a Pro — where experts from diverse fields and industries discuss how writing supports their professional success. In this interview Andrew Doty, founder of boutique publishing...

On Being Oneself

Teaching the courage to be uniqueAnglo-Irish literary aesthete, prodigy and queer icon Oscar Wilde advised: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”Like so much of his language, the words flit quicksilver from the tongue, they practically trail champagne...

On Reading Like a Writer

Revisiting authorial advice I wrote this article some years ago, after interviewing three authors. It is worth revisiting._______________________“It is impossible to become a writer without reading,” says Paul Hendrickson, writing professor at the University of...

10 Great YA Novels

Summer is here… start reading!Great books help develop strong readers. And strong readers are capable of learning just about anything.One of the joys and challenges of my job as a literature teacher is to continuously find exciting, engaging stories that will...

On Culturally Responsive Teaching

Conference presentation I presented the following case study at Le Sallay Academy’s January 2023 conference on blended learning.Culturally Responsive Teaching in Blended Learning: A Case Study What is culturally responsive teaching?The term culturally responsive...

On Playing with Words

Native English speakers only need to learn around 9,000 words to read proficiently (Nation, 2014; Qian & Lin, 2019). This, out of a lexis of over 170,00 words (and growing!)Hence most of us walk, eat and talk on a daily basis rather than shuffle, feast or...