Unwrap the name of a candy bar, and you just might find a story inside. For instance, one chewy treat found in many a checkout lane is named after a family’s beloved horse. And: 50 years ago in the United States, some Latino elementary...
An elementary music teacher in Cheyenne, Wyoming, reports that on a cold and windy day, one of her three-year-old students declared that she wished they were all on a sandy beach where they could change into their zucchinis. It was clearly a...
If you speak both German and Spanish, you may find yourself reaching for a German word instead of a Spanish one, and vice versa. This puzzling experience is so common among polyglots that linguists have a name for it. • The best writers create...
Advice about college essays from the winner of a top prize for children’s literature: Kelly Barnhill encourages teens to write about experiences that are uniquely their own, from a point of view that is theirs and no one else’s. Plus...
Michelle calls from Peoria, Illinois, about a slang term that she and her friend Liz often heard when they were students at Bradley University in the mid-1990s. In those days before modern social media, to squid or to engage in squidding referred to...
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...