Freelance Tips Blog

I got a kick out of this word when I found it. I doubt that any kind of detective would appreciate being called a “gumshoe”. It doesn’t have quite the same pizzazz as “secret agent”, for example. Nor does it carry the same air of impressibility as the title of “detective”. Finding this word reminds …

When I went grocery shopping at the Forks Market last weekend, I saw a sign at the Tall Grass Prairie Bakery that read: All day old bread for $1.50! The sign was posted in front of a stand full of delicious-looking baked goods. I immediately grabbed a bag of whole wheat buns, a loaf of …

Yesterday was Moving Day for me- the movers arrived and, four hours later, all of my things had been transported from my apartment to my new condo. It’s rather disgusting just how much stuff I own. And I’m not a “stuff” person, either. I used to be a bit of a pack-rat, but several years …

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen have written an article entitled “Front Pages: Analysis of Newspaper Layout”. Even if you aren’t involved in working with a newspaper, and even if you don’t read the newspaper, you likely see them all over the place and thus have an idea of newspaper layout. The Internet may be …

As I clean out my apartment, preparing to move out of it in a couple weeks so that I can move into my new condo, I’ve had to deal with an assortment of items that I’d rather forgotten about. The wine bottle collection is something that I’m not looking forward to getting rid of, due …

As Kenneth Burke once said, and as us rhetoricians are fond of iterating, every act of selection is an act of reflection and also an act of deflection. Every time that we make a statement or an argument, we focus on one thing but neglect something else. This is reflective of our position in life …

Why is it that in the word “nihil”, the “ni” is pronounced “nee”, but in the words “nihilism” and “nihilistic”, the “ni” is pronounced “ny”? And why is it that in the word “nihilist”, the “ni” can be pronounced either “nee” or “ny”? The English language is a beautiful, strange, and confusing thing.

We do a lot of peer editing of our work in my Creative Writing class, and it is appalling just how many of my classmates’ stories are written with poor grammar, sentence structure, or a complete lack of coherency, as far as being consistent goes. As a proofreader for the university’s newspaper, one of my …

“Assonance is when you get the rhyme wrong” – Educating Rita If you know anything about literature, or if you are interested in plays about social class differences, or if you are intrigued about the meaning of “culture”, be sure to check out this fantastic play at Winnipeg’s MTC.

We are currently reading The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) by Mark Bauerlein in my Revolutions in Communication class. It’s an excellent book, even though a) I spend hours each day blogging and thus using the very technologies that Bauerlein despises, …

We have been studying poetry in my Creative Writing class. Several students brought Sylvia Plath’s work into the class to analyze. These students were raving about Plath’s genius, so I read her poetry with great curiosity. I didn’t like it. I found it to be simultaneously dull and melodramatic; the diction is simple and the …

I write visual art reviews for The Uniter. Typically I check out the art, ponder it a while, jot down a few notes, and then go home to write up my review. E-mail it to my editor and a week later, it’s published. Last week, however, I had the opportunity to attend a visual art …