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Ideas become Words become Ideas

How to Inspire Creative Writing with Gamefication: Dog No Cat

How to Inspire Creative Writing with Gamefication: Dog No Cat

Whether you’ve had an opportunity to write professionally, for school or even just for pure enjoyment, like every writer, you’ve probably gotten stuck for inspiration. For me, getting started with a creative writing project can be daunting when I am a loss for new ideas. A great technique for getting the creative juices flowing is a form of gamefication. That is, take a challenging set of rules and see if you can make it work. The result is a framework […]

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How Food Idioms Enhance Language and Understanding

How Food Idioms Enhance Language and Understanding

Have a seat at the sturdy pine table and enjoy the farmhouse fare of the English language. While this may not be where I started my journey to collect food idioms, it is surely where I have concluded (at least for now … something tells me I might keep collecting!). Across as many sources as I could find, I have come to a list of 362 idioms that employ food and its counterparts, cooking and eating. Throughout the project, I […]

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My Top Three Domestic Snake Encounters

My Top Three Domestic Snake Encounters

I am not afraid of snakes. Mostly. It may be due to the parenting era which I’ll call the “Time of the Lizard” when the menagerie in my home was pushed into a population crisis by nine geckos and a chameleon. Reptiles are beautiful, interesting and – I found – super compelling to watch. Nevertheless, my mostly brave snake interest is still sometimes accompanied by a chill spreading down the back of my neck, hidden though it might be by […]

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Honey Maid Ad Hits a Sweet Spot

Honey Maid Ad Hits a Sweet Spot

Last week I published an article on Motley Fool that looked at the business of what I dubbed “rebel marketing.”  Honey Maid was the latest entry onto the scene of advertisers daring to tackle once controversial topics — in this case the definition of a traditional family. Their “This is Wholesome” message played over tender scenes of single-parent, gay and multi-racial families, and it was beautifully done. I grew up in the days when Playtex advertised via the floating bra. […]

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