I’ve long believed that if we want students to improve as writers, it makes sense to make writing as fun as possible. Ask students how often they experience school-related writing as fun and expect a ...

Literature at its most serious is almost always funny. It’s hard to name an authentic great—Dickens, Faulkner, Zadie Smith—who’s not a gifted comic, too. In our conversation for this series, Sean ...

Brevity is soul. Usually that quote is longer, but who has that kinda time? With so much content competing for our attention, there’s a lot to be said for doing more with less. Unless there’s a way to ...

Some children enjoy spending hours on end writing paragraphs and stories, but others absolutely dread it.‎ They may have great ideas but struggle to express them on paper. Yet as students move through ...

When it comes to writing comedy, every syllable counts. Host Scott Simon talks to Mike Sacks, author of And Here's the Kicker: Conversations With 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft, and writer and ...

I’ve long been jealous of science teachers because they have liquid nitrogen. I remember the day in eighth grade science class when my teacher brought in the semi-sinister looking metal canister, ...

Twitter was abuzz with chatter about Mindy Kaling yesterday. She had attended a breakfast at Book Expo America and said funny things like “This is like a high school reunion where all the jocks were ...

When I was first explaining what I wanted this blog to be like in 2008, I shared with some folks at NPR a theory I have had for some time about writing about popular culture. It goes like this: If you ...

How am I qualified to advise anyone on how to write funny? Well, I’ve published three collections of humorous essays and another three compilations of whimsical light verse, so I feel I can speak with ...