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Archaeologists have uncovered the largest collection of ancient Egyptian 'notepads' found since the beginning of the 20th century. In the long-lost city of Athribis, in central Egypt, researchers have cataloged more than 18,000 inscribed pieces of pottery, some of which seem to have been written by students. The shards of inked pottery are known as 'ostraca'. Much cheaper and more accessible than papyrus, remnants of broken jars and other vessels were used in ancient Egypt on a daily basis to detail shopping lists, record trades, copy literature and teach students how to write and draw. In fact, a large...

Each year, Dictionary.com reveals a word that often serves as a perfect snapshot of a given year. Maybe you talked about it, texted it, or read a blog about it. No matter how you encountered it, Dictionary.com’s editors say the chosen word was at the forefront of many of our minds in 2021. What is the word of the year for 2021? What is old is indeed new again because Dictionary.com editors proclaim “allyship”—a noun born in the mid-1800s—as the word that dominated the American English vernacular during a year that simmered with racial and political unrest after the rolling...

Okay...I haven't posted in some time but just thought this was funny and had to post somewhere. I'm a bereaved father and author of several grief recovery and support books. I'm working on my sixth book now - this one discussing the return to work following the loss of a loved one. Regardless, I was just curious about the proper use of the words "toward" and "towards" and of course went off to the interwebs to research. There I came across the website Learner's Dictionary and got what I wanted (both correct - writer's choice...just use them the same throughout...

Victor Hugo on Gutenberg's Press, "The Invention of Printing ... is the Mother of Revolution." HISTORY OF WRITING The invention of "writing" was around 3300 BC. Richard Overy, editor of The Times Complete History of the World, stated in "The 50 Key Dates of World History" (October 19, 2007): "No date appears before the start of human civilizations about 5,500 years ago and the beginning of a written or pictorial history." Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson stated in the Cosmos TV series (2014, natgeotv.com, episode 10, "The Immortals"): "It was the people who once lived here, around 5,000 years ago, who...

Freshman composition occupies a unique position in a college curriculum. It is the only class required of about 90 percent of enrollees whose diverse aptitudes and prior writing experience present a challenge for instructors every semester. In Why They Can’t Write, instructor John Warner of the College of Charleston proposes a course he says will minimize the challenge for instructors and have students writing “clearly, persuasively, even beautifully” by semester’s end. His “dream” is to have his course “adopted in every classroom across the country,” but this classroom veteran hopes that the Warner model stays just that—a dream. Before I...

Defenders of politically correct language claim that such speech reduces offensive behavior and encourages conscious thinking about individual merits. On the contrary, the drive for politically correct language relegates more and more terms to the exclusive domain of bullies, while requiring unthinking, reflexive adherence to the latest stupid language fashions. [PDF file at source]

The Fox News headline sums up the issue at hand: "No Obama documents in Obama library? Historians puzzled by Chicago center plans." The article continues, "The Obama Foundation is taking an unconventional approach to the presidential center and library being planned in Chicago. It's opting to host a digital archive of President Barack Obama's records, but not keep his hard-copy manuscripts and letters and other documents onsite." The Chicago Tribune broke the story that, to this point, has attracted no major media attention. Its headline raises much the same question Fox News did: "Without archives on site, how will Obama...

Leslie Mancillas believes everyone has a story worth telling. The Santa Rosa Junior College professor and author has worked with her students over the past few years capturing their stories of hardship, hope and triumph in anthologies. Gearing up for her latest student compilation, Mancillas finds herself reflecting about surviving childhood abuse in a memoir she hopes to finish next summer. Her mother beat her and two siblings while hooked on amphetamines and barbiturates, Mancillas said, which had been prescribed for weight loss and sleep. The amphetamines gave her mother — a petite hospital nurse — super strength, she said....

FORT MADISON, IOWA -- Only ghosts and shadows haunt the empty halls of Sheaffer Pens, the onetime giant pen manufacturer on H Street. Its locked doors and worn brick stand like weary sentinels along the banks of the Mississippi in this struggling southeast Iowa river-and-railroad town. Rust weeps through the paint on the window frames; the once magnificent illuminated-letters sign with the trademark white dot that faced Illinois is gone, no longer serving as a gatekeeper for its fortress of employees. At its peak, it employed more than 2,500 people in a town of 14,000; nearly everyone here had someone...

14-year-old on a mission to change perceptions about young ArabsA 14-year-old Emirati girl’s love for books has led her to write novels, a move she hopes will inspire other young Arabs to work towards reaching their full potential and changing the world’s perception of young Arabs’ capabilities. Aisha Al Naqbi’s first book Blue Moon was published in April last year when she was just 13 and she has just finished the draft for her second book and is well on her way to plotting her third novel. At first glance, Al Naqbi seems like every other teenager but it takes...

Alabama and Louisiana passed laws in 2016 mandating cursive proficiency in public schoolsCursive writing is looping back into style in schools across the country after a generation of students raised on keyboarding, texting and printing out letters longhand. Alabama and Louisiana passed laws in 2016 mandating cursive proficiency in public schools, the latest of 14 states to require cursive. And last fall, the 1.1 million-student New York City school system encouraged teaching cursive to students in the third grade. Penmanship proponents contend writing words in a single line is just a faster way of taking notes. Others say students...

An “antiracist” poster in a college writing center insists American grammar is “racist” and an “unjust language structure,” promising to prioritize rhetoric over “grammatical ‘correctness.'” The poster, written by the director, staff, and tutors of the University of Washington, Tacoma’s Writing Center, states “racism is the normal condition of things,” declaring that it permeates rules, systems, expectations, in courses, school and society. “Linguistic and writing research has shown clearly for many decades that there is no inherent ‘standard’ of English,” proclaims the writing center’s statement. “Language is constantly changing. These two facts make it very difficult to justify placing people...

University of Washington Tacoma - An "antiracist" poster in a college writing center insists American grammar is "racist" and an "unjust language structure," promising to prioritize rhetoric over "grammatical 'correctness.'" The poster, written by the director, staff, and tutors of the University of Washington, Tacoma's Writing Center, states "racism is the normal condition of things," declaring that it permeates rules, systems, expectations, in courses, school and society. "Linguistic and writing research has shown clearly for many decades that there is no inherent 'standard' of English," proclaims the writing center's statement. "Language is constantly changing. These two facts make it very...

Zhou Youguang, the inventor of a system to convert Chinese characters into words with the Roman alphabet, died Saturday at the age of 111. Since his system was introduced nearly six decades ago, few innovations have done more to boost literacy rates in China and bridge the divide between the country and the West. Pinyin, which was adopted by China in 1958, gave readers unfamiliar with Chinese characters a crucial tool to understand how to pronounce them. These characters do not readily disclose information on how to say them aloud — but with such a system as Pinyin, those characters...

cave paintings Spot the signs: geometric forms can be found in paintings, as at Marsoulas in France Philippe Blanchot / hemis.fr / Hemis/AFP By Alison George When she first saw the necklace, Genevieve von Petzinger feared the trip halfway around the globe to the French village of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac had been in vain. The dozens of ancient deer teeth laid out before her, each one pierced like a bead, looked roughly the same. It was only when she flipped one over that the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. On the reverse were three etched symbols: a...

Cairo (AFP) - The Egyptian Museum in Cairo is showcasing for the first time the earliest writing from ancient Egypt found on papyrus, detailing work on the Great Pyramid of Giza, antiquities officials said Thursday. The papyri were discovered near Wadi el-Jarf port, 25 kilometres (15 miles) south of the Gulf of Suez town of Zafarana, the antiquities ministry said. The find by a French-Egyptian team unearths papers telling of the daily lives of port workers who transported huge limestone blocks to Cairo during King Khufu's rule to build the Great Pyramid, intended to be his burial structure. One document...

June 9, 1870. Charles Dickens sat writing at his desk. He had been laboring more than was his custom on his latest book. Though the story was progressing well, Mr. Dickens was not feeling well. His left hand clawed at the air. His left foot dragged on the ground. And though he had recently retired from public performances with a final reading from Pickwick, his pen scarcely ceased its scratching. A profound and perplexing mystery was unfolding beneath that pen and Mr. Dickens’ knew it well. If only his readers might know it as well.It had been five years...

An archaeological dig has turned up the earliest known handwritten documents in Britain among hundreds of Roman waxed writing tablets. Some 410 wooden tablets have been discovered, 87 of which have been deciphered to reveal names, events, business and legal dealings and evidence of someone practising writing the alphabet and numerals. With only 19 legible tablets previously known from London, the find from the first decades of Roman rule in Britain provides a wealth of new information about the city's earliest Romans.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy said Friday that the EPA is very good at making rules requiring individuals, businesses and state and local governments to comply with laws related to “protecting” the environment. “If anybody knows anything about EPA and writing rules--we rock at it,” McCarthy said at the Climate Action 2016 summit held last week in Washington, D.C. "We do them legally. We do them on the basis of sound science. And while there is a pause, there’s no pause in the action in the United States towards renewable energy and energy efficiency. We are going in...

PHOENIX — Insisting it's good from everything from civics to brain development, state lawmakers want to require students to know how to read and write in cursive. Legislation on the desk of Gov. Doug Ducey would mandate that schools include cursive reading and writing in their curriculum. Specifically, students would have to show by the end of fifth grade they are "able to create readable documents through legible cursive handwriting.'' But, unlike a requirement that students know how to read by the end of the third grade, there is nothing in the law that says students who can't display that...