Author: Cynthia MacGregor

When my mother was in high school, many decades ago, she was compelled to learn Latin. By the time of my own high school years—also long ago—Latin was no longer compulsory, but it was still offered.

Who said, “The U.S. and Great Britain are two nations divided by a common language”? This oft-repeated and unquestionably true saying has been variously attributed to Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and Winston Churchill. In truth, they may all have said it at one time or another, though who said it FIRST, who ORIGINATED the...

Some people still have a mistaken idea of the writing life. They envision a writer curled up in the corner of her couch, laptop in lap, leisurely writing. Or perhaps she’s sitting alongside a babbling brook, drawing inspiration from nature as she pens what she hopes will be her best-seller.

Do you have the urge to write? Maybe there’s something specific you want to write: your memoir, or a children’s story—perhaps one you originally made up to tell your own child—or a compilation of recipes you collected in the course of your travels, or a novel set in Camelot involving one of King Arthur’s knights,...

The freelance life is a precarious one. Unless you’re a JK Rowling, Danielle Steele, you don’t pull in enough royalties to survive let alone thrive. So writing books full time is out of the question. You have to have another gig to pull in income. Yet you want to remain a freelancer.

How many of us remember learning to read? Wasn’t it magical? It unlocked a whole world for us—the world of the written word.

What I’ve got is not writer’s block, but it’s impeding me all the same. Writer’s block is that dread affliction that causes a writer to sit down to work on their work-in-progress, or to begin it, if all they have is the title, the concept, and perhaps an outline…but when they put fingers to keys,...

An online newsletter I subscribe to contains queries from journalists, book authors, broadcasters, and others who seek input for articles, books, broadcast/podcast shows, and other media. Lately there has been a rash of queries seeking suggestions for gifts for people of varous demographis—by age, by occupation, by avocation. These articles the queries are for suggest...

In a world that’s ever more digital, a group of students at Yale have protested over the school library’s plan to relocate a trove of books from the Bass Library, bringing the library’s holdings down from 150,000 books to just 40,000.

While I’m not discrediting the internet as a fabulous source of information, let’s not overlook books…and not just as a source for supplying answers to specific questions, but for generally informing us.