Tumblr’s image posts are a natural format for conveying ideas at a glance. I composited contemporary and historical photos of New York City to show the transience of built environments. To show climate change, I juxtaposed photos I’d taken in the same locations in different years. I used a public domain Charles O’Rear photo from the Environmental Protection Agency’s 1970s Documerica series and answered Maureen Johnston’s call to “cover flip” gender bias in book design, “flipping” Alice Munro’s Dear Life:
Grading undergraduate compositions inspired me to create a quick guide to apostrophe use:
Posted 11.22.11, 10:30 a.m.
Between likes and re-blogs, the post accumulated 196 notes in a day—the most well-received grammar lesson I’ve done.
Next to apostrophes, the misstep I find most often in student (and other) grammar is the use of “graduate” as a verb. So I made a graphic for that:
Posted 12.12.12, 9:44 a.m.
Colors from vintage fabric swatches gave a 1940s look to this diagram of the chronological acrobatics Muriel Spark performs in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:
Posted 12.09.10, 6:19 p.m.
And how could a writer’s blog ignore the AWP Conference?
Posted 2.24.12, 12:40 p.m.
Images lightly revised from their originally posted versions.
Splash image sources, clockwise from upper left: (1) Mario Tama; (1, 7) Detroit Publishing Company; (2, 3, 4, 8) Sarah Malone; (5) Tina Kolberg; (6) John Jay Pierrepont, Abbot Low Moffat; (7) Shorpy.com user TimeAndAgainPhoto
Works Cited
“Looking east from the Singer Tower.” Detroit Publishing Company, Detroit. Circa 1910. Shorpy, 17 Oct. 2010, www.shorpy.com/node/9165. Accessed 15 Aug. 2011.
“Madison Avenue and the Towers.” Detroit Publishing Company, Detroit. 1909. Shorpy, 23 Aug. 2010, www.shorpy.com/node/8784. Accessed 16 Aug. 2011.
“Main Street Looking North, Interlaken, NY.” Ancestry.com, Tina Kolberg, 3 Aug. 2005, freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~tinako/New%20York/Seneca%20Co/Interlaken/Interlaken%20NY%20Main%20St.jpg. Accessed 10 Oct. 2009.
O’Rear, Charles. “Amtrak passengers board the southbound San Diegan as it makes a nighttime stop at the Fullerton, California, station, May 1974.” Documerica: The Environmental Protection Agency’s Program to Photographically Document Subjects of Environmental Concern, 1972 – 1977. Environmental Protection Agency, 1974. National Archives Catalog, catalog.archives.gov/id/555959. Accessed 6 May 2013.
Pierrepont, John Jay and Abbot Low Moffat. “New York’s Skyline Sits for a Long Portrait.” Life, 31 Aug. 1942, pp. 12-13. Google Books, books.google.com/books?id=iU4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA12&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Accessed 3 Jan. 2013.
Tama, Mario. “Construction Continues on One World Trade Centre next to the Memorial Footprints of the Twin Towers in New York.” The Guardian, 14 Aug. 2011, www.theguardian.com/world/picture/2011/aug/14/eyewitness-one-world-trade-centre#zoomed-picture. Accessed 15 Aug. 2011.
TimeAndAgainPhoto. “Here is the same view from April of 2010 – it’s looking south from 30th Street.” Shorpy, 23 Aug. 2010, www.shorpy.com/node/8784#comment-99386. Accessed 16 Aug. 2011.
