Image posts can reward a glance or repeated consideration. To show the transience of built environments, I composited contemporary and historical photos of New York City. To show climate change, I juxtaposed photos of the same locations on the same day of November in different years. Using a public domain Charles O’Rear photo from the Environmental Protection Agency’s 1970s Documerica series, I answered Maureen Johnston’s call to “cover flip” gender bias in book design, “flipping” Alice Munro’s Dear Life:
Grading undergraduate compositions inspired a quick guide to apostrophizing:
Posted 11.22.11, 10:30 a.m.
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 can 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.