Living Life Twice

  Here are five of the most popular  Living Life Twice  posts for 2025. Thank you for your continuing support and interest in teaching writing and all it involves. Here's a chance to reconnect with writing ideas. Ideas you can easily carry forward into 2026.  Just click the blue links to discover more... Developing Personal Writing Projects In this post I wanted to challenge the long held practice that the first logical action after identifying a writing project is to always immediately start drafting. For generations schools have reinforced this approach. It does the young writer a disservice. It does teachers and learning outcomes a disservice too. Creating Opportunities For Kids To Publish A recent question from a teacher prompted me to think more deeply about  publishing student writing . She was searching for professional reading that dealt more deeply with the  publishing  phase of the writing process. My own search revealed that many of the avai...

For this writing piece I didn't have to look any further than my left hand. I was holding the idea right there -and my deeper thoughts followed... I have always been pen particular. Pernickity, or should that be penickity ? My pen of choice is a Uniball Gel Impact pen with black ink. Always black ink. Must be black ink.  It is the pen I prefer when writing. It feels comfortable in my hand. When writing with this pen, words seem to flow more easily. They effortlessly spill across the page. I actually feel like I am speed writing. Being left handed, this continues to be my most glorious delusion. I also have a Lamy fountain pen which also uses black ink cartridges. I enjoy writing with this pen too. It has become accustomed to my left handed peculiarities. I would never a let a right hander use it. Call me fussy. It won’t change my thinking on pen sharing. Not for me, a pen of questionable origin, no generic biro with a chewed end. No novelty pen with gaudy fluoro coloured ink. ...