From my experience, travel writing is highly competitive and involves a mixed bag of everything, somewhat like this pond we spotted in Worlitz Park, Germany.

One special outcome of travel is a rich set of photographs. I paint with my mind and my camera and have a great time in the process. I share my photographs on Instagram, Flickr, Typepad, my blogs, Facebook etc, including this great Lion Photo at 500px. 

When my husband and I travel, we try to have a variety of experiences including:

• birdwatching
• hiking
• museums of all types
• historical buildings such as castles
• gardens
• amusement parks
• restaurants
• hotels
• spas
• golf courses
• music and opera and dance

All of these experiences then get turned into background for articles and books. I've started a travel book to go along with my golf book. 

I've started joining travel groups on the web but haven't done enough.

My travel day usually starts at 7 or 8 am and runs until 7 or 8 pm at night. We usually eat one meal and snack on the other meals. We sometimes get so much exercise I hobble back, suffer rashes on my legs, and/or fall asleep when I sit down. If I stay awake, I spend three to five hours on the internet posting reviews at places like Yelp, Google, Yahoo, Foursquare, Foodspotting, or Tripadvisor like this one of our visit to Martin Luther's House in Lutherstadt, Germany.

And that makes us as rich as royalty, a time honored tradition:

Janet Sternberg is an editor who has chosen to pull essays written by women into collections about how and why they write. The anthology series The Writer on Her Work offers many lessons that a writer can pull into their toolkit. I chose to read Volume II because it offered essays from two women science fiction writers who I admired. In the process of reading this collection, I met some new authors and learned a few lessons. Here’s what they offered to me:

Lesson One: Guilt is a Primary Feeling Shared by Many Women Writers

Joy Williams in her essay titled “Shifting Things” tells about being given three copies of Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling when she decided to write. She assumed the message behind the gift was to discourage her, because it took the author seventeen years to write. Joy Williams admits she write’s “out of a sense of guilt.” So I’m not the only one discouraged by others. It offers a pleasant relief that discouraging writers is a community event. Because of it we feel guilt that we go ahead and write anyway.

Women feel guilt about their writing because it is something they do alone, outside of family and outside a traditional job or in some cases while multitasking on other jobs. Like Elizabeth Jolley in her essay “Dipt Me in Ink”, I too think, “The best time for me to write is when other people are asleep. I am not needed in their dreams.” Why do women feel guilty?”

Natalia Ginzburg describes her transition back to writing while caring for children in her essay “My Vocation” thus: “I still made tomato sauce and semolina, but simultaneously I thought about what I could be writing.” It’s because their primary role is as organizer of the family and household.

I knew mothers always had to set aside their work, but why did I? Even though I had no children I still need to clean my house, order the household by paying bills and perform other organizing tasks such as planning exercise time. I handle any issues arising from the rest of my family before writing. So why do I do this?

Maxine Kumin in her essay “The Care Givers” says it exactly, “It never occurred to me that I was a willing victim of sexism.” And “The pressure to conform came from me.” It affected her choices about what she would write, and it affects other writer’s about when and how they would write including myself.

Admitting to the need to play all the roles we’ve accepted in life actually frees us women to write in our downtime, whenever we can allow it to happen.

Lesson Two: Commissioned Work is a Wonderful Concept as is Reinforcing the Notion of Vocation

So if women, maybe men too, feel guilty because they write, what helps motivate them to continue forward?

The lesson seems to be that writer’s all need to accept their writing as their vocation and that any payback helps make it worthwhile. Patricia Hampl starts the collection of essays with “The Need to Say It” and writes, “My first commissioned work was to write letters for her [grandmother]” and “My fee was cookies and milk”.

Maxine Kumin reports after the sale of several books, “I was an important wage earner.” She left off the finally part.

Many of the writers talk about persistence finally leading to pay and the feeling of a real job that comes with being paid. It’s not enough to do the job, want to do the job, need to do the job; true self respect for doing a job comes from being paid to do the job.

Lesson Three: Feminism isn’t About Being a Woman

I also tended to wish that the women’s rights movement wasn’t necessary, in much the same way that Jan Morris says, “In my heart I resist the title of this book,…, that it matters whether a writer is male or female. She also says, “Twenty years ago I would have said that the woman is hampered by the male inability to take her seriously.”

The good news seems to be that attitudes can and do change since as Maxine Kumin says, women are the “best-kept secret: Merely the private lives of one-half of the humanity.” A humanity as Baharati Mukherjee says, “who was condemned to a role of subservience”, before explaining how her move to the United States transformed her.

Feminism is giving voice to the silenced half of humanity. For Elena Poniatowski in her essay, “A Question Mark Engraved”, that meant that unlike other Mexican women peasants, she found a character that didn’t remain silent and didn’t have children but who did, “pick up stray children and dogs in the street, fed them and taught them how to work.” Feminism is about social justice.

Lesson Four: “It’s a Quirk of Memoir that it’s Narrator Can Never Be its Hero”

The title of this lesson comes from a quote from Patricia Hampl in her essay, “The Need to Say It”. This is a lesson to think about when writing memoir since the reader expects the writer to be a distant observer of other stories. Memoir is not about writing about the self, but writing about what we observe in the world around us. This is helpful for me to know since I am working on a memoir and it will help shape the final product.

Lesson Five: Hearing Voices Can Be Enabling

My brother hears voices and is schizophrenic. I also hear voices, sometimes of people I know, sometimes one of my characters telling me their story—this made many people frightened that I would be crazy even though I have seldom been violent and though I get angry it is the type of anger that takes me for a walk or to dig in the dirt.

I guess many people are frightened by other people, in fact, one of my classes in communication explained that humans have to have the courage to cross over to others and strike up a conversation. This is the power of communication and hearing voices is all about willingness to listen. Many people don’t take the time to listen, so because writer’s do listen they are often the first to share hidden truths about the world.

Linda Hogan in her essay “Hearing Voices” talks about how the wind carried the news of Chernobyl’s hidden disaster. She says what the value is very beautifully “We begin to learn we are many people including the stars we once were, and how we are in essence the earth and the universe, how what we do travels clear around the earth and returns.” To listen is the first step in being a writer because you hear life.

Lesson Six: Writers Gain Community When They Write

In the “Care Givers” an essay by Maxine Kumin about her writing, she offers up “I wish, too, that I had kept some sort of journal during the years of serious, warring, loving, almost violently productive workshops with Holmes and George Starbuck and Sexton and Samuel Albert.”

When asked to do community service, I always want to say, who is my community? The answer for me is my community is other writers but I have found other writers reject me because I was a systems analyst. I don’t think of it as one or the other.

To me, community is more than who aids me and me them; community is the entire world that I embrace when I tell the stories I envision. Unlike Maxine Kumin who gave up her apocalyptic writing and began to write of domestic life; I never wrote apocalyptic, only post-apocalyptic. The difference is the focus, in the former, the focus of the story is about disaster, while the latter is always about survival. Writer’s due to the huge amount of investment time needed to pull together enough product to sell well need to be survivors. I know more about survival then I do about domestic life that I avoid if I can handle the guilt of doing so.

Rita Dove on the other hand, in her essay “The House that Jill Built”, tells the tremendous tale of how working with a photographer pushed her into a project and in return pushed the photographer to find appropriate photographs and how empowering all of this can be.

What both of these women are explaining is how wonderful it is to have an audience who cares about your writing as much as you care about their work. So really, after thinking about it quite some time, community is the writers you work with primarily, all the others fade to the background just the same as other people’s colleagues at their jobs are community.

Lesson Seven: Writing is A Duty

This sections title is also a quote from someone in the book but I can’t find it. The woman who wrote it said, we writers are extremely lucky to be allowed to sit and write stories and therefore it is our duty to write. There is my guilt.

Natalie Ginzburg writes in her essay “My Vocation” that “This vocation is a master who is able to beat us till the blood flows, a master who reviles and condemns us.” Well, I have met this same guy and despise him as much as I like to fall into story.

Writing for me is always a battle. It begins with a word or picture that floats in my head for days at a time. I don’t every think I know enough or tell the truth enough so I am always seeking revision of it. Margaret Atwood offers up “Next day, there’s the blank page. You give yourself up to it like a sleepwalker.” To me that is less guilt. To fall into imagining I have to let the world around me dissolve. I do this by playing games and am always in trouble for it. Games are as addicting as chemicals but they offer up the ability to stop thinking. Only when I do that, can I climb outside of myself, wrap myself in someone else and follow a dream.

But I have learned that I can beat myself up by saying, “writing is a duty” because I’m so privileged and it makes me last longer. As Carolyn Forche reminded herself, “Whatever keeps you from doing your work has become your work,” in her essay “The Province of Radical Solitude”.

Many have complained that I spend too much time researching since it has become my other job. This is true. But immersing myself in what I writing requires me to know if very deeply, like in my home. I believe that a home in which I’ve touched every surface and made it mine as I cleaned it is very healthy and alive because I have brought about the magic of loving it.

Ursula Le Guin writes “Her work, I really think her work/isn’t fighting, isn’t winning, isn’t being the Earth, isn’t being the Moon. Her work, I really think her work/ is finding what her real work is/ and doing it.”

Lesson Eight: Women Write About Home

Harriet Doerr in an essay titled “A Sleeve of Rain” showed me the power of extended metaphor.  She uses her homes that she lived in and how she related to them to convey how her writing is influenced by her life. As Gretel Erlich say in her essay “Life at Close Range”, “If you live in a place—any place city or country—long enough and deeply enough you can learn anything.” This is different than how men write because they spend less time at home until they retire. Since I was away from home for many years working in the business world, I have witnessed and experienced both worlds, but I still did so as a woman and I write from a woman’s point of view more often than not. Likewise, Linda Hogan, too uses extended metaphor to carry her piece to completion. This is a good technique for essay writing. Luisa Valenzuela also uses extended metaphor in her essay "Writing with the Body", taking the hands on approach, going where her body led, needing to touch the world.

Overall, I got a better sense of what writing memoir and writing essays were like. Many of the pieces went beyond a telling mode of I did this or I did that. The writers all sought for what was in their heart. Many admit how painful this can be, to take on the pains of society and wear them with your words. This sharing of experience brings people who write closer together into a community. Women writers are more my community than that of men. I found in my second novel that this became true. Women have a different experience than men because we play different roles. We may take on roles that men play, too, because many of us have played them or we have husband’s to check with, about experience.

In order to better understand what makes an opinion essay effective, I looked for six opinion articles on US Education. These six articles were narrowed down to the two best and these two articles evaluated for effectiveness.

Explaining the Process for Evaluating Opinion Essays

My process for evaluation worked in three steps:

1.  I narrowed the choices down to two articles.
2.  I came up with criteria for why I felt that these were effective essays. 
3. Then I tested my assumptions by reviewing my grammar lessons and the opinions of others on the subject of essay effectiveness.

The reason for the three step process was to :

1.  Come up with a set of assumptions
2. Test the assumptions against standard assessment factors
3. Evaluate if my opinions about effective articles were based on measurable means or if perhaps they were based on emotional reactions.

The articles selected were from popular newspapers around the United States and selected to get a range of what educational reform meant.  These are the ones selected with the starred links indicating the ones selected for further analysis: [1][2][3]*[4]*[5][6].

What I think are my criteria for selecting two of the six articles as the most effective include the following style issues:

1. The content of the article in some way matches the title [7, p. 331]
2. The article provides reliable information on the article subject , i.e. the argument is supported by research [8] [9][10]
3. The author doesn’t wander off topic  [7, p. 331][8][9]
4. Audience targeting is used [7, 197][10]
5. Clear need for the opinion is demonstrated i.e. relevance[10] 
6. Clear use of arguments based on data or informed opinion[8][9][10] 
7. Opinions offered solutions to any identified problem [7, 223]
8. One of the solutions was a call to action [7, p. 225]
9. The articles were easy to understand, using everyday language and easy to read sentences.[7, p. 208-10]

My general impression is that grammar and style played a less important role than organization and content, although clarity helped. I will test this below.

Some of the non-style issues that may have influenced my selection include:

1. One paper was selected from a set of prize winning articles [4]
2. One paper was written by a well-known writer [5]
3. One paper held an opinion I shared [5]
4. Some titles were printed with lower case words rather than having each letter capitalized except for conjunctions [2][4][6][16]

My analysis of “Rethinking Urban Schools” identifies the author’s use of the following arguments:

Dallas schools can succeed if they plan for change

1. It is time for Dallas to embrace upon new plans for their schools 
2. Big urban schools can succeed if they embrace innovation backed by research, he ends with a need to improve middle school education
3. Big urban schools can succeed if a pipeline of leaders enter the district as teachers and principals
4. Big urban schools can succeed if they use data to back their decisions
5. Big urban schools can succeed if they get buy in from parents

William McKenzie uses the following evidence to support his arguments:

1. Superintendent is leaving
2. Example of Denver and New Yorks scools where teachers use a longer day to get 2 hours of planning time, explanation of charter schools, example of Los Angeles schools placed under the mayor’s watch 
3. Lack of qualified teachers and superintendents can seek candidates from three programs, the Teacher Trust, Teach for America, and New Teacher Project, Houston example, teacher assessment 
4. Parent portals and their time lag, Dell Foundation financing, Denver example
5. Obama example, Harvard study, parent training initiative, Stand for Children

His conclusion is if we don’t educate our children, it affects our economy, health and society. He has one topic with four points backed by several pieces of evidence.

His style features the following:

1. clear connection between argument and an explanation of alternatives [7, p. 331]
2. Parallelism is used in the repetition of “success is possible”, “innovative schools” (which is left undefined), “existing schools are successful” can be better on a small set of factors, and he uses parallelism by returning to the question stated at the start of the opinion essay [7, p. 27].
3. Organization is based on a point by point basis—1-5th points in an outline that is summarized at the end [7, p.331]
4. Change is a continuation of previous superintendent’s work and therefore unthreatening
5. Use of italics and bolding for emphasis [7, p. 289]
6. Specific examples from innovative schools backed by results data (presumed since he calls them innovative schools backed by research)
7. He only explains how the innovative program is backed by results once
8. Audience addressed is limited to Dallas and therefore connects the program to the voters
9. He matches benefits to students, parents, educators, teachers, school districts and voters [10] i.e. the subject matters to the audience
10. His explanation of relevance is split into several parts and not well supported---he assumes a familiar audience
11. His use of tense is always present tense and active and it corresponds to the call for the school district to continue to be innovative
12. He uses a lot of connective words i.e. likewise
13. He uses a lot of subordinate clauses, i.e. after, at Los Angeles which is useful for explaining case studies
14. A lead that invites thought [7, p. 245][10]
15. Use of Cliché—“magic bullet”[7, p.124-5]
16. He uses subordination to set up the desired outcome i.e. “At campuses that want to become an innovation school, teachers, principals, parents and administrators work on a plan that incorporates best practices from other places.” 

I believe William McKenzie’s article is strong because it quickly establishes relevance [10]. He speaks directly to an interested audience [7, 197] that directly votes on the topic. His language is simple. He uses specific examples and explains them well, many times using subordinate clauses to establish a set of criteria for where the case would apply. His organization is simple but inside his major points, he wanders from alternative to alternative sometimes offering explanations, sometimes offering benefits, sometimes providing additional problems that maybe belonged at the top in his main argument.  His upbeat style [7, p. 223] eases over any lack of details since the reader can look those up. Examples would be that he could provide some measure for each of the items effectiveness or indicate which of the alternatives has a set of benefits that would maximize implementation or some measure of cost. He makes no grammar mistakes that I noticed. His closing however, brings the reader back to the start, having considered the alternatives and using the echo effect [7, p. 247][10]

An analysis of “The Steve Jobs Model for Education Reform” identifies Rupert Murdoch’s use of the following arguments to examine which approach to education reform should be used:

1. American education reform is needed
2. Effective education reform is gained by deploying technology that rewrites the rules of the game
3.  We should use technology to force the education system to meet the needs of the individual
4. Technology offers savings
5. Teachers are needed but the way they teach can be altered with technology
6. Education requires standards to unlock investments and unleash innovation in order to be competitive in the world of today

This amounts to one topic, with six separate points. Rupert Murdoch uses the following evidence to support his arguments:

1. Statistics on dropout rates, claim that graduates have less skills, claim that graduates are meeting their potential, anecdote about NY Times headlines
2. Examples of how existing system fails to use teachers and technology
3. Statistics on flat line improvement with increased expenditure
4. example lesson, two examples of how to cut costs one technology
5. teaching can improve with altered organization
6. return to initial anecdote about Steve Job (example of an innovator)

His conclusion is that change had to be driven by standardization across the United States and maybe with the world.  Because his arguments sequentially[7, p. 332] build to his conclusion, with each argument followed by evidence leading to the next point [7, p. 331], his essay is effective. His last points explains his thesis, namely, when educators talk about standardization it needs to be in terms of actual lessons and that the overall system needs to be redesigned to allow as many lessons as a person can learn as possible. His tone is upbeat and avoids complaining [7, p. 223]

Rupert Murdoch’s style features the following:

1. audience selection is targeted to the reading public [10][7, 197]
2. his claims rest on his authority as a publisher
3. examples are based on commonly understood difficulties
4. example of personal innovation is based on a popular innovator
5. changes in tense from present to past to future tense
6. he uses parallelism [7, p. 27] in several ways: 
7. his statistics use does not use orderly parallelism but alters it in standard ways about talking about education statistics i.e. the top, the bottom, then all the rest
8. he uses unjust, unsustainable, un-American i.e. repetition
9. he starts with an example of a Steve Jobs commercial and returns to Steve Jobs empire at Apple 
10. his style of organization repeats for every point [7, p. 331]
11. he uses subordination in one example where he is demonstrating what is possible in the future
12. a strong unusual popular keyword lead [7, p. 244]

I believe that Rupert Murdoch’s essay is strong because it quickly establishes relevance[10]. I believe parallelism aids Rupert Murdoch’s argument since it makes it more persuasive. His style of organization is easy to follow since it is repeated and it never wanders off his point. His limited use of subordination makes the two uses stand out as a lesson about the past and sets up a possibility for the future. I believe he relies too heavily on his position to be as effective as he could be—his use of evidence is largely example driven and anecdotal. His continuing changing tenses seem correct for his subject matter, i.e. showing how to transition education to a more modern paradigm; less complicated tenses would simplify reading it. His choice of audience could be narrowed down by the use of a more specific call to action that explains how the change he wants effected could come into being. His closing brings the reader back to the start, having considered the need for innovation using the echo effect [7, p. 247][10].

Overall, I think my criteria for evaluating the essays I read matched the selected papers on writing effective essays and on the textbook for our class. I found the less effective essays had fewer arguments, an unclear thesis or didn’t say anything new. I find the use of lower case titles less effective, although I don’t always notice them. When a writer uses poor grammar, I’m likely to skip the article entirely, although I selected one that had grammar problems [6]. The ones I found effective showed few grammar difficulties if any, used simple sentences, used simple punctuation and very few complex sentences.

References
[1] Paul Krugman, “Ignorance is Strength”, New York Times, Mar 8, 2012

[2] “More time in school”, www.chicagotribute.com, Mar 30, 2012

[3] Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, “Higher Education?”, Los Angeles Times, Aug 2011

*[4] William McKenzie, “Rethinking urban schools”, The Dallas Morning News, Aug 21, 2011

*[5] Rupert Murdoch, “The Steve Jobs Model for Education Reform”, The Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2011

[6] Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler, “Higher education: for a better Florida”, Tampabay.com, Feb 25, 2007

 [7] Pamela Rice Hahn and Dennis E. Hensley, “Alpha Teach Yourself Grammar and Style in 24 hours”, Penguin, 2000

[8] Michael E. Gorman, “What Makes a Good Essay?”,

[9]Daria Przbyla, “How to Write an Opinion Essay: Structure and Argumentation in Personal Approach Writing”, Suite101, Mar 23, 2009

[10] Purdue Owl, “What Makes a Good Literature Paper”, Oct 19, 2011

[11] “Essay Essentials”, Scholastic.com