Teaching writing is my passion
My work is all about communicating

Hello, my name is Linda Aragoni.

If you meet me in person, you'll see I got a haircut since the photo was taken. You'll also learn that I am passionate about teaching writing.

It wouldn’t be too far wrong to say I learned to teach writing in order to stay awake.

How hard could teaching be?

I went to graduate school after college because going to school was the only thing I knew I did well. Swamped with students trying to avoid the Vietnam War, Western Kentucky University was desperate for freshman composition teachers. The English department offered me a teaching assistantship, and I grabbed it.

I had had 16 years of English courses. How hard could teaching freshman composition be?

Within three days, I had my answer. Teaching was going to be hard.

Very hard.

Just as quickly I learned that teaching composition the way my teachers had taught me was boring. In fact, being the teacher was actually more boring than being a student. Who would have believed that was possible?

Then I woke up to teaching

I scrapped my lectures and began having students write while I walked around, offered comments, and made suggestions. I started having fun — and student writing started to improve.

I was hooked on teaching writing.

Before I finished my first master’s degree, I’d taught English 101 and 102 four times. Since then, I’ve taught variations on that freshman composition course at four bricks-and-mortar colleges and for three online universities — 19 times for University of Phoenix alone.

I write as well as teach

Although I keep coming back to teaching, I haven’t been just a writing teacher all my life. Through the years, I’ve financed my eating addiction by writing and editing newspapers, books, journals and magazines, and marketing materials. I still keep one foot in the news business as an editor for EmpirePage.com, a website for New York's political leaders.

Most of the stuff I write is instructional material that nobody in his/her right mind would read unless they were paid to do it. To give you an idea how exciting my work is, I'll just say my first book was about how to install steam turbines and my first newspaper story was about a county sewer system.

I’ve also worked with K-12 student populations while serving as coordinator of a distance learning program for a regional educational services agency, the Delaware-Chenango BOCES.

If you’re dying to know more about my experience and education, you click the icon for WizIQ.com, my online classroom site for workshops and courses on writing-related topics.

All that experience as writer, editor, writing teacher, plus lots and lots of reading shaped my philosophy of education — and gave me lots of gray hairs.

This website began as a book

For years, my sister, who spent 20+ years in Christian school teaching before re-careering, has been after me to write a book about how I teach writing.

She said her teacher education program provided no instruction in how to teach writing. When she got stuck teaching seventh grade English, she had to figure out what to do on her own.

My friends who homeschool told me a similar story. They could find books that read like doctoral dissertations (and probably were!) and inspirational stories by people who had been teaching since Mr. Chips was in pre-K. What they couldn’t find was straightforward information about teaching writing geared to people who had limited background and minimal resources to draw on.

I checked. It really is tough to find information about teaching writing. There’s plenty of material, but it’s mostly in academic libraries and subscription-only databases. All too often, the articles are written in polysyllabic words and insider jargon that make my head spin.

I decided little sister was right. I needed to write a book explaining how to teach writing.

I wrote the book. I even got teachers and some homeschoolers to preview it and give me suggestions for improvements.

Then I realized I was either going to have to publish the crazy thing myself or convince a publisher that I had a ready-made market. Either way, I had to have a way to find prospective readers.

A website seemed the best way to meet people interested in teaching writing, since I live in rural New York where wild turkeys outnumber English teachers 10 to 1.

Detour to build a business with SBI

While exploring my options, I ran across Site Build It! The company offered a whole lot more than just web hosting. SBI! said they would help me develop a site that would build a business. I liked that idea a lot better than grossing $5 an hour as an adjunct college teacher or getting 1¢ a word freelancing.

I spent 2 months studying the SBI! manuals before I put up my home page, then another four months building pages before I could write a page without consulting my notes. (See why I get along so well with the slow learners?)

Sometimes I wish the process of building a business were faster and easier.

Building a website is a lot like learning to write. There's a lot to learn. Both require consistent work. You can’t learn how to put up a good website or write a good paper without practice.

You may want to look into SBI, too, if you are looking for a

• Retirement business,

• Work-at-home business,

• Cheap way to learn techie stuff like search engine optimination and web-site usability, or even an

• Excuse to spend time on something you are passionate about.

I'm already planning two more SBI! websites. Can't let all this wonderful stuff I've learned go to waste!

In my spare time

When I get too tired to write one more word, I read what someone else has written. Rereading novels that topped the charts 50, 60, even 100 years ago is my hobby. I put reviews of vintage fiction on my just-for-fun blog, GreatPenformances. I put the feed for the blog in the right hand column, so you can see some of my reviews without going off site.

If there’s anything you’d like to know about me that I didn’t mention — whether I like spinach, write poetry, or love bungee jumping — or if you want to tell me what’s wrong with my whole approach to teaching writing, you can use the contact form below.

Using the form reduces spam. (It also keeps you from telling me so much about what’s wrong with my whole approach to teaching writing that my ego would be hopelessly crushed.) You’ll get a response within 48 hours.

By the way, if you want to know what I do with information you submit on my site, you can read my privacy policy.

Please come back again to learn more about how you can teach writing.

We’ve got to keep meeting like this.

Linda

P.S. If you want to know about my philosophy of education, you can scratch that itch my clicking this link.