What’s in your toolbox? A writer’s toolbox would be incomplete without a variety of rhetorical devices. Rhetorical devices were first examined by the rhetoricians of ancient Greece. Writers and speakers have been honing these devices ever since in their search for clarity and beauty in language. Discover these tools for yourself in thirty short, enjoyable [...]

Letter written by dear daughter Ava, age 8 Why do you suppose this is our most popular blog post?

Don’t nod. Dogma: I am God. Never odd or even. Do geese see God? Too bad I hid a boot. Rats live on no evil star. No trace; not one carton. Murder for a jar of red rum. Some men interpret nine memos. May a moody baby doom a yam? A man, a plan, a [...]

I am having a hard time finding essays that are well written for my students to “practice” the Benjamin Franklin method of reading, outlining, and rewriting from outline [page 399 of Teaching the Trivium]. Any suggestions that are easy to do today? Thanks so much. Juli There are several books of essays in the Harvard [...]

I have a question about memory work. My son just turned 3 years old, and I want to know how much new text he needs to memorize per day/week, just to give me an idea. Today he recited The Sanctus in Latin, but this he has learned a few weeks ago. Now that I am [...]

Noah Webster graduated from Yale College in 1778, at age 20, and commenced teaching in several small American schools. He came to dislike these schools due to their being overcrowded, poorly staffed, and poorly equipped. His speller (published in 1783), grammar (published in 1784), and reader (published in 1785) were a result of his dissatisfaction [...]

It is said that Winston Churchill was once corrected for ending a sentence with a preposition, to which he responded, “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I shall not put.”

Rachel Thomson has posted a review of our Handy English Encoder Decoder.

Hello, fellow friends of the vernacular and illustrious lovers of logic! (Oh, I am so sorry for being so cheesy; the heat must be getting to me!) I wanted to pass this on to you; perhaps you wouldn’t mind passing it on to everyone else on the Trivium Loop. It’s one of my blog entries, [...]

What I have trouble with is copybook. My children seem to be allergic to pencils and paper. Suggestions please! Judy Have you tried buying the children special colored or regular pencils or markers and special books filled with blank pages for doing their copywork? When my children were small and even up till the teen [...]