English has always been one of my favourite subjects—the art of weaving words to make an object feel tangible, to breathe life into it with description. Losing myself in a book feels like stepping through a portal, transported to another world where reality fades, and imagination takes flight.

Look at these: – – —. In order, they are hyphen, en dash, em dash. The hyphen is next to the zero; the en dash (on my Mac) is Option+hyphen; the em dash is Shift+Option+hyphen.

A journal. It’s an odd thing to be grateful for. And yet, it is journals like William Bradford’s that share the secrets of life. Journals contain stories of lessons learned, results of roads less traveled, and conclusions of decisions that some would probably not make again.

Writing can’t be done without going through certain stages. All writers go through their own unique writing processes before they make their final drafts. Usually, writers start with choosing topics and brainstorming, and then they may outline their papers, and compose sentences and paragraphs to make a rough draft. After they make a rough draft, writers may begin revising their work by adding more sentences, or removing sentences. Writers may then edit their rough draft by changing words and sentences that are grammatically incorrect or inappropriate for a topic

Summer is a great time to explore our creativity and stretch our writing skills. We can get out into the sun and nature, smell the flowers, daydream under the clouds, and make use of the long summer days to chase adventure and catch up on our big writing projects.