My name is Linda Aragoni.
I read.
I write.
I think.
I teach.
For half a century, I’ve made my living by making big ideas simple.
I wrote technical texts for non-techies.
I wrote books on technical topics like steam turbine installation and drug interactions so that the guys in Indonesia with a screwdriver could install the steam turbine and the ex-blacksmith in upstate New York could pitch his company’s new drug to doctors.
I taught students who hated writing to write.
I taught students at five traditional colleges and three online ones to write straightforward expository prose by simplifying the process to eight strategies expressed in 34 words.
I shared my teaching tricks with other writing teachers.
I operated You-Can-Teach-Writing.com for five years, then closed it and distilled its 450 pages down to yctWriting.com. Now confine my “academic” work to PUSHwriting and selling books about how to teach writing.
I read and reviewed vintage fiction.
To reassure English teachers that I wasn’t anti-fiction, I reviewed all the bestselling novels of the twentieth century at my blog GreatPenformances.
Next: Books about how to visit in a nursing home.
I’ve been a nursing home visitor off and on since I was a youngster. During my most recent experience, residents said, “Ugh” when I told them I wanted to write about how to visit in a nursing home. But when I told them I’d title the book what people said to me when I visited—”Thanks for dropping by”—they said that would be good.
I’ve teamed up with a former nursing home activities director. We are working on a set of books for different types of visitors, from folks with loved ones in the nursing home to people, to people like myself, who just get a kick out of turning strangers into friends in a hour in five- or ten-minute visits once a week.
If you want to tag along while I learn how to publish books for people who aren’t paid to read them, give me your email address and I’ll send you monthly updates about my success or lack thereof.
Linda Aragoni
March 2020
