BradHemphill

Who are your favorite American authors?  I don't read as much as I'd like to and my tastes cover a wide range, but here are a few of the author's that have inspired and challenged me:

Phillip Roth

Cormac McCarthy

David Foster Wallace

ee cummings

Harper Lee

Mark Twain

Who do you like?

I am an English teacher and a student of literature, and while I love Poe I have never even heard of "The Oval Portrait."  It's sounds intriguing.  Thanks for the suggestion.

I like limon's definition.  It's interesting how such a simple term can have so many possible definitions.  Even though I'm not a huge fan of the genre, if literation is a reflection of society, it's interesting to me how much insight and value science fiction has.

I love poetry as well and also try to write a little from time to time.  My all-time favorite poet is ee cummings but I also quite enjoy William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost.

I'm sure learning English as a second language would be tough if you didn't put at least some time into learning all aspects of the language, including slang and profanity.  That said, I find profanity in any language to be rather useless.  For me, it's a matter of exerting some control over myself.  I can't seem to do it with food, exercise or anything of the like so I compensate by not using profanity.  Lame, I know.

Hello yourself.  I am new, too.  Welcome to us both!

I grew up in Southeastern Arizona so I had a lot of Hispanic friends.  Most residents of the area grew up knowing quite a bit of Spanish and I furthered that study by taking classes in high school and college.  Still have a long way to go, however.

This is embarrassing but I'll tell it anyway.  I'm not sure what my first word was, but I spoke early and quite well.  Precocious might be the word.  At any rate, my mother tells the story that one afternoon I came to her while playing outside and said, "Mom, change my diaper. The flies are following me around."  I was either too young to be forming that kind of sentence, or WAY too old to be wearing diapers!

It has helped me quite a bit to watch Spanish language films with English subtitles and vice versa.  Audiobooks also seem to benefit my progress.

Correct grammar is essential when learning a new language.  I am an English teacher and constantly explain to my students that you have to learn to do it right before you can use it creatively.  Cormac McCarthy can be stylistic with his punctuation choices, for example, but I feel he is allowed that leeway because he has mastered the language.