You write like?

Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.

Any text in English will do: your latest blog post, journal entry, comment, chapter of your unfinished book, etc. For reliable results paste at least a few paragraphs (not tweets).

If you go to the site associated with the hyperlinked text above, you can paste some of your writing into a box, hit analyze and then learn what famous writer your style emulates. 

CCSS foes and supporters at work

Supporters of the Common Core State Standards are moving to confront increasingly high-profile opposition to the standards at the state and national levels by rallying the private sector and initiating coordinated public relations and advertising campaigns as schools continue implementation. (Andrew Ujifusa at Education Week)

Here's a way to get writing

Each month (on the 15th), Prompt & Circumstance will provide new writing prompts in four different categories: Six Words, Run With It, Imagine, and Whatta Character. The main goal of our journal is to help you to ignite your writing process. Please use our prompts however you will, without restriction. If you start off inspired by something, but veer completely off track, that’s okay. We give you permission to twist and shrink and launch.

We hope you produce works you are proud of, or that lead to other works, or that end up being funny when you find them in your journal in 2036. We encourage you to write for yourself, for other journals, or to send your masterpieces to us for possible inclusion in our monthly journal, Promptly. Most of all, we encourage you to write. (from Prompt and Circumstance)

(Even though the folks at Prompt & Circumstance have a way for a reader to subscribe to get prompts via email, I'm not sure that feature is working.

A place to write and respond

2013 E-Anthology

MAY 15 – SEPTEMBER 30, 2013

The NWP E-Anthology is a social media forum that invites members of the National Writing Project Community to publish their writing and reflections and to respond to the work of colleagues. This year's E-Anthology will be hosted within theNational Writing Project Google+ community . (from the National Writing Project website)

States trying to find stronger candidates for teaching programs

Slowly but surely, a growing number of states are eyeing policies to select academically stronger individuals for their teaching programs as one avenue to improve the quality of new teachers.

Underneath the attention such plans are attracting, though, run deep-seated fears about their potential consequences—particularly whether they will result in a K-12 workforce with fewer black and Latino teachers. (Stephen Sawchuk at Education Week)

'Brain Pickings' rocks

Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK andThe Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors.

Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why, bringing you things you didn’t know you were interested in — until you are. (from the "About" page at Brain Pickings) 

Click on the above hyperlinked text and explore. This site is alive with interesting resources. 

New standards to inform federally funded work

As part of an effort to improve the quality of educational research and make it less balkanized, the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences have introduced a common set of evidence standards for federally funded work.

The criteria, rolled out last week at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting here, will guide all new research at the IES, the U.S. Department of Education's main research agency, and all NSF research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. (Sarah D. Sparks at Education Week)