Hello, My name is Shulamite. I'm a talkaholic. I know I have a problem. How do I know? My responses to articles are entirely too long. No doubt you've been "rooting around" on here tonight and found one of my responses. And you thought, "geez." I think my problem is that I've been a debater. Have you ever watched a college debate round? Wow. Can we talk fast. We can fit in an insane amount of information in a tiny little space of time. It's insane. And the arguments just keep coming! ...

I set about to write on the major premises of Christianity. I sat down and wrote them down and then put them in logical order. You’d have to grasp the first to get to the next in other words. When I did this and began writing the first, I went back and placed one before it and wrote on it. Finally it struck me. I was reinventing the wheel. A very gifted writer did just this already. Everything I was writing was obviously already hit by him. So what could I do? I decided I’d re-read what h...

I guess I have to start with why I write. At first, I thought, “Catharsis. Definitely.” But really, I don’t think I do a lot of that in my blog, really. I’m not much into the truly personal stuff. Sometimes I do but it’s secondary or tertiary. I don’t write to record my most intimate stuff. I write poetry for that, sure, but I don’t publish it here. Not the right medium, I don’t think. No offense, web poets, but I think this is more of a prose place. And something about my poetry is s...

I've noticed in IMing friends and on Joe here, several people try the rhetorical device of "sarcasm" for their arguments. I know I cannot possibly be the only person who has noticed this. Sarcasm doesn't work in writing. We write like we speak and just assume others will read what we write the same way we'd speak it. Not so. In fact, rarely so. Sometimes, we use sarcasm and the other person thinks we're serious. Or thinks we're sarcastic but doesn't want to suffer embarrasment in case ...