Gary Paulsen: Adventurer and Author is part of the Spotlight Biography ebook series for young readers. This collection of previously published, well-reviewed biographies will grow over the next two years. Next in line is Judith Josephson’s award-winning biography on Jesse Owens. Download Gary Paulsen free on Tuesday, September 10. Download Barbara McClintock: Nobel Prize Geneticist free on Thursday, September 12.

Gary Paulsen is a writing machine, his books magnets for young readers, especially boys. His work has been translated into fifteen languages, and more than 15 million copies of his books—200+ titles—are in print. He’s used more lives than a cat—during the Itidarod sled race, on a motorcycle journey, in storms at sea, and at a Minnesota lake where he fell twelve feet through thin ice, rescued by his beloved lead dog Cookie, all fodder for his writing.

Most remarkable is Paulsen’s ability to set different tones. From books like his rollicking Harris and Me, Liar Liar, Flat Broke, Crush, and Lawn Boy, to the phenomenally popular Newbery Honor Book Hatchet, from the searching Canyons to the poetic A Christmas Sonata, Paulsen’s books fly off the shelves.

Paulsen’s own childhood was rough. “My parents were drunks,” he says bluntly of his itinerant upbringing. As a teen steeped in loneliness, he escaped to the woods and rivers of northern Minnesota, calling it “a kind of self-fostering.” Paulsen is best known for his Newbery Honor survival story Hatchet.

Paulsen Does Research

Nancy Johnson’s poignant eFrog Press blog post about writing her book My Brother’s Keeper brought to mind Gary Paulsen’s similar Civil War era research. Their focus on making history come to life for young people struck a particular chord as the nation notes the sesquicentennial of the battle that raged at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Paulsen’s Civil War-based research resulted in Soldier’s Heart, which frames the Civil War through the eyes of Charley Goddard, an underage soldier who enlists in the First Minnesota Volunteers.

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 We (Edith Hope Fine and Judith Josephson) are the Grammar Patrol. Both of us taught for years and are now writers, with thirty plus books between us, including our two popular grammar guides, Nitty-Gritty Grammar and More Nitty-Gritty Grammar. For close to twenty years, we taught writing and grammar basics and now we blog about grammar for writers.

For those new to English, many expressions pose puzzling challenges. Can something really “drive you up a wall”? Read on.

Idioms

Idioms are expressions with understood meanings, but are figurative, not literal.

In our neck of the woods, we’re pleased as punch when it rains cats and dogs.

Our gerbil kicked the bucket.

We burn the midnight oil.

The Cabbage Patch doll was a flash in the pan.

Your optimistic grandmother may have a pie-in-the-sky attitude.

Actress Blythe Danner has worked “Break a leg!” into an osteoporosis drug ad.

I’m under the weather.

Sports idioms have crept into everyday communication:

They’re out in left field.

Mosley got it straight from the horse’s mouth.

Let’s touch base on Tuesday.

Idioms abound in work settings:

Our design team thinks outside the box.

The comptroller is crunching the numbers.

Bubba LaRue is climbing the corporate ladder.

Beef up your resume.

As an added challenge, idiomatic expressions can change, especially in “teen speak.” “I could be up with that” once meant you liked an idea.  Now it’s “I could be down with that.” Go figure!

As Ziva from TV’s popular NCIS perfects her English, her idiomatic mismatches amuse her colleagues: “Stay focused on the job in my hand” or “You are a broken tape, Gibbs.” She was “close, but not cigar”; she meant “job at hand” and “broken record.”

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