Standing Around With My Finger in the Dike, Feeling Hopeful
Yes, I am trying to hold back a flood. And I’m a little annoyed with the AP Stylebook. As the Washington Post says: The barbarians have done it, finally infiltrated a remaining bastion of order in a...
View ArticleIt Ain’t Easy Bein’ Yank
Some years ago my British friend Christine came to visit. I introduced her to several of my friends; we had girls’ lunches. Generally a good time was had by all, but she finally confessed she thought...
View Article“Let Other Pens Dwell on Guilt and Misery”
A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. —Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817) A couple years ago it was big news: “Manuscripts Suggest...
View ArticleMisery Loves Company: A Copyeditor’s Top 10
I was delighted when I happened upon this article about the ten most common errors this copyeditor (the author uses “a manuscript editor”) encounters—and she works on academic books. Oh, you mean this...
View ArticleYou Can’t Make Me Like It, But—
I have spent a good bit of my life trying to learn how to write well. Writing well, I think, is one part practice (those 10,000 hours), one part reading other writers (good ones), and one part the...
View ArticleIt’s National Grammar Day!
And as Mignon Fogarty—that’s Grammar Girl to you, kids—says, What do you want to do first? Split infinitives or diagram sentences? Yeah, yeah, OK, it’s a made-up thing, but at least the powers that be...
View ArticleYou’re Asking Me What?
There are lots of things newbies need to learn—including how to be professional among professionals. Here’s a fantastic lesson in how not to do it from my longtime friend and colleague Bob Singleton....
View ArticleYour Fifth-Grade Teacher Versus … Well, Me
When I was a kid, some of my best friends were teachers. What grade was I in when my teacher read aloud to us every day after lunch? The Story of Doctor Doolittle (by Hugh Lofting, published 1920)...
View ArticleShort Saturday: Short Lists, Short Jokes
We’ve been talking about lists and short fiction this week—and we’re always talking about grammar and punctuation—so I couldn’t resist leaving you with this short Short Saturday post. Who doesn’t love...
View ArticleBecause I Can
An author friend of mine sent me an email the other day. “Am I crazy?” the subject line asked. Her manuscript was in the copyedit phase; as she worked through the copyedited manuscript, she kept...
View ArticleShort Saturday: Rules You Can Forget
We’ve talked about “writing rules”* before. Some are inviolable, like No Double Spacing After a Period. Some have to be reconsidered, like my stance on the singular they. Some fall into gray areas...
View ArticleThe Manuscript, the Editor, the Thief, and Her Grammar Nazi *
My friend author/editor Ramona Richards has a monthly column over at CFOM** and this month she’s declared she’s a reformed Grammar Nazi. What changed her? She got into publishing. :) That’s right. If...
View ArticleShort Saturday: A Linguistic War Between the States
You know I’m fascinated by accents, dialect, colloquialisms, and slang, so when I stumbled on this interesting article, I was all over it. Business Insider says, Regional accents are a major part of...
View ArticleShort Saturday: A New Language—It’s Child’s Play!
We’ve talked a lot about words and slang words, language and how it changes … These are not static things, as much as we’d like to think so. And when I read this little blurb—“Warlpiri rampaku [Light...
View ArticleShort Saturday: Evaluating Self-Published Authors
There’a always something interesting going on at Writer Unboxed. I read this article, “Ten Things I’ve Learned from Evaluating Self-Published Books for a Year,” when it was published last winter. The...
View ArticleMany Teaspoonsful of Sugar Help the Medicine Go Down …
My Facebook friends and I engaged in an etymological rabbit chase the other day. I do, seriously, get a kick out of this stuff, even if I really should be working instead of hopping around my office...
View ArticleThe Language Metamorphosis
We’ve talked a lot here about how the language we use—the words, the grammar—is a constantly evolving, living, almost breathing thing. (And still, still we want to stop that process! Human nature, I...
View ArticleI Sing the English Teacher Electric*
In one week, two articles about the teaching of “English”—the word we speakers of English give, rather incorrectly, to both the reading of literature and the written construction of it—cross my path,...
View ArticleDon’t Be Trolling: “A Typo Is Just a Typo”
Every so often I read something one of my friends has written and think, Man, I wish I’d written that! Which is exactly how I felt when I read this one from writer/editor Beth Bates. :) And with the...
View ArticleAre You a Prescriptivist or a Descriptivist?
Yes! I am! A few weeks ago I had Some Guy leave a comment on a two-and-a-half-year-old post of mine called “Pronoun Abuse.” In it* he alleged my argument made no sense, said I was “clearly mistaken,”...
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