Conventional wisdom says that you should write clearly and concisely to educate and entertain your readers. However, given the poor quality of a lot of writing today, I think many writers bore, confuse and otherwise alienate their readers. I’ve studied lots of poorly written material and believe their writers follow these 10 rules. Rule #1: […]

I am continually amazed at the number of typos and other written errors I find. How could such mistakes happen? It’s easy because we read: The outside shapes of words, not the individual letters Words in phrases, not just individual words Words in context, not isolated from the sentence’s meaning. Specifically, aoccdrnig to rscheearch at […]

Each year at this time, publishers of English dictionaries reveal their “words of the year,” which are primarily based on the number of searches for the word or words on the dictionaries’ websites. I am always surprised at some of the choices. See what you think. Goblin mode: Oxford Languages, the creator of the Oxford English […]

“I knew she was trouble the second she walked into my 24-hour deli, laundromat, and detective agency, and after dropping a load of unmentionables in one of the heavy-duty machines (a mistake that would soon turn deadly) she turned to me, asking for two things: find her missing husband and make her a salami on […]