I just put the finishing touches on a news release, and started thinking about the first releases I wrote so many years ago. I remember struggling for hours on a draft, only to have my supervisor rip it apart. It was painful, but good because I learned to write even complex news releases clearly and […]
Words I Love to Hate
I love this time of the year, when lists of the most overused, hated and hackneyed words abound. Lake Superior State University published its “2011 List of Banished Words,” all 14 of them, at http://www.lssu.edu/banished/current.php Richard Nordquist of About.com has amassed “200 Words and Expressions that Tick You Off” at http://grammar.about.com/od/words/a/200expressions.htm. Russell Working, a Ragan […]
Big, Bigger, Biggest: the Decline of the Comparative
A friend sent me this article from the Vancouver Sun, complaining that the comparative in English is dying. http://bit.ly/92tWKA You know the comparative. In “big,” “bigger” and “biggest,” the word in the middle (“bigger”) is the comparative. In general, the rule of thumb is that you make the comparative of a short word by adding […]
The Missing Link
I have just spent a frustrating half hour trying to set up an online account with a social media service (which shall remain nameless). It was frustrating because of the “missing link.” The written directions said to “click here” and “click there.” Unfortunately, there was no “there” there. It was unclear where to find the […]
Deep Reading
I continue to think about the notion that “As Technology Advances, Deep Reading Suffers” that Nicholas Carr explores in his June 20, 2010, article in the San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2010/06/20/INL91DU44K.DTL You see, according to recent studies, the average American spends more than eight hours a day peering at a screen, but only 20 minutes reading books […]
The Space
Here’s a little factoid for you. Word spaces (or the spaces between the words) were invented in the Middle Ages. Before then, people didn’t separate one word from the next. As Nicholas Carr explains in his June 20, 2010, article “As Technology Advances, Deep Reading Suffers” in the San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2010/06/20/INL91DU44K.DTL): “Long lines of […]
