Phrase of the day: cacoëthes scribendi
“An uncontrollable urge to write.”
Sharpied
Kellyanne Conway, as heard on CNN a little while ago, talking about Donald Trump’s preparation for his State of the Union address: “He Sharpied up a lot of the passages.”
A wrongheaded “dead words” movement
Dressing up in an awkward costume doesn’t make a writer look smart. It makes a writer look awkward — and dumb. Did I peruse the tome? No, I read the book.
A plumbing tale
“Don’t use hydrochloric acid. It eats hell out of pipes.”
Joseph Mitchell and small words
“I’ll search endlessly for the right small words of a few syllables that hold something up.”
Raymond Carver on words and punctuation
“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say.”
Our words, our selves
Barbara Wallraff: “With our words — particularly our written words, or words that we have written down before we say them — we can be our best selves, and even selves better than our actual best.”
Falling in love with words
“I have an abiding and foolish affection for old mass-market paperbacks that promise to improve one’s vocabulary or writing.”
How to improve writing (no. 42)
“The study of law is something new and unfamiliar to most of you — unlike any other schooling that you have ever known before.”
Garner covers 2012
Bryan Garner collects some news of the year in language and writing.
“They mess you up”
For the first time in a long time, the word “mess” has appeared in a Michiko Kakutani book review.
Hardly convincing (adverb adjective)
Pullum on Strunk and White on adjectives and adverbs
Pullum on Strunk and White
"Pullum's take on Strunk and White involves a significant degree of distortion and plain misreading."
Cereals in the hands of an angry blog
No. 21: analysis of sloppy Post cereal box design and copywriting
How to improve writing (no. 19 in a series)
Pita bread, not pizza bread
How to improve writing (no. 18 in a series)
Avoid hyperbole and redundancy
How to improve writing (no. 17 in a series)
Anchor? No, encore.
Readers and writers
From a supercomputing glossary
Commas and colons, chickens and caulk
Looking at the first lines of the Odyssey in Greek, a student (I’ll call him “Joe”) asked a great question in class: Are there really comma...
And, but, for, nor, or, so, yet
Starting a sentence with a conjunction is a literary device that can be overused. And it can be annoying. But there's nothing inherently evi...