How to improve writing (no. 115)
One of Joe and my favorite parts about being on the campaign trail is meeting supporters just like you.
Dreyer’s English
An Utterly Correct Guide: it’s as if matters of writing are turning into matters of etiquette: which fork — or word — to use.
That and which
From Bruce Ross-Larson’s Edit Yourself: A Manual for Everyone Who Works with Words, useful advice for solving the problem of a relative clause that doesn’t follow the noun it modifies.
Bryan Garner on “The fallacy of intelligibility”
A short piece about the idea that it doesn’t matter how you write it as long as they understand what you mean.
Geoffrey Pullum on On Writing Well
What On Writing Well offers is not “mendacious drivel about passives and modifiers” but sound advice about lifeless sentences and dopey overwriting. But you wouldn’t know that if you were to trust Geoffrey Pullum.
How to improve writing (no. 52)
Different from, not than.
Recently updated
WhiteSmoke now has a demo, and the results do not inspire confidence.
Sentence-starting conjunctions
Yes, Virginia, you can begin a sentence with a conjunction.
A Bryan Garner story
“Jim, good usage isn’t nearly as fluid as you’re suggesting.” Good advice for writing for any audience.
Grammarly, WhiteSmoke
“Any service that gives its own writing a 61 and William Zinsser a 54 is a service I wouldn’t trust. I’ll add that any service that gives my writing a higher score than Zinsser’s is a service I wouldn’t trust.”
Postal abbreviations
MA or Mass.? Christopher Lasch’s advice.