Subject-verb disagreement in the New York Times
In Garrison Keillor’s review of Deborah Solomon’s Norman Rockwell biography.
Review: How to Not Write Bad
The premise of Ben Yagoda’s book — that novice writers can improve greatly by learning what not to do in their prose — is sound. But the book is a disappointment.
Review: Wallace and Garner, Quack This Way
“When it comes to language and usage and writing, there are two kinds of people: those who care, and those who could care less.”
Recently updated
Making a sentence better still.
How to improve writing (no. 47)
Take that, Charlie Rose.
From The Onion? No, The Times.
“I have come to realize that my writing brain has been waiting for something exactly like today’s dizzyingly overfull, warp-speed Internet.”
Rae Armantrout, taking notes
I carry a blank book journal around with me most of the time and jot down things I see and hear, especially if they seem puzzling.
Kurt Vonnegut, advice for students
“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”
How to improve writing (no. 46)
Fixing another Mark Trail speech balloon.
Write Space
A free extension for Chrome, comparable in its look and feel to the OS X app WriteRoom.
Writerly realia
A slidehow of items that belonged to writers.
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.”
Obviating elaboration
Claire Cook: “Condensing to a fault is so rare a failing that it needs only passing mention.”
Sherwin Cody wants to know
Do You Make Mistakes in English?
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.”
Orange Crate Art: How to improve writing (no. 45)
To my eyes, the writer has crammed too many bits of information into one sentence — a problem one sees again and again in news writing.
Rachel Toor’s writing tricks
The Find command and ugly fonts: especially useful tricks.
A thought about writing
Wilson Follett: ”Wherever we can make twenty-five words do the work of fifty, we halve the area in which looseness and disorganization can flourish, and by reducing the span of attention required we increase the force of the thought.”
Zinsser on work
“It may seem perverse that I compare my writing to plumbing, an occupation not regarded as high-end. But to me all work is equally honorable, all crafts an astonishment when they are performed with skill and self-respect.”
Thomas Jefferson’s PDA
“The Jefferson notebook attracted a flurry of interest in 2005, during the salad days of the hipster PDA. Everything old is new again, and again.”
“Creatures of hope”
a sentence from J. L. Carr’s 1980 novella A Month in the Country .
Grammar and writing resources
From the University of Chicago Writing Program, “an annotated collection of grammar and writing resources from around the web.”
Staying small
Words from Robert Walser and John O’Reilly.
Robert Walser, Microscripts
“Reading these works for the first time, I think of Laurence Sterne, Franz Kafka, and Max Jacob, but Walser resembles only himself.”
From Wittgenstein’s Mistress
“One more passage from David Markson’s 1988 novel, six pages from the end, from a litany of suffering that sounds like something from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.”
From Wittgenstein’s Mistress
“In spite of frequently underlining sentences and books that have not been assigned, I did well in college, actually.”
Ruskin takes flight
Eight sentences, one paragraph.
How to improve writing (no. 44)
Mark Trail and “however.”
Mina Shaughnessy on error
Anyone who has read, say, a comma-free student essay (comma-free for fear that using commas might mean making mistakes), will see the wisdom in Mina P. Shaughnessy’s observations about error.
NYT cursive debate
Four viewpoints.