To learn the history of the English language, I had to take an entire 15-week university course. (And read Baugh’s book shown in the photo here.) But you can get the big picture in an entertaining — if not entirely vetted by experts — way in only 10 minutes.
Enjoy getting fit!
Like to play with words? Need a diversion today? I suggest a visit to the Oxford English Fictionary. From their About page: Have you ever read a book and come across a word and said to yourself, “Hmmm, self, I wonder what that word means?”, and then gone to a dictionary to look up the…
My name is Tucker Burke and I am a senior at the University of Alabama, majoring in Management Information Systems. I will be graduating in May before I begin my career at Ernst & Young in Nashville, TN. As a part of my education, I have been working to complete a specialization in Management Communication,…
Within Western culture, there are few workplaces with ONLY men or ONLY women. In theory, our workplaces are gender neutral. Our language, however, sometimes perpetuates a world in which women are subservient to men. Sexist language is commonly characterized using six issues: pseudo-generic pronoun, he (e.g., When an employee asks for a raise, he should be brief.) pseudo-generic noun,…
To Be Clear, SEC Reviewers Want Filings in Plain English, Period” from the Wall Street Journal will help you make your case. Let me highlight a few of their examples of SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) responses to the filing documents companies have submitted for review. In case these documents are unfamiliar to you, here’s how Wikipedia describes them:…
I was reading my digitial issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) this morning and found Ben Yagoda’s Warren Buffett Is a Better Writer Than I Am. Damn It. (Yagoda is one of a handful of contributors to CHE’s Lingua Franca blog.) The piece is a terrific analysis of Buffet’s writing ability based on his recent Letter…
Know your audience! The most common platitude about workplace writing. Well . . . duh . . . who could argue with that? It certainly doesn’t describe what pros have learned. What amateurs need is GUIDANCE for getting to know the right things about their readers. My guidance, based on a chapter new to the third edition of Revising Professional Writing, focuses…
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Thanks for stopping by my site and for the kind words. I stumbled upon your site after reading the grammar blog post this week on WordPress. Professionally, I am a writer/editor, and I thought your analysis about how to teach writing was spot-on. Somewhere between journalism (my undergrad major) and good literature, there lies the elusive intersection of art and science that makes clear prose.
Btw, I thoroughly enjoyed this short video as it made me LOL several times. What DID happen to the Jutes, anyway? 😉
I appreciate hearing from folks — especially the ones who agree with me! I’m not sure why the Jutes’ name didn’t take on the same level of importance as the Angles’ and Saxons’ did. I think they might have appeared first — as mercenaries from modern-day Denmark. Maybe there were too few of them. Or maybe they more successfully integrated with other tribes. I’ve read that their most famous leaders, Hengist and Horsa, were actually Angles. Interesting stuff!