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!
Today is filled with tasks related to my day job — AGAIN. So I’m sharing a quick (and dirty) punctuation lesson in honor of my friend, Charles White. Chas and I are both nerdy enough to be fans of the Oxford comma. The illustration is a slightly edited version of the original by Jeff Bishop. (I’m trying…
My colleague, Saul Carliner, shared this slide deck from Mark O-Toole about why new grads don’t get hired. See if you can locate one of the eleven reasons that isn’t caused by (or couldn’t be fixed with better) communication. Congratulations Graduate! Eleven Reasons Why I Will Never Hire You. from Mark O’Toole Here’s my analysis….
The Center for Plain Language recently released final grades for US federal agencies. After completing a rigorous evaluation process, they concluded that Participation by agencies in the Center for Plain Language Federal Plain Language Report Card reached an all-time high: 23 agencies submitted materials for review, including all 15 Cabinet-level departments. Compliance scores increased overall: Eight…
Readers understand a message better when writers use explicit signals of what they want readers to get out of a document. Transitions like “unfortunately” are one type of explicit signal. (Headings are another — see Think long-term and be kind to readers with well-formatted documents.) In fact, transitions are also sometimes called logical connectives. Maybe that makes…
Had to share this silly typeface humor from SoMuchPun! For more language fun today, check out A Walk in the WoRds.
For National Grammar Day, I’m posting a slightly edited version of “Shibboleths and entering the professions,” which appeared on Pros Write back in 2012. I wrote the original in response to the raised eyebrows after I posted “Language choices can be unsuccessful — but never wrong.” For some readers, my belief that language can never…
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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!