October 20th is the National Day on Writing in the US. See the press release here or the US Senate proclamation for 2012 here. To celebrate: On October 19, tweet out your compositions of all sorts and post them to Twitter using the hashtag #WhatIWrite and, if space allows, #dayonwriting. Our goals are to share writings…
‘Cause my day job kept me from blogging this week, I’m reprinting a wonderful article by James Harbeck: You’re using that dash wrong: A comprehensive guide to our language’s horizontal lines — from the humble hyphen to the three-em dash. It’s worth a few minutes! Published in The Week on September 10, 2013 Ah, the dash…
Glad to leave my sick bed and return to the land of the living . . . Here’s how this post started. Recently, my 17-year-old son did something dumb on the basketball court during his high school team’s game at a school in another town and earned his fifth foul. (For those with limited knowledge…
The Harvard Business Review blog network recently featured a piece by Kyle Wiens called I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why. Wiens runs two companies, and both focus on technical communication. But he makes a good argument about why what he calls “grammar” matters in any workplace. Grammar is relevant for all companies. Yes, language…
Check out Huffington Post‘s “The new illiteracy — obfuscation — hinders progress.” The author mentions some top notch plain language efforts like the Center for Plain Language and PLAIN. But he assumes obfuscation is a recent problem. I wrote a very brief history of the problem in Why hasn’t plain language become the norm? Related…
Wanted to share this piece from Fast Company even though I have no time to elaborate today. (Tip o’ the hat to Marie Paretti for sharing it!) Those of you who write performance reviews for women need to reflect on your word choice. And what it says about you! The answer = abrasive.
Level 7 🙁
I think you should celebrate anyway. This is REALLY hard!