Nothing makes an English major’s day like seeing the word “grammar” in a news headline. Apparently, the lack of a gender-neutral plural pronoun in the English language is causing confusion on social networking sites: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080627/ap_on_hi_te/tec_facebook_genders
All writers struggle with this one. For example, take a sentence like “Every writer has ______ own unique style.”
Should one use [...]

I’ve been working on new content for Dr. Jennifer Anacker’s website this week and needed to learn more about chiropractic treatment and subluxation so I could describe them briefly and clearly for her readers. That meant starting with research and taking lots of notes. And thanks to a lucky accident — running out of graph [...]

I was the guest speaker for a lively group of business analysts at the Treasure Valley IIBA lunch meeting today. During the Q&A they gave me some wonderful examples of miscommunication. (For those of you who don’t already know this, I’ll explain here that I collect such examples to use for trainings, workshops, and just [...]

Here is the corrected link to the freerice.com site.
Many thanks to the alert subscriber who pointed out that the link in my earlier post wasn’t working! I fixed it there, too.
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Language mavens take heed: you can feed the hungry and build your vocabulary at the same time, while slacking off online, by visiting www.freerice.com. The home page is built around an interactive vocabulary quiz, and for every word you guess correctly, the site’s sponsors donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations’ World [...]

Next Tuesday, April 8th, I’m presenting a luncheon seminar for the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce called “Words That Work: Business Writing Basics.” Can’t wait. It’s always a treat to get a chance to share useful, practical information that makes life and work easier for people. There’s nothing like witnessing those “aha” moments when something [...]

How many times have you asked someone, “What do you do?” only to get a pretty much incomprehensible answer? For some reason, people tend to get lofty when they try to think of a boilerplate phrase to introduce themselves and their business. Unfortunately it’s very easy to get caught up in words like “optimize,” [...]

Not long ago, I heard Pamela Dell of the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce deliver a delightfully to-the-point talk about marketing. She took the whole daunting subject and broke it down into three steps:

Make time.
Have fun.
Follow up.

How can you [...]

A well-educated, sophisticated client of mine whose practice serves her own well-educated, sophisticated clients brought up an interesting question about headlines this week. She had learned in an online marketing course that capitalizing every word in a headline — regardless of grammatical correctness — is a good way to get people’s attention, and she wanted [...]

Just read a colleague’s post — http://www.webinknow.com/2007/08/the-gobbledygoo.html — that makes my day. David Meerman Scott’s updated manifesto makes me feel so, well, validated. Having written more than my share of jargon-ridden pieces — always under tactful protest, having tried to point out the futility of using worn cliches instead of language that actually means anything [...]