I had a great conversation with a book design expert last week. Nick Zelinger has designed covers and interiors for many, many books over the last 20 years, most of them for authors who self-publish. I asked him for some tips about how my clients and I could prepare our manuscript files to prevent hang-ups [...]

Over the past year, many of you have been following my news about my client and friend Marc Warnke, who has had the vision and commitment to make the journey from hatching an idea, to creating a manuscript, to becoming a published author. The journey reaches its culmination today, folks – the book is now [...]

I got to hear Greg Mortensen speak at the Morrison Center last night. One of the many amazing stories from his amazing journey was about the struggle with his publishers at Penguin over the exact wording of the subtitle for his book, Three Cups of Tea.
The publishers insisted on “One man’s mission to fight terrorism [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

One of my favorite clients is writing his first e-book and has been sending me drafts, asking for my professional opinion about whether the book is “there” yet. It’s a tough question to answer since “there” means such different things to different people. But it did get me thinking about what makes the difference between [...]