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 [...]