Try this: Go to a content Web site and click on an article, or open a Word document you’ve created, and search for the word that. This wallflower word is likely to appear with surprising frequency — but it shouldn’t seem very surprising, because that has five distinct grammatical functions: 1. As a pronoun used [...]

Is rhetorician on your resume? It should be, because I’d be surprised if you haven’t employed one or more of the methods listed below for conveying emphasis to your writing. Rhetoric, the art of persuasive written or spoken discourse, was developed in ancient Greece, and every one of the terms below stems from classical Greek [...]

Writers often miss opportunities to push home a point or spotlight an interesting observation by ignoring or not attending to the effect of cadence and syntax on written communication. Such incidents are like a standup comedian placing a punch line in the middle of a joke. Here are some examples of slight adjustments of sentence [...]

Do you notice dangling participles and misplaced modifiers and unclear antecedents? Do you cringe when punctuation is misused, or when a writer employs the wrong word or phrases a sentence awkwardly or poorly organizes a paragraph? Do you shake your head when number style is inconsistent, abbreviations are incorrect, or words are indiscriminately capitalized? Have [...]

There comes a time when you have to put down other people’s books and start writing your own. But if you don’t feel you’ve gotten to that point yet, or you’d just like a shot in the arm (or a more definitive blow to another part of your anatomy), explore these excellent writing workshops in [...]

Few technical writing errors drive editors to distraction like superfluous capitalization does. This eruption of capitalitis (a pathogen otherwise known as Uppercasis ludicrosii) is most often seen in references to plants and animals. Words that comprise the names of plant species are generally lowercase: “Lumber from the live oak is rarely used for furniture.” Exceptions [...]