However and wherever you find them, the right books can help improve your writing and make your home office a happier, more productive place.

No matter your motivation for blogging, you’ll want to make sure each post is high quality to keep your readers coming back. In today’s post, I’ll describe tips to make your blog more effective.

Writing is never easy; even professional writers and academics, people who have chosen careers with hefty writing requirements, can struggle mightily to get it done.

There’s no rule saying that academic articles can’t be written in muscular prose, no law that business writing can’t have a sense of forward momentum and the occasional memorable line.

Here are the top ten changes to the APA manual, selected because these are the issues professional editors are probably going to encounter most often.

The kinds of figurative language described in this installment are not appropriate for most academic writing, where panache must occasionally be sacrificed for the sake of clarity. For less rigorous types of informational writing, such as business communications or informal reports, they represent ways to add color and spice to your message.

You should shun discriminatory language as you should shun discrimination; doing so also allows your message to reach the broadest audience and lends credibility to your words.

In this post we cover the apostrophe rules that are, for lack of a better word, downright wacky. If you’re going to be an expert, you’ll have to memorize these individually.

This time, let’s go way out there and look at a pair of related poetic devices that seem, at first glance, hopelessly roundabout and exotic: metonymy and synecdoche.

As an editor, I am naturally sensitive to language matters, and I took this criticism seriously. I’ve made an effort to modernize my pronoun usage, and in today’s blog I’ll provide tips to avoid gender bias in your pronoun use.