A frequent complaint of language learners of English is that the pronunciation of a word is often quite unpredictable. For example, we have the words “might,” “right,” and “freight” with Gs and Hs with no apparent sound; “score,” “school,” and “skip,” but also “scissors”; and, of course, “bow” (and arrow) and “bow” (and show respect), and “row” (a boat) and “row” (with an enemy).

For this first post in the series, we’ll start with the most important aspect of good fictional magic I can think of: establishing its limitations.

The Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit based in Mountain View, California, was founded in 1991 to compile the various ad hoc systems used in different companies and locations and institute a truly global, cross-platform standard, meaning that a given code point will correspond with the same glyph in any application, search engine, or operating system.

In today’s post, I will focus on the needs of one of our large client groups: students. Specifically, I will  review some of the most common problems we proofreaders see in student papers.

The en dash is used mostly for number ranges (e.g., 1928–1972) and in some stylebooks to suggest a hierarchical or interactive relationship between two nouns (e.g., father–son relationship). Except when people use an en dash when they want to us an em dash, writers tend to use en dashes properly. It’s em dashes that get abused.

Let’s say you’re writing a paper about the history of the United Nations during the Cold War; there’s a single reference to the late secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld, and you need that diaresis over the o. It doesn’t make sense to add the name to AutoCorrect, because you anticipate never typing his name again after you finish this paper; heck, you’re never going to type it again after you finish this one sentence. What to do?

With any digital assignment, follow steps similar to those you would follow for a traditional assignment like a paper. Read the assignment carefully and make sure you understand it fully, plan your process, ensure your argument is solid, conduct thorough research, write the text of your video using appropriate language, revise and proofread, and document your sources.

Most new writers I’ve worked with share the crucial misconception that the way to write a novel is to create a movie in their head and then write out that movie.

A given word may or may not then “read” to the English-trained eye as foreign, based on habit, familiarity, and longstanding usage. But language is a matter not only of the eye, but also of the ear. That’s where diacritics come in.

This fall, many schools will be returning to in-person learning, but no matter what your or your child’s mode of learning will be, the pandemic and the virtual learning it required will have a tremendous effect on teaching and learning from now on.

Whether your first language is English or not, you must have mixed your metaphors a time or two. In conversation, it’s not a biggie. Everyone (unless they’re an editor with no social skills) pretends it didn’t matter, and life goes on. But in writing, these matter. They sit there and taunt the reader to notice something is wrong, and usually they succeed.

Foreign loan words are brought into English more or less intact, either in their original spelling (e.g., the German “schadenfreude,” the French “bistro”) or, if non-Western in origin, transliterated into the Latin alphabet (e.g., the Japanese “karaoke,” the Mandarin “kung fu”).

In Word, there are lots of little options and properties that dictate—and may unpredictably change—the positioning of an object. Understanding those, which I will discuss in this post, puts you in a much better place to avoid the rabbit hole of object placement issues.

Getting from an initial idea to a completed story seems like a mysterious process for the novice writer. Let’s demystify it a bit.

Writing on a specialized topic for nonspecialists can be a challenge for writers of all ages, and writers often face the task of writing to an audience outside their field. In today’s post I’ll offer some tips to help you write clearly and usefully for a broader audience even if your topic is very narrow.

I know, as an editor, I’m not supposed to say this, but when it comes to a language’s health, imposing grammatical rules isn’t nearly as important as staying relevant.

The first step to solving any problem is diagnosing it. That begins with figuring out what kind of story you’re writing, which may not be the kind you intended. But it’s difficult, in the heat of creation, to analyze your own work. You can’t tell the size and shape of the forest when you’re lost among the trees. You need perspective.

For readability and clarity and out of respect for those referred to, it is important to be aware of how to use names grammatically and in accordance with proper style and social norms. In today’s post, I will review some common errors in using names and how to correct them.

Last time, we talked about transitioning from topic to topic, which means from paragraph to paragraph. This time, let’s talk about the “micro-transitions” that occur inside the paragraph, sometimes from sentence to sentence and sometimes inside sentences.