Curse of the Proofreader’s Brain

The curse of professional language persons, you see, is that they are always language persons,…

Respectively: Explained

The word “respectively” is extremely useful, but only if you use it correctly. It’s useless…

Grammatical Metaphor: A Quick Guide

Grammatical metaphor may seem complex, but it is actually something we use rather automatically and…

More Commonly Confused Words: Y and Wherefore

There are occasions when the living language is unsettled; no firm rule guides us, and…

Figurative Language: What It Is and When to Use It

igurative and literal speech, often confused, are important to understand, and both serve their purposes…

Editing Advertising Tip: Make the Style Consistent

Advertisers do all these things after conducting expensive marketing research with focus groups, taste tests,…

Making Good Friends with Irregular Words

Words derived from the same root might change their spellings when used as nouns or…

How Macros Improve Writing

Macros are little programs you can add to Word to make it do pretty much…

When and How to Use a Proofreading Service

A professional edit is not a shortcut to quality writing; that comes only from rewriting,…

Expert Insider Wordle Techniques & Tricks

Of course, one day the craze will calm down, but for now, if you’d like…

More Tips for Word’s Spell and Grammar Check

Spell check is a great tool to let writers know when they’ve made spelling errors,…

It’s a Modifier or a Hyphen, Not Both

Recently, I’ve been noticing an increase in the error of putting a hyphen between a…

Quick Intro to Dialects in Dialogue

what does the poetry of Burns have to do with writing and editing in Modern…

Can Writers Evade Bias, Sexism, and Racism?

Language is always changing to reflect material developments and changing ideas, so it’s important to…

5 Cancelled Terms & Sayings

Several phrases have been cancelled in recent years for good reasons, but there have been…

Crafting Plurals for Surnames and Joint Possessives

We’re used to speaking and writing as individuals; writing from the whole family means navigating…

6 Effective Tips for Office Bulletins and Memos

In today’s post, I’ll offer some tips for shorter internal office communications such as memos…

5 Times You Just Gotta Edit Quotes

So there you are, editing away, and you see a quote with an error in…

Quick Guide to Using Unicode Keystrokes for Diacritics

The curators of the standard have assigned keystroke shortcuts the diacritics, punctuation marks, and symbols…

Knowing Your Helpful Pronunciation Diacritical Marks

A frequent complaint of language learners of English is that the pronunciation of a word…