An Easy Guide to Articles: A, An, and The

There are three articles: “a,” “an,” and “the.” All of them function as adjectives.

Simple Guide to Using “If” or “Whether”

The English language is full of words that seem to perform the same function but…

Tips to Help Children Write Better

With school having started already some places and about to start in others, many parents…

Plotting Fiction: Keeping Track of Time, Part 2

Reconciling objective and subjective chronology might seem simpler in fiction: after all, the author controls…

Commonly Confused Homophones

Ah, the double-edged sword of spell-check. That little red squiggle under misspelled words can be…

Plotting Fiction: Keeping Track of Time, Pt 1

Our heroes live in a world, and despite all their antics, life goes on for…

Bad Parallelism, Good Parallelism

“Parallelism” means the same parts of a sentence must be of the same type. But…

Implicit Racism in Writing

Implicit racism is woven into the fabric of American society. It plays a part in…

Plotting Fiction: Keeping Your Story Straight

Keeping your story straight is mostly a matter of holding yourself accountable.

Cell Phones and Why We Write

Civility is the world’s second-best social lubricant, and from the first day of their public…

5 Reasons Assembly Instructions Fall Apart

If you find yourself in the unlucky position of writing a manual or set of…

The Writer’s Bookshelf

However and wherever you find them, the right books can help improve your writing and…

Write an Effective Blog Post

No matter your motivation for blogging, you’ll want to make sure each post is high…

5 Tips for Choosing a Paper Topic

Writing is never easy; even professional writers and academics, people who have chosen careers with…

Hearing the Music: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Writing (Again)

There’s no rule saying that academic articles can’t be written in muscular prose, no law…

Top 10 Changes in APA’s 7th Edition

Here are the top ten changes to the APA manual, selected because these are the…

Poetry Tools to Enhance Your Prose: Still More Figures of Speech (Anaphora, Merism, Antonomasia)

The kinds of figurative language described in this installment are not appropriate for most academic…

How to Make Your Writing More Inclusive

You should shun discriminatory language as you should shun discrimination; doing so also allows your…

Really Tricky Apostrophe Rules

In this post we cover the apostrophe rules that are, for lack of a better…

Poetry Tools to Enhance Your Prose: Analogy, Part 2 (Metonymy and Synecdoche)

This time, let’s go way out there and look at a pair of related poetic…