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…

Tips for Using Singular “They”

As an editor, I am naturally sensitive to language matters, and I took this criticism…

Apostrophes with Singular and Plural Nouns

Lets get into the complexities of apostrophes when dealing with singular and plural nouns.

Poetry Tools to Enhance Your Prose: Analogy, Part 1 (Simile and Metaphor)

The guidebooks’ prohibition on colorful language is really just a plea for clarity. Used sparingly,…

What to Do When You Can’t Use Emojis

This time, let’s deal with the fact that emojis are still not OK in professional…

Conditional Verbs in Research Writing

In research writing, the difference between hypothetical and factual statements is critical; your choice of…

Why We Need Emojis

Even though the older generations love to dump on them and elites love to complain…

AP Style Quick Guide

In today’s post I’ll discuss some AP basics and differences from other style guides you’ll…

Poetry Tools to Enhance Your Prose: Varieties of Rhyme

Rhyme can be understated, and it comes in more flavors than you might think. Repeated…

One or Two: The Case Remains the Same

Adding in a second (or third or eighth) subject or object or modifier doesn’t change…

Poetry Tools to Enhance Your Prose: Rhythm

The glorious and intimidating thing about the English language is its bounty of options. Whatever…

URLS & DOIs in Reference Lists: APA, MLA, and Chicago

In today’s post, I’ll provide examples of reference listings including DOIs and URLs in APA,…