BuzzWhack defines "buzzwords" as important-sounding words used to impress laypeople, and "buzzwhacker" as a person who gets pleasure out of bursting the bubbles of the pompous. Buzzwhackers out there, this one's for you! BuzzWhack demystifies one buzzword after the other on its site, including this delicious morsel: "Lawn mullet: A lawn that's neatly mowed in the front but uncut in the back." Read more buzzwords debunked here.

We here at the Visual Thesaurus receive a lot of emails from subscribers around the world. Not long ago we got a nice note from Sandra Dolores Becker of Porto Alegre, Brazil. She wrote:

"The Visual Thesaurus has become a friend, a colleague, and my companion when I'm trying to find the specific word that will fit perfectly in a verse of my early period poetry or when I'm writing another chapter of my book. It's wondrous! I spend my time researching, finding and reflecting on the meaning of words. Simple words? No, words are never simple. They can move mountains, change a nation, make a friend or cause pain. Words can make us dream, see what isn't there at the moment? Accept my gratitude for showing me how to increase my vocabulary with ease!"

Thank you, Sandra! Her note got us curious about her work and the challenges she faces writing in both Portuguese and English. We wanted to ask Sandra for her advice to writers whose native tongue isn't English. So we contacted Sandra in Brazil. We were surprised to learn she had lived the first half of her life in Indiana and works for an American multi-national company, in addition to writing poetry and fiction in both languages. With this unique perspective, here's what Sandra shared with us:

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This week's "Word Count" features Sandra Dolores Becker, a Visual Thesaurus subscriber and writer from Brazil who works in both English and Portuguese. We asked Sandra to tell us about books that help her write better in English:

The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation by Jane Straus. I always have this one on hand. It's very practical, with simple rules and easy examples.

Felicity: Summer by Janet Tashijian . Pure American English and delightful reading! It's perfect for reading everyday, normal, spoken English.

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss's books are a must for anyone wanting to learn English -- even adults! There are no words to describe them. You learn, you play, you see, you enjoy.

When I am up against a deadline and I absolutely, definitely have to get on with my work, I use a few tactics to force myself to concentrate:

1. Switch off email. I don't start Outlook (or if I do, I disable all the notifications that tell me I have new mail).



2. Isolate myself. I use Bose noise-canceling headphones but don't plug them into anything. The silence really is golden.



3. Greed and guilt. I remind myself how much money I'm getting paid for a particular assignment and how ashamed I will be if I miss the deadline. This actually works sometimes.



4. Stop with the blog already. When I'm pressed for time, distractions like blogging and tidying up become very compelling. Knowing this makes it easier to resist.


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These are the five writer blogs that I, your humble editor, check out every day.

The Mechanic & the Muse . Reporter turned writing teacher Chip Scanlan's baby, on the art and carpentry of good prose.

Gangrey. Great storytelling from newspapers around the country, and so much more.

Collision Detection. Tech and culture writer Clive Thompson's collection.

Malcolm Gladwell . Tipping Point and Blink's author's. How can you not check it every day?

Creating Passionate Users . What writer doesn't want passionate readers?

On the evolution of my most recent novel, The Pleasure Was Mine, which was recently read on Dick Estell's Radio Reader and was a finalist for the SIBA (Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) Award in Fiction 2006.

My father died of Alzheimer's seven years ago this past June. A couple of years before he died, I began keeping notes. At first we weren't sure he had Alzheimer's. He hadn't been to the doctor in 35 years, so we had no real frame of reference. My father was wonderful, smart, articulate, warm, very well read, obsessed with Eastern mysticism, a fine writer, and eccentric in a very charming way, and so it was hard to tell where any sort of illness like Alzheimer's started and where his personality left off. Looking back, we realized he had been a master at hiding what he didn't know or what he was forgetting.

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If you scroll down to the end of this article you can enter a comment on what you just read. It's a small deal that hints to a bigger deal: The evolution of the Internet into a collaborative universe. Educators have lately grasped the power of this in the classroom -- and are beginning to use collaboration tools to enhance learning. To find out more, we called up two education technology experts, Cristina Lopez and Kurtis Scaletta, both Instructional Multimedia Consultants at the Digital Media Center of the University of Minnesota. They've been studying the potential of a collaboration technology called "wikis" and run a website called Teaching With Wikis. We asked them how wikis can improve learning -- and the challenges teachers face using them.

VT: What in the world is a "wiki?"

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