When we asked author and teacher Julie Smith, who we feature in this week's Word Count column, to recommend books on writing, she emailed saying, "My choices are all over the map -- popular authors, literary authors, writing teachers as opposed to authors, and even one literary agent. There's a reason for that: Different points of view are absolutely essential. I think aspiring writers should read them all, and then some. You never know what's going to work for you." Thanks, Julie! Here are her picks:

From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction by Robert Olen Butler

Immediate Fiction: A Complete Writing Course by Jerry Cleaver

No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty

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Detective novelists, here's a clue: Check out these crime writer blogs for tips on solving the ultimate whodunit -- writing a great gumshoe story!

Detectives Beyond Borders

Hardboiled Heaven

Crime Fiction Writer

The Rap Sheet

It's a Crime

You already know that stories are the foundation of comic books, novels, biographies, and screenplays. Here's what may not seem so obvious: the principles of storytelling are equally as important in successful business communications.

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Have a burning question about language origin, morphology or perhaps the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Well, why not ask a friendly linguist! Ask-A-Linguist , a service provided by an Internet network of professional linguists, welcomes you to post language-related questions of all kinds on their site.

Want to know every top chef's secret ingredient? The right food terms! We called Chef Eve Felder, associate dean of the Culinary Institute of America, to ask her about words to cook by:

Bind. "When you bring two disparate ingredients together. You might bind through the emulsification of fat and meat. For example, if I were making sausage, I may add an egg as an additional binding agent to hold the ground meat together."

Devil. "It means adding spicy ingredients to food, from the French word for devil, diable. In America, we think of deviled eggs and deviled ham. It may have a spice component but we've mostly gotten away from that."

Grease. "A verb, as in to grease a pan. You would use paper towel or a gloved hand to grease a sheet tray or a cake pan with butter or oil."

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The Visual Thesaurus is a proud sponsor of public radio's A Way with Words, a "freewheeling joy ride through the English language," that airs every weekend in San Diego, the Midwest and around the world via podcasts. When the ninth season of the show kicks off this Saturday, host Martha Barnette will be joined by a new partner, lexicographer Grant Barrett (read our interview with Grant here). We caught up with Martha to talk about her show, her work and her latest book, the delightful Ladyfingers and Nun's Tummies.

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Martha Barnette, the host of public radio's A Way With Words, recommends these books on language, written by some of her favorite guests on the show:

Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods by Michael Wex

Word Origins ... and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone by Anatoly Liberman

Crossworld: One Man's Journey into America's Crossword Obsession by Marc Romano

Do You Speak American? by Robert MacNeil and William Cran

And one more by her predecessor on the show:

The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations by Charles Harrington Elster