According to David Meerman Scott, author of the bestselling book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, the old rules of PR no longer apply. Thanks to the Internet, marketing and PR professionals shouldn't write press releases for journalists in the hope of getting ink.  Continue reading...

Ready to boil your life down to, oh, six words? Talk about a writing challenge. Since 2006, Smith Magazine has been collecting "six word memoirs" from writers both famous and not-so-famous. Check out the latest entries here -- and submit your own micro-memoir!

These blogs review books, introduce writers, cover literary news, offer literary links, and even feature a video or two:

Beatrice

BookFox

Bookburger

Books, Movies and Chinese Food

These anthologies collect the greatest speeches in history, invaluable for any writer:

The World's Great Speeches

Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History

Words That Shook the World

The Penguin Book of 20th-Century Speeches

Great American Speeches

Many words have multiple meanings (sometimes called senses). The Visual Thesaurus displays meanings as individual circles connected to words. The word pen for example, has six meanings. Five of the meanings for pen are nouns, and one is a verb. For this reason, the circles in the Visual Thesaurus representing meanings are color coded to indicate their different parts of speech. The most common meaning for pen as a noun is "a writing implement with a point from which ink flows." pen can also be used as a verb. When used as a verb, it means "produce a literary work." What is interesting is that the word pen is not in and of itself a noun or a verb. It is the individual meanings of pen that belong to a particular part of speech.

"Blancmange?" one of my students said. "What's blancmange?" And suddenly, we weren't talking about themes and relationships in Little Women anymore, but instead about a foodstuff that no one's enjoyed for 200 years.  Continue reading...