We welcome back Michele Dunaway, who teaches English and journalism at Francis Howell High School in St. Charles, Missouri, when she's not writing best-selling romance novels. Here Michele argues that to get students excited about books in this highly distracted era, choosing the right literature to read is key.  Continue reading...

Just in time for the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, linguist Neal Whitman has been thinking about a phrase that seems to guarantee victory: win-win situation. What does this "no-lose" proposition really mean?  Continue reading...

"Here's one safe prediction for the Winter Olympics," writes Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer in the New York Times Magazine. "Competitors and commentators will use podium as a verb, as in, 'She can definitely podium here today.' And just as predictably, some observers will shudder at the word." Read the rest here.

Over the last few days, America's Eastern seaboard has seen record levels of snow... accompanied by record levels of snow wordplay. There has been a blizzard of "portmanteau words" involving snow, with snowmageddon and snowpocalypse leading the way. On Twitter, the hashtag of choice has been snOMG, compactly joining snow with the online interjection OMG. We haven't seen this much seasonal word-blending since 2008's "summer of the staycation."  Continue reading...

One of my three children is dyslexic, but I taught the other two to read myself. It wasn't hard, but here's the deal — what I taught them wasn't so much reading as it was decoding. That is, I explained to them the various sounds that all the letters in the alphabet represent. For example, the letter e can sometimes sound like "eh" as in pen. But it can also sound like "ee" as in we.  Continue reading...

Poetry can be found in unexpected places. On 3 Quarks Daily, Richard Eskow takes transcriptions of his phone messages, as automatically processed by Google Voice, and turns them into hilarious gems of free verse. Check it out here.

Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, offers useful tips to copy editors and anyone else who prizes clear and orderly writing. Here she takes an extended look at the troublesome issue of when to hyphenate compounds.  Continue reading...