Erin Brenner of Right Touch Editing provides "bite-sized lessons to improve your writing" on her engaging blog The Writing Resource. Here Erin wonders about the fate of spelling in the era of text messaging.  Continue reading...

Teachers, are you wary of using social media and other online tools to foster student communication? Follow these tips from 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).  Continue reading...

USA! USA! USA!

Sorry for the chanting and the giant foam finger. I just wanted to establish that this is a thoroughly all-American column and provide a smooth transition to a term that brings together two of my top two interests: euphemisms and dogs.  Continue reading...

Michael Lydon, a well-known writer on popular music since the 1960s, has for many years also been writing about writing. Lydon's essays, written with a colloquial clarity, shed fresh light on familiar and not so familiar aspects of the writing art. Here Lydon shines a light on literary realism, the style by which writers "make the imaginary real and the real imaginary."  Continue reading...

Users of Amazon's e-reader, the Kindle, can not only highlight their favorite passages, they can see what everyone else is highlighting. University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron ponders the consequences.  Continue reading...

This month in the Language Lounge, we take a look at an underappreciated grammatical category: submodifiers. We hope that by shining the spotlight briefly on the term, we might win over a few converts, as well as alert readers to the nuances of the delightful class of words so designated.  Continue reading...

In the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, competitors are asked to write incredibly bad opening sentences to incredibly bad novels. The 2010 winner for worst opening line features a comparison to "the world's thirstiest gerbil." Read the whole thing, and the rest of the results, here.