When developing writers are striving to be more "descriptive" and vivid in their creative writing, they often turn to adverbs as one of their enhancement tools (understandably — since they are words that are intended to modify or qualify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs.) However, when students begin to learn some of the more sophisticated standards for writing, teachers often advise them to avoid adverbs and to instead reach for powerful verbs that "show" instead of "tell" about their subjects and their actions.  Continue reading...

With VocabGrabber you can preview the vocabulary in a text, and then immediately create a word list.  Continue reading...

University of Illinois English professor Dennis Baron writes:

Every once in a while some concerned citizen decides to do something about the fact that English has no gender-neutral pronoun. They either call for such a pronoun to be invented, or they invent one and champion its adoption. Wordsmiths have been coining gender-neutral (or "epicene") pronouns for a century and a half, all to no avail.  Continue reading...

With everybody heading out to the beach this summer, my latest On Language column for The New York Times Magazine looks at the local lingo of shore towns. Beach-related regionalisms can get quite colorful, especially when it comes to epithets for the seasonal hordes of visitors.  Continue reading...

Stan Carey, a professional editor from Ireland, writes entertainingly about the English language on his blog Sentence First. Here Stan warns of the perilous ambiguity that can result from incautious use of the word that.  Continue reading...

The 2010 Annual Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) will be held in Orlando, Florida. Visual Thesaurus director of curriculum development Georgia Scurletis will present "Vocabulary in Context with The New York Times Learning Network and The Visual Thesaurus," a workshop co-presented with Katherine Schulten, editor of The New York Times Learning Network. Join us on Nov. 20 from 4:15 to 5:30 pm (Asbury Room B).  Continue reading...

The Visual Thesaurus will have an exhibit at the National School Boards Association's T+L Conference, held in Phoenix, AZ. Please visit us at Booth #720! Click here for conference details.