In my column "The Dead Letter Classroom," I argued that we needed to be teaching students how to write letters. In this piece, I'm going to tell you specifically how I do it and how I use letters to teach English skills in a timely, relevant manner.  Continue reading...

Merrill Perlman considers why writers avoid the word "oral" and use "verbal" instead.  Continue reading...

If we divide up the short list of English parts of speech according to status, adjectives are at the top of the B-list. The elites, nouns and verbs, seem to get everyone's attention because without them, sentences wouldn't have a job.  Continue reading...

Yesterday we heard from University of Illinois English professor Dennis Baron on the announcement of new words added to Merriam-Webster's dictionary. Here is another perspective, from Baltimore Sun copy editor John E. McIntyre, who argues that journalists reporting on new words often misconstrue the purpose of dictionaries.  Continue reading...

The Chronicle of Higher Education has launched a group blog called "Lingua Franca: Language and Writing in Academe." The all-star lineup of bloggers includes Geoffrey K. Pullum, Ben Yagoda, Allan Metcalf, Carol Fisher Saller, and Lucy Ferris. In the first post, Metcalf debunks the notion that sentences should never start with "and" or "but." Read it here.

It's back to school, and that means it's time for dictionaries to trot out their annual lists of new words. Dictionary-maker Merriam-Webster recently released a list of 150 words just added to its new Collegiate Dictionary for 2011, including cougar, a middle-aged woman seeking a romantic relationship with a younger man, boomerang child, a young adult who returns to live at home for financial reasons, and social media -- if you don't know what that means, then you're still living in the last century.  Continue reading...

Is it possible for a word to have no alphabetic letters? Stan Carey, a regular Visual Thesaurus contributor, considers the question on his blog, Sentence First. Among the no-letter words he examines are +1 ("plus one"), 1337 ("leet"), @ ("at"), and ♥ ("heart"). Read his blog post here.