The U.S. presidential election is six months away, but the Republican debates and primary contests have already gone on for more than a year. The long campaign has meant plenty of exposure to that special genre of language known as political speech.  Continue reading...

What keeps writing alive? The truth of life. Getting the truth into words is our only hope for immortality. Writing that speaks falsely about life dwindles down to death in a matter of decades.  Continue reading...

If "grammar is the skunk at the garden party of the language arts," how can teachers confront the skunk when it comes to explaining how verbs work?  Continue reading...

The podcast Lexicon Valley tackles knotty language issues in an engaging manner. Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield finish a three-part series on language and gender by looking at the struggles over the absence of a gender-neutral pronoun in English. They talk to University of Michigan professor Anne Curzan about the case for singular "they" to fill the gap. Listen to the podcast here, and catch our own interview with Curzan here.

How are you at handling criticism? I don't mean comments about your driving or your housework or your management style. And I particularly don't mean criticism from your kids. (Anyone who can tolerate that with grace deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for parenting.) I'm talking about criticism of your writing.  Continue reading...

This week has seen many encomiums to the great children's book author Maurice Sendak, who died on Tuesday at the age of 83. As it happens, tomorrow marks the two hundredth birthday of one of Sendak's predecessors in playful children's literature: Edward Lear. That got me thinking about the grand tradition of wordplay in books for children, from Lear and Carroll to Seuss and Sendak.  Continue reading...

It's hard these days to be in the computer business and avoid "the cloud." All the big companies — Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Cisco, and Apple, among others — tout their cloud services. For the most part, the folks who have to think about cloud computing are programmers. But odds are that you’re using the cloud today, and definitely will be tomorrow. What is "the cloud," anyway?  Continue reading...