"The voice of a generation, Dylan's albums hit the airwaves at a time when protest songs could actually influence the national discourse."

I was confronted by this sentence when I sat down to take a copyediting test that would determine whether or not I got a job as an assistant editor on a biographical reference series.  Continue reading...

The journalism professor was not having much "fun" explaining things to her feature-writing students: "I know so fun is wrong but I can't tell them why," she wrote. "So happy is right, but so fun should have 'much' as the sandwich filling."  Continue reading...

June 23, 2012 would have been the 100th birthday of the British polymath Alan Turing. Among his achievements, Turing contributed substantially to the field of computers, and his name shows up multiple times in the lexicon of IT. Reflecting on this made me wonder who else I might find represented in the vocabulary of the field. Lots of people, it turns out.  Continue reading...

I have to admit that I have a problem in teaching the verb to get to English language learners. It's not just that it is a verb that has multiple meanings depending on context — around a dozen, I'd say. No, the bigger problem for me is that I haven't recovered from it being a prohibited item when I was a kid.  Continue reading...

What vocabulary and reading strategies can students use in analyzing literary nonfiction?  Continue reading...

Transition words can act like road signs for the reader — by providing indications of what is to come in the phrase, sentence, or paragraph. This week's worksheet asks students to explore the meanings and uses of some common transition words on The Visual Thesaurus and to then categorize those transition words according to the roles they play in context.  Continue reading...