As my school year draws to a close and I pack the box to head over to another building and teach summer school, I've paused for a minute of reflection. So I'll share some of my thoughts with you. First, reflecting back on the school year is something that needs to be done. Too often (and yes, I'm guilty on occasion, too) we close the door, yell hooray and try to forget the past. After all, isn't that what summer's about? So we start fresh in the fall?  Continue reading...

In this Wordshop article, Susan Ebbers provides teachers with some creative suggestions for showing students how to make the most of adjectives, "those fabulous descriptors that comprise about one-fourth of the words in the language."  Continue reading...

Michael Lydon makes an eloquent case for the central role of assonance in the craft of fine writing: "More than a device we can apply by rule or rote, assonance comes to us as a gift from language itself, from our deep animal urge to communicate with our voices."  Continue reading...

The latest installment of the Lexicon Valley podcast is on one of our favorite topics: linguistic anachronisms on period TV dramas. Mike Vuolo talks to Benjamin Schmidt, who was inspired by Ben Zimmer's work on Mad Men and Downton Abbey to look more systematically at the language on these shows. Listen to the podcast here, and check out Schmidt's Prochronisms site here.

Machines can grade essays as accurately as human readers. According to the New York Times, a competition sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation produced software able to match human essay readers grade for grade, and a study of commercially-available automatic grading programs showed that computers assessed essays as accurately as human readers, but a whole lot faster, and cheaper, to boot. But that's just the start: computers could lead to a reading-free future.  Continue reading...

Do you know the grammatical mnemonic "FANBOYS"? It's an acronym for the coordinating conjunctions for, and, nor, but, or, and yet. Seems pretty handy, right? Not so much: Erin Brenner argues that "FANBOYS" hides more than it reveals.  Continue reading...

Today, the Visual Thesaurus is joining the New York Times Learning Network and a host of other organizations and individuals in tweeting our #summerreading plans. And to celebrate this essential activity we're posting several new vocabulary lists for books you might want to read this summer.  Continue reading...