The relations among words are not so different from those among people. It's not unusual for, say, first cousins to bear no obvious resemblance to each other, but if we examine their DNA we find that they have a grandparent in common.  Continue reading...

Stop visualizing your bestseller and start thinking about what to do if you're unable to meet your goals. You can develop the writing habit if you develop the skill of predicting what might go wrong and figuring out a solution, in advance.  Continue reading...

Is Dreyer's English "utterly correct"? Of course not, as the author would be the first to acknowledge. But it's compulsively readable, thoroughly helpful, and delightfully funny. For anyone who cares about writing well, it's an utterly essential addition to your shelf of most-reached-for reference books.  Continue reading...

Just as there are oodles of food trucks, there are mega-oodles of language emetics in the form of euphemisms. Please hate enjoying or enjoy hating the following.  Continue reading...

Linguistics and Big Data have been a fruitful partnership since they first found each other, and new hookups with promising results are happening all the time. Here's a small sampling of the riches to be found in two new corpora — the TV Corpus and the Movie Corpus.  Continue reading...

influencer – the word, not the status – is one of the most influential buzzwords of our era.  Continue reading...

Even if you enjoy being alone, the exquisite loneliness of writing can still be tough. Here are five ways to deal with that.  Continue reading...