Here's how tracking your output — specifically, recording how many words you write each day or how much time you spend editing — can help you.  Continue reading...

The woman suffrage movement introduced Americans to a new vocabulary of voting rights. Here's a centennial look back at our linguistic debt to the 19th Amendment and its advocates.  Continue reading...

If you've visited the world of online dating you may have noticed the disparities between the ways males and females present themselves, and the disparities between the ways that they seem to want to appear to each other.  Continue reading...

The world is filled with bad editors. Here's how to deal with them.  Continue reading...

Linguistically, it seems, the second decade of the 21st century was all about our selves. At its annual meeting the American Dialect Society selected (my) pronouns as its word of the year for 2019 and singular or nonbinary they as the word of the decade.  Continue reading...

We are now far beyond the day when a product might be distinguished from its competitors with descriptors such as mild, strong, or rich. Lately I'm noticing what is surely a very common trope in consumer marketing: the enhancement of an adjectival descriptor for a product by introducing it with an adverbial.  Continue reading...