Shortly after 10 a.m. EDT on June 28, FOXNews and CNN erroneously reported that the US Supreme Court had invalidated the Affordable Care Act. Simultaneously, Scotusblog, which was live-blogging the last Supreme Court session of the 2011 term, correctly announced that the Court had upheld most of the ACA.  Continue reading...

"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...

When Nik Wallenda crossed over Niagara Falls on tightrope as a daredevil stunt, it was a golden opportunity for commentators to use the word funambulist.  Continue reading...

Writing coach Daphne Gray-Grant has an unusual suggestion for writers developing their craft: "Take a published work, written by an author you respect and admire, and copy a portion of it, word for word." Just don't pass it off as your own!  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...