Mike Pope, a technical editor at Microsoft, writes:

My name — Pope — is surprisingly easy to mishear. "Polk?" people ask. "Hope?" This is particularly true over the telephone. Even spelling it out doesn't help — P-O-P-E — and I find myself exaggerating the aspiration on those plosives.  Continue reading...

I'm embarrassed to admit that my handwriting is so bad and so physically uncomfortable for me that I no longer use a pen. Well, except for dire emergencies or for signing checks from the Bank of Mom (which some might call the same thing!) Instead, I use my Neo Alphasmart.  Continue reading...

University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron is a regular Visual Thesaurus contributor, and we have been proud to feature selected pieces he has written for his site, The Web of Language. Today WOL celebrates its fifth anniversary, and Dennis has commemorated the occasion by looking back on some of his most notable posts.  Continue reading...

Whenever we read fiction, a three-way bond springs to life between the writer, the reader, and the characters. Writer and reader are real human beings, the characters are imaginary, but to write a believable story, the writer must convince the readers that the characters are as human as he or she and we are, and draw us into a conversation in which facts of life may be compared and foibles confessed.  Continue reading...

Lisa McLendon is Deputy Copy Desk Chief at the Wichita Eagle, writes: I ran across an interesting post over the weekend that asks: "Why do people hate on those of us who know grammar? Why is it insulting to have your language skills corrected?"  Continue reading...

A journalist friend on Twitter, Oliver, asked my opinion of ongoing. He said he had been asked to ban it in a style guide, and that he didn't see why. I said I had nothing against it, and that banning it struck me as excessive and unhelpful. Although I sometimes find constructions like ongoing situation and ongoing issue vague or euphemistic, I see no point in prohibiting them outright.  Continue reading...

I like to play games with clients. I don't mean anything nasty by this! Quite the opposite: I play games because it helps make the learning more fun.

Recently, I had a client -- a reporter -- who was having a hard time writing stories.  Continue reading...