I'm a big believer in the magic of three. You know — the three little pigs, the three Musketeers, the three Stooges. There's something ineffable but magical about a list of three. So, when I had three unrelated people forward me a Wall Street Journal article on the Pomodoro technique in less than a week, well, I took it as a sign. This was something I needed to investigate!  Continue reading...

Michael Lydon, a well-known writer on popular music since the 1960s, has for many years also been writing about writing. Lydon's essays, written with a colloquial clarity, shed fresh light on familiar and not so familiar aspects of the writing art. Here Lydon looks at how writers from Shakespeare to Tolstoy have understood the power of bringing opposites together.  Continue reading...

Erin Brenner of Right Touch Editing provides "bite-sized lessons to improve your writing" on her engaging blog The Writing Resource. Here Erin tackles the tricky distinction between compose and comprise.  Continue reading...

One of my three children is dyslexic, but I taught the other two to read myself. It wasn't hard, but here's the deal — what I taught them wasn't so much reading as it was decoding. That is, I explained to them the various sounds that all the letters in the alphabet represent. For example, the letter e can sometimes sound like "eh" as in pen. But it can also sound like "ee" as in we.  Continue reading...

Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, offers useful tips to copy editors and anyone else who prizes clear and orderly writing. Here she takes an extended look at the troublesome issue of when to hyphenate compounds.  Continue reading...

Michael Lydon, a well-known writer on popular music since the 1960s, has for many years also been writing about writing. Lydon's essays, written with a colloquial clarity, shed fresh light on familiar and not so familiar aspects of the writing art. Here Lydon explores how metaphors have the power to "fuse fact and fancy."  Continue reading...

Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, offers useful tips to copy editors and anyone else who prizes clear and orderly writing. Here she takes a look at the predilection of headline-writers for the word likely.  Continue reading...