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  1. Blog Excerpts

     NOAD Word of the Year: "Refudiate"
    Tue Nov 16 00:00:00 EST 2010
    It's time once again for "Word of the Year" season! The New Oxford American Dictionary gets things started by naming its Word of 2010: Sarah Palin's notorious Twitterism, refudiate. Read about the selection and the runners-up (including vuvuzela and nom nom) on the Oxford University Press blog here. And read more about refudiate in Ben Zimmer's Word Routes column here.

  2. Word Count

     Punctuation Point: Joining Independent Clauses
    Mon Nov 15 00:00:00 EST 2010
    Recently, someone asked me about joining two independent clauses to make a compound sentence. She thought such a sentence would need a comma, but she often found them missing. Today, we'll review how to join independent clauses.

  3. Weekly Worksheet

     Getting to the Heart of Gettysburg
    Mon Nov 15 00:00:00 EST 2010
    One hundred and forty-seven years ago this week, Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most famous American speeches: The Gettysburg Address, a speech that reportedly lasted less than two minutes and that he considered "a flat failure." Use this worksheet to help students use vocabulary and key lines from the address to discover Lincoln's lasting message to Americans.

  4. Word Routes

     "The Web" at 20
    Fri Nov 12 00:00:00 EST 2010
    Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau authored the proposal that launched "the World Wide Web," and the English language has never been the same. In my On Language column for The New York Times Magazine this Sunday, I take a look back at the inception of "the Web" and its many linguistic offspring over the years. As a master metaphor for our online age, the gossamer Web has proved remarkably resilient.

  5. Word Count

     Causes of Writing Death: Narcissism
    Thu Nov 11 00:00:00 EST 2010
    Recently I wrote here about trivial purposeful falsity, TPF for short, a major cause of writing death. Here’s another: narcissism.

  6. Teachers at Work

     The Nitty-Gritty Essay, Part II
    Wed Nov 10 00:00:00 EST 2010

    (Read part one of "The Nitty-Gritty Essay" here.)

    I'm not sure what the deal is, but people have a fixation with five-paragraph essays. It's as if five is some magical number that a good essay must have. However, that couldn't be further from the truth. Some essays simply aren't worth five paragraphs, and can suffice with three or even four paragraphs. Some need ten or more. For those writers who struggle with composition, it's what's in the paragraphs that counts, and how long the paragraphs are.

  7. Weekly Worksheet

     Understanding Veterans Day
    Tue Nov 09 00:00:00 EST 2010
    Teachers, your students may know that they are getting a day off for Veterans Day, but they may not know why! Use this worksheet to lead your students through some Visual Thesaurus research to define the words veteran and armistice and to understand how Armistice Day became Veterans Day back in 1954. Click here for the worksheet.

  8. Word Count

     Seven Ways to Ensure Your Reading Is Helping Your Writing
    Tue Nov 09 00:00:00 EST 2010

    When people ask me the one thing they can do to improve their writing and I tell them to read more, I often receive shocked looks in return. Is it really that simple?

    Well, no, of course it isn't. But reading -- and reading well -- can make a huge difference to your writing life. Here are seven tips to ensure you're doing it right.

  9. Wordshop

     Transform a Minivan Ad into a Word Lesson
    Tue Nov 09 00:00:00 EST 2010
    Word lessons are everywhere--even on minivan billboards. The new ad campaign for the Honda Odyssey prominently features the neologism "Vanquility."

  10. Candlepower

     Red Pen Diaries: Das Kapitalization
    Mon Nov 08 00:00:00 EST 2010

    There it was again — a random capital. The offender was the "M" at the beginning of "Mother," as in "Her Mother was the first to notice she could really sing."

    If it had been "Mother told me she thought I could really sing," it would have been fine and dandy because "Mother" would have been serving as a proper noun there, referring to a particular maternal figure. But when it's not standing in for a name, "mother" should not be capitalized.
171 172 173 174 175 Displaying 1721-1730 of 3488 Results