Michael Lydon has been swayed by the power of allusion. "I began by laughing at P. G. Wodehouse's addled literary quotations, and then I discovered how powerful and surprisingly subtle a writing resource allusion can be," he writes. "Though often overlooked, allusion lives omnipresent in the writing that surrounds us."  Continue reading...

July 4th marked the 167th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau's decision to go into the woods because he "wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life," as he wrote in his classic memoir, Walden. In the midst of quiet contemplation of nature and language, Thoreau did something we hardly ever recollect: he developed a handful of new words.  Continue reading...

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...

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...