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...

In the Sunday Review section of the New York Times, I took a look at how forensic linguists try to determine the author of an e-mail by picking up on subtle clues of style and grammar. This is very much in the news, thanks to a lawsuit filed against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg by one Paul Ceglia, who claims that Zuckerberg promised him half of Facebook's holdings, as proven by e-mail exchanges he says they had. Did Zuckerberg actually write the e-mails? Call the language detectives.  Continue reading...

"Cheryl's mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine..." So begins the winner of the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which competitors write incredibly bad opening sentences to incredibly bad novels. Read the whole thing, and the rest of the results, here.

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...

I used to be a personal journal person. Every January I would buy one of those 6x9 inch spiral wildlife calendars, the kind where you can see a week at a glance and have lots of space to write. At the end of each day, before I turned off my light, I'd scrawl in very tiny handwriting all my thoughts for the day. Sometimes I didn't say much. Other times I went into the margins or the white space below the pictures.  Continue reading...

More than 30 years ago, when I was completing my undergraduate degree, I found myself in an "open-book" final exam. Talk about the magic of threes... I had to write three essays on three different books in three hours. As allowed, I had lugged into the exam an impossibly tall stack of books.  Continue reading...