Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: xeric…. In addition to being a famous and highly successful novelist, Barbara Kingsolver is also a botanist. Her novels tend to incorporate her specialized knowledge, none more […]
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If you are writing a book, understand that, eventually, you will need an author website. Here’s how to go about creating one. Step 1: Decide on your platform. As of 2021, the two easiest-to-install ones are WordPress and SquareSpace. I use the former and many people use the latter. Just be aware that if you’re
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Reading time: Just over 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about such writing from Tejal Rao… I have been a bagel fan since 1980. That year, I made a trip to visit a friend in the East, and we stood in line
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: ouroboros…. I’m a big fan of Geraldine DeRuiter — a travel, food and, really, anything writer — who won a 2019 James Beard Foundation Journalism award for
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If you want to improve your writing, one of the first steps you should take is double-checking your readability statistics. If you’ve never heard this term before, the concept was first proposed way back in 1893 by an English professor from the University of Nebraska named Lucius Adelno Sherman. Sherman was the first person to
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about some metaphors from Rachel Friedman… The book’s subtitle says it all: On Creativity, Potential and the Imperfect Art of Adulthood. A tiny, perfect book by Rachel Friedman, published under the main
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: zoonotic… I read the story in the New York Times because the headline grabbed my attention. “Mothers All Over Are Losing It,” the headline read. Written by
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Reading time: Less than 3 minutes If you think sunk costs are a topic suitable only for economists, read on to learn how this issue affects writers as well. Do you ever do any of the following: Work for a client who belittles you or who pays you poorly? Accept writing or editing contracts for
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Like many people, I occasionally have problems with pronouns — words like he, she, it, and they. For example, I might write, “The folder was on the bus, but now it’s gone.” Do you see how that sentence is not clear? Generally speaking, this type of problem is referred to as an unclear antecedent because
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Reading time: Less than 2 minutes I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about similes and metaphors from John le Carré… I don’t read much “genre” fiction so it might surprise you that I consider myself a John le Carré fan. Although he is famous
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