Reading time: Less than 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about figurative language from novelist Emma Donoghue… Born in Dublin, Emma Donoghue (pictured above) is an award-winning writer now living in Canada. Like thousands of other readers, I was impressed with her gripping novel Room, […]
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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: parvenu. I learned the word parvenu as a child. My father was extraordinarily pompous and used it to describe people he didn’t like: wealthy people with no class
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a Grammarly blog post about the Oxford comma… Where do you stand on the Oxford comma? If you’re a writer or copy
Do you use the Oxford comma? Read More »
Reading time: Just over 1 minute How long should you make blog posts? The answer might surprise you. I know it shocked me… My webmaster keeps telling me I should write longer posts. “That’s what Google wants,” he says. I’ve accommodated him by agreeing to write one super-long post (a close to 2,000 words as possible) per
What’s the best length for a blog post? Read More »
Reading time: Just over 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of metaphors from novelist Elizabeth Hay… As a longtime fan of the Canadian novelist Elizabeth Hay, pictured above, I was delighted to learn this summer that she’d written a book back
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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: hypotaxis. I’ve watched the upcoming American election with more than my usual interest (I have an undergrad degree in political science), as a result of the bizarre performance
What’s ‘hypotaxis’? Read More »
Reading time: Less than 3 minutes “That’s bad writing” is a phrase I hear a lot, whether applied to a book, magazine article or blog post. But what, specifically, makes writing “bad” and what can we do about it? When I recommended the Gregory Maguire novel, Wicked, to a neighbour of mine, I had no idea
‘Bad writing’ — what deserves that label? Read More »
Reading time: Less than 1 minute This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a blog post about creativity based on the thoughts of psychologist Jerome Bruner… Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner (1915–2016), was celebrated for
Jerome Bruner’s essential conditions of creativity Read More »
Reading time: Just over 1 minute If you want to make your web searches more fruitful and more effective, consider downloading a free app called OneTab for your Chrome browser…. I’m a fan of writer and tech expert Clive Thompson, pictured above. You may have seen a link to one of his videos I posted on
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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 a series of metaphors from Lauren Groff… Lauren Groff is a New York-born novelist who now lives in Gainesville, Florida. Her most recent book, Fates and Furies, won the 2015 American Booksellers’ Association Indies’ Choice Award
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