Reading time: About 4 minutes Shortening sentences — or, at least editing longer ones — is a great trick for making your writing more accessible to more readers… When I lead a writing workshop with a sizeable group of engineers or business people, I notice that many of them write sentences […]
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Reading time: About 1 minute Do you need to become better at accepting feedback? This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find materials to help other writers… Some writers have a hard time accepting feedback for their work. And when I
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Viewing time: 3 min. 58 sec. The Write Question is a weekly video podcast about writing that I started in 2017 and that ran, more or less weekly, until April 2022. This is a republication of issue #49, about sticky writing. The post first ran on March 9/18. Transcript: Welcome
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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 similes and metaphors from novelist Tom Rachman…. I found the 2010 book, The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman, to be a magnificent coup —
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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: mesallinace…. Craig Brown’s book, Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, is enormous fun, even for people who aren’t fans of the royals. A kind
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Reading time: About 3 minutes Do you know how to let your mind wander? Don’t worry if people call you a “daydreamer.” A wandering mind is your passport to greater creativity. A majestic cypress tree grew outside my grade 11 classroom window, eons ago. I remember spending hours staring at
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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 blog post about cleaning your writing office… Is your office (or your desk) relatively tidy? Or
Is it worth cleaning your writing office? Read More »
Viewing time: 3 min. 48 sec. The Write Question is a weekly video podcast about writing that I started in 2017 and that ran, more or less weekly, until April 2022. This is a republication of issue #48, about writerly guilty and how it can derail you. The post first
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Reading time: About 1 minute I like to share similes and metaphors I encounter in my reading. I write today about the figurative language of Julian Barnes…. I read Julian Barnes’ latest novel, The Only Story, earlier this year. While I enjoyed the beginning, I can’t say the book was up
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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: uxorious…. When I encountered the word uxorious in Patricia Hampl’s very fine non-fiction book The Art of the Wasted Day, I had
What does ‘uxorious’ mean? Read More »
