Reading time: Less than 2 minutes 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 Aminatta Forna…. Aminatta Forna (pictured above) was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain and spent parts of her childhood in […]
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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: clabber…. I had never heard the word clabber until I read the novel The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. Here is how Bennett used the term: “Lighter
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Reading time: Less than 3 minutes Do you have any bad habits with writing? Here’s how to demolish them so you can learn to write with ease, grace and pleasure… When people tell me they cannot write, I never suggest they get more disciplined or work harder. Instead, I try to help them figure out
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In 2006, Princeton University psychology professor Daniel Oppenheimer had an article published in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology. The title of his paper was: “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity.” But that was a joke. His subtitle gave the game away: “Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.” Here is the link 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 a series of similes and metaphors from Brit Bennett…. Brit Bennett (pictured above) was born and raised in Southern California and graduated from Stanford University. Later, she earned her MFA in
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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: 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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