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: samizdat…. I haven’t yet watched The Handmaid’s Tale on television (I’m a slow enough TV watcher that I’m still making my belated way through a boxed set of […]
What is ‘samizdat’? Read More »
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 Siddhartha Mukherjee… I have a particular admiration for people who write about science in interesting and evocative ways. For me, Siddhartha Mukherjee (pictured above) is one
The figurative language of Siddhartha Mukherjee… Read More »
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: doughty… I don’t watch much TV but I was sick with food poisoning last week and that was enough to keep me in bed for two days. What else
What does ‘doughty’ mean? Read More »
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 David Bergen… I had searched for the book The Case of Lena S. by David Bergen (pictured above) since its publication in 2012. The novel
The figurative language of David Bergen… Read More »
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: blackbirding… Set in Australia, in the middle of the 19th century, David Malouf’s award-winning novel, Remembering Babylon, explores both the subtleties and the gross injustices of racism. The
What is ‘blackbirding’? 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 an article written by Carl Richards, a financial planner and a New York Times columnist… I’ve been following Carl Richards for about
Writing advice from Carl Richards 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 similes from Rebecca Kauffman… I love it when I book I pull randomly from a library shelf, written by an author I’ve never heard of before, turns out to
The figurative language of Rebecca Kauffman… Read More »
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: phalanx… I enjoy literary mystery stories. One of my longtime favourites has been A.S. Byatt’s Booker-Prize winning novel Possession, the story of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives
What’s a ‘phalanx’? 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 incorrectly used words… One of my pet peeves is to see a grocery store sign reading, “this aisle
101 incorrectly used words Read More »
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 simile from Kurt Palka… I had high hopes for the novel The Piano Maker by Kurt Palka. By all appearances, it should have been a finely written literary novel. An
The figurative language of Kurt Palka Read More »
