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: enfilade…. I know when I read a Julian Barnes novel that I’m going to have the bonus of several new words to learn. This was the case […]
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Reading time: About 3 minutes Has it ever occurred to you to plan for the worst while hoping for the best? This is precisely why preparing for imperfection is such an integral part of the writing process. If I had a dollar for every person who told me they couldn’t write because they were a “perfectionist,” well,
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Reading time: About 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 address the question: is writing like homework? Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, who was co-author of the 1980 and 1983 Star Wars films The Empire Strikes Back
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Viewing time: 4 minutes and 13 seconds 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 #8, about how to switch from writing to editing, which first ran on March 10/17. Transcript: Welcome to
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Reading time: About 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of images from Hope Jahren… Hope Jahren is an American geochemist and geobiologist at the University of Oslo in Norway, known for her work using stable isotope analysis to analyze fossil forests. But she is also the author of
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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: abjure…. I’ve encountered the word abjure many times, and undoubtedly learned its meaning many times as well, but for some reason it’s never managed to lodge itself
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Reading time: About five minutes The human brain is powerful, but it also makes mistakes. Scientists consider some of these mistakes to be what they call cognitive biases… Is cognitive bias harming your writing? Even if you are unfamiliar with the term, the answer is almost certainly yes. Cognitive bias, which is studied in psychology
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Reading time: About 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 post about taking a holiday from writing… People often ask me if it’s a bad idea to take a holiday from
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Viewing time: 3 minutes and 26 seconds 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 the issue #7, about how to avoid death by PowerPoint, which ran on March 2/17. Transcript: Welcome to The
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Reading time: About 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about similes from Jennifer Haigh…. The most recent novel by Jennifer Haigh takes on the topic of abortion. And as the New York Times puts it, ” it would be a terrible mistake
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