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: feeble… A recent, thoroughly engaging piece in the New Yorker, “Go Ask Alice,” explores the story of Alice in Wonderland — “as familiar […]
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Reading time: Just over 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: thrawn. I read Kate Atkinson’s 1995 debut novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum more than a decade ago and it has remained one 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: dilatory… Are you too dilatory in your writing? I encountered the word dilatory in my recent reading. It appeared in the book Birdsong
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Reading time: About 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: sententious. I’d avoided the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly — by Jean-Dominique Bauby (pictured above) — for years. As a survivor 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: maieutic… I wrote yesterday about Draftback — a fascinating piece of free software that will allow you to record your writing, keystroke
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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: cloisonné. I’m not hugely interested in things, unless perhaps they are books. I hold no love for fashion or shoes (as most people can
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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: exegetical. Recently, I’ve become a fan of the very fine American writer Nicholson Baker, pictured here. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award (for
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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: hermeneutical. I love few things more than reading about food, when two of my most intensely held pleasures combine into one glorious mouthful. When I
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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: caterwauling. I think I’ve known since grade 5 that the term caterwauling means a long,wailing cry, usually heard on streets. What I hadn’t realized is
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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: marmoreal. I’ve never read anything by William S. Burroughs, not even Naked Lunch (1959), but when flipping through a stack of my beloved New
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