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: batholith I read the book The Mountain Story by Canadian novelist Lori Lansens for one reason: Another novel of hers, The Girls, sits near the top of my lifetime top […]
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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: spline… Today’s word of the week comes not from my reading but from my husband. Yesterday we happened to be talking about a piece of furniture in our
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: perspicacity…. I’ve heard the word perspicacity since I was a child. I’ve probably even used it. But I could no longer remember what it meant when I encountered
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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: nocebo… I usually enjoy reading Seth Godin’s blog. I find it entertaining, interesting and frequently provocative. But it’s always written in plain English, so one thing I don’t
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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: epergene… I view myself as a serious cook and entertainer, but I had never come across the word epergne until I read Patricia Volk’s memoir: Stuffed: Adventures of
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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: mondegreen. I learned a new word last week, as a result of my recent obsession with podcasts. Sadly, I can no longer remember which program I heard it
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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: petard. You’ve probably heard the expression “to be hoisted by your own petard” on many occasions. It means to be injured by the device that you used 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: listicle… I’m not a morbid person. But following the deaths of my father, my father-in-law and my mother, I’ve taken more of an interest in end-of-life issues. Perhaps
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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: jiggery-pokery… As a youth, I wasn’t a huge David Bowie fan. But of course I grew up to his music and his Ziggy Stardust and Thin White Duke personas.
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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 an article on collective nouns from the Language Matters blog by the Oxford Dictionaries… Collective nouns — names for a group of people
Collecting some collective nouns… Read More »