Four Powerful Ways to Bring Your Writing Goals Closer

Do you wish you could get further with your writing? Whatever your writing goal is, follow these four steps and you’ll find yourself making much faster progress.

How Do You Teach Someone to Write Well?

Why is the craft of writing in such a dire state? The best writers of our time create magnificent prose, but the vast majority of people seem competent at best.

15 Big Little Words

Sometimes, short and sweet is best, and English includes many three-letter words that help us accommodate our yearning for concise composition — or, to be brief, fix our yen for curt prose. Some are workhorse words — the article the, the pronouns his and her, conjunctions like and, prepositions such as for, verbs like put and say.

A Quiz About Parallel Structure

Many writers are thwarted by unsuccessful efforts to express equivalent ideas in phrases that clearly identify the hierarchy and relationships of those ideas. Here are five sentences in which syntactical structure fails to communicate these concepts.

75 Synonyms for “Angry”

Are you angry? At the risk of infuriating you, or making you apoplectic or exasperated, here are dozens of words to use to describe your choleric condition more precisely:

Is Identifying a Person’s Age Necessary?

In fiction, the number of years since a character was born is of variable importance, depending on the person’s prominence in the narrative and on the nature of the story as well, but at the very least, the author usually provides some clue, at least, as to approximate age.

12 Evocative Words That Include “Ae”

There’s something about the digraph ae that lends it a dignity and an aura. Perhaps it’s the vowel combination’s ubiquity as a plural marker taken directly from Latin (antennae, nebulae, and so on). Maybe it’s the frequency of its appearance in classical nomenclature (maenad, praetor, and the like).

A Hyphenation Quiz

Yes, I hype correct hyphenation, but proper treatment of the little line enables clear communication, so on this site, I repeatedly attach importance to the attachment tool. In the following sentences, excessive or insufficient use of hyphens clouds rather than clarifies.

5 Confused Word Pairs

The similarity of the letters e and i leads to frequent confusion between similar-looking and similar-sounding pairs of words. Here are five such word pairs with their respective meanings and tips for keeping each word in its place.

7 Negative Prefixes

What determines which prefix is attached to a word to form that word’s antonym? Why unlawful, but illegal? Why infirm, but impaired? You may be surprised that there’s a method to this madness: Negative prefixes come in forms that vary not only according to language derivation but also depending on meaning, and variations occur according to the letter that follows.

50 Idioms About Talking

Last week, I offered a roster of synonyms for talk and talking. This list expands on that theme by offering set phrases about talking and their meaning.

Analog vs. Digital

What’s the difference between analog and digital, and why is the latter word, which originally referred to fingers, now the antithesis of “hands-on”?

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