Below you will find the most popular articles of the past month. Check them out to make sure you have not missed any. A Writer Can be Anyone or Anything: I attended a writers’ workshop session at which a minor, but much-published author warned participants against creating POV (point of view) characters of the opposite … Read more
Mark, one of our readers, requests a discussion of the difference between systematic and systemic. Both adjectives derive from the noun system which, in late Latin, meant a musical interval, that is, a difference in pitch between two notes. While retaining its original meaning, the Latin word came to mean, in addition: a union of … Read more
The Oxford Dictionary of Etymology tells an interesting story of the origin of the word knickerbockers. In 1809 Washington Irving, who is famous for the short stories Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, published a book called History of New York. The book was published under the pen name Diedrich Knickerbocker. Pictures … Read more
This is a guest article by Andy MacDonald. Today companies are realizing that cleverly written copy can seriously affect the responsiveness to their ads and marketing collateral. Online and offline content has to be designed in a cleverly written manner to induce the reader to purchase the business’s products or services, or otherwise do what … Read more
I saw this in an article about caring for a laptop: If you store your laptop in the vehicle for any period of time, keep in mind that the extreme temperature ranges within the vehicle could wreck havoc with your laptop. It’s not the first time I’ve seen the word “wreck” substituted for “wreak” in … Read more
In part one of How To Write An SEO Article, we looked at how important it is to get the basics of an SEO article correct from the start. We looked at the importance of writing relevant content to the user and not the search engine, and we also looked at the research that goes … Read more
Many of us want to write fiction but rarely manage to get round to it. We struggle to find a free hour to write in – or the energy to write. Doing writing bursts is a great way to get going when time is short and motivation flagging. What is a writing burst? I came … Read more
One of our readers who works as a Web Content Editor raises an interesting question concerning the handling of customer comments on a product web site: Should comments posted by customers be edited for glaring errors of spelling and grammar? Consider, for example, the following customer recommendation for an imaginary product: I recomend the Ajax … Read more
I was startled to read the following in an article by Associated Press writer Christopher Bodeen: But China has angrily rejected all calls for dialogue, and Tibet’s hardline Communist Party chief [Zhang Qingli ] was quoted Wednesday in a particularly viscous attack on the Dalai Lama The quotation left me picturing His Holiness covered with … Read more
One common spelling error is omitting the K at the beginning of words where it is silent (example: nick-nack instead of knick-knack). The origins of silent K are difficult to pin down. What we do know is that the k wasn’t always silent, especially in words of Germanic origin. Just as it is in German, … Read more
Reader Eric wonders about the uses of will and shall. When do you use “will” and “shall?” I know that [they] mean the same thing, but I would like to know when to use them in the correct grammatical sense. In modern English will and shall are helping verbs. They are used with other verbs, … Read more
I work in technical support, which has given me many opportunities to develop the skill of phrasing things carefully. If you’re in an IT department or technology company, you doubtlessly have to deal with emails from irate people who’ve just spent hours struggling with a piece of unhelpful software. These users often have a preconception … Read more