Mark Nichol Among the more colorful specimens of the human race you will find many who earned a sobriquet, or nickname — what we word geeks call an epithet. (Epithet, among other meanings, is also a euphemism for name-calling or other uncomplimentary utterances.) From Alexander the Great to the King of Pop, memorable figures with such appellations … Read more
In 1970, poet Kenneth Koch went into classrooms at a Manhattan elementary school and benevolently tricked children into realizing that every one of them was a writer. It’s been a long time since I read Wishes Lies, and Dreams, his paperback memoir/anthology, but I do recall that the first thing he did was ask the … Read more
Nominalizations are nouns formed from verbs. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; various parts of speech are transmogrified into others as part of the process of language. But such creations, colloquially known as smothered verbs, can easily complicate sentences, leading to wordiness and passive construction. Enable for more dynamic prose by allowing verbs to … Read more
They often seem disreputable, like sullen idlers loitering in a public thoroughfare, but they actually do a lot of hard work and are usually persnickety about the tasks to which they are put. They are interjections — one class of them, anyway: those lacking etymological origins but packed with meaning. But how do you know … Read more
Gender and ability bias in language doesn’t register for many people, but that’s often because many of them do not belong to the classes who have been subjected to the bias. For example, many writers persist in referring to our species, collectively, as man or mankind, even though several reasonable alternatives exist: the human race, … Read more
In one of the most recent tugs-of-war between qualitative practice and quantitative practicality, search engine optimization has been eroding the exalted status of time-honored elegant variation, the convention of avoiding wearying repetition of words throughout a sentence or a passage. One of the principles of SEO, the suite of strategies for shaping online content to … Read more
It’s time to talk about time: specifically, how to write references to units of temporal measurement. This post will note style for increments from seconds to centuries. Time of Day Imprecise times of day are generally spelled out: “six-o’clock news,” “half past one,” “a quarter to three,” and “eight thirty,” as well as “noon” and … Read more
You see them all the time during rural drives and suburban errands alike, those olde-fashioned wooden shingles mounted on mailboxes or dangling from porches or fastened to walls: “The Smith’s” and the like—stark reminders that possessives still throw many people for a loop. Rules about possessives can be complicated, but this error is straightforward enough: … Read more
A couple of years ago, a site visitor asked about the necessity of obtaining permission to refer to trademarked products by name in fiction. Here’s the specific query: How is copyright dealt with in fiction writing? For example, if I sell a story where I wrote that a character jogged to Burger King in his … Read more
Hyphens are helpful little things that aid in reader comprehension. Although confusion is not at great risk in phrases like “sharp-dressed man” (though the omission of the hyphen suggests that the passage literally refers to a dressed man who is sharp) others, such as “small-business owner,” can at the very least conjure distracting imagery if … Read more
Navigating the formatting rules about titles of compositions — books and chapters, movies and TV shows, albums and songs, and the like — can seem like negotiating a minefield. Here’s a handy map to help you maneuver through the terrain: In print, two primary formats exist for identifying a creative work. Titles of entire bodies … Read more
Sentences can be simple. Or, by inserting a phrase within a sentence, as I’m doing here, they can become complex. Doing so by adding what’s called a parenthetical phrase, or a parenthetical, makes sentences richer and more informative; no one wants to read sentence after sentence at the level of complexity of “See Dick run.” … Read more