‘Spaghetti on a plate’ and more pandemic analogies (Wordnerdery)
Don’t you appreciate when people use creative ways to help you understand something complicated? This is especially welcome as we continue grappling with COVID-19. These days, scientists are explaining how vaccines or preventive measures work, the perfect situation...
We’re laughing, but no joke: COVID-19 vaccines have fancy new names
When I heard that three COVID-19 vaccines were getting new names, and when I saw the names, I thought it was a joke. But no, apparently it’s true. Health Canada has “authorized brand name changes” for the vaccines formerly known as Pfizer, Moderna and...
More links about words and writing you might have missed
So much of what we see online seems pretty random. That’s because the lifespan of content posted on social media is mostly fleeting: On Snapchat, you might have 10 seconds, although Stories last about 24 hours. Tweets might be visible to your followers for an...
100+ buzzwords and jargon bugging us in 2021
Roughly this time last year, I was lamenting the overuse of words like cadence that have turned them into jargon or buzzwords. It’s still everywhere, as in this recent example: “Prime Your Revenue Engine with a Prospecting Cadence.” It’s also been a big year for...
Bullet protocol: How to handle lists (Wordnerdery)
Readers love lists. Organizing long and possibly confusing information into a list helps readers scan and understand the information. But there are multiple ways to use punctuation in lists, as I was reminded while proofreading a client document that used all of them....
More awful writing to inspire you
If you like the idea of spinning a wordy, over-the-top sentence that would be proud to launch a bad novel, you must know about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. I first found and wrote about this amusing contest in 2009, although it began in 1982. As the site says,...
Words, writing and more: Links to great content you might have missed
Oh, hello! (Gets up and dusts herself off.) You may have noticed that I’ve fallen off the weekly blogging bandwagon. I’ll blame work, and summer, and maybe a lack of blog mojo. Instead of an original post, here are some of the smart, helpful, and sometimes...
5 ways to help make numbers make sense (Wordnerdery)
Making a tiny change in your own life that would fight climate change seems impossible. That may seem especially so after a week that saw catastrophic flooding in Europe, wildfires in Western Canada and the U.S., a tornado north of Toronto and more. Yet Starbucks...