Tonight, we celebrate New Year’s Eve
Champagne on ice? Check. Cupboards stocked with food? Check. Coins in the pocket to signify wealth for the coming year? Check. Twelve grapes to gobble at midnight, also meaning wealth? Check. Bright red or yellow undies to ‘catch’ love or money? Er...
Live your life, part 2
We interrupt the week’s frantic shopping, work and studies to bring you this important public message: Do not wait to live your life until you find the perfect man or woman. If the Sexiest Man Alive (so named by People magazine), Ryan Reynolds, and the Sexiest...
My grandma helps avoid the passive
Maybe it’s the influence of Legal departments, who prefer the blameless “mistakes were made” or “it was decided” to naming names. But corporate writers often have to fight for the active voice — you know, where the subject performs...
E-newsletters a great tool
While Facebook and Twitter continue to get all the press, email newsletters just keep building their solid reputation. In fact, they are “the Internet’s best tool for supplementing a website,” according to web usability expert Jakob Nielsen:...Funny but dubious honour
Leave it to the British to give an award for Bad Sex in Fiction! The 18th annual (dis)honour, given out last night, went to Rowan Somerville for his novel The Shape of Her. Somerville won over the judges with phrases such as the one describing an act of lovemaking as...Where are the proofreaders?
Yesterday, a headline in a prominent newspaper boldly proclaimed that the Saudi king was handing over the reigns while he was in the U.S. for treatment. Since a king only has one reign, and he holds it whether he’s in the U.S. or not, I thought at first maybe...
Drop the dictionary; choose words that communicate
The author of one of my textbooks must be a friend of the magniloquent (see below) Conrad Black, or maybe a contributor to the harder levels of FreeRice.com. I say that because the text is sprinkled with so many obscure, unusual, “look how smart I am” kinds of words....