Long before Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the Little House on the Prairie (Bookshop|Amazon), she worked as a journalist, chronicling life in the Ozarks. In one of her early writings, Wilder refers to what she calls “the famous question”:...
The anatomy of effective prose, and the poetry of anatomy. Ever wonder what it’d be like to audit a class taught by a famous writer? A graduate student’s essay offers a taste of a semester studying with author Annie Dillard. Also, what...
When Julie, a journalism student at California’s San Francisco State University, got her dream job covering the San Francisco Giants for a season, she noticed while transcribing interviews that the players seemed to use the terms somebody...
Even though blogs can’t read and newspapers can’t speak, it’s totally appropriate to write “the blog reads,” or “the newspaper says.” This is part of a complete episode.
C-r-r-r-r-reeeeeeeeaaaaaak! Last weekend, we reached into the AWWW vault and pulled out an oldie but goodie, featuring “death eatin’ a cracker walkin’ backwards,” “graveyard shift,” “saved by the...
Grant recommends two blogs about writing well and copyediting: Merrill Perlman writes The Language Corner blog for the Columbia Journalism Review, and Philip B. Corbett of the New York Times reports on actual grammatical and usage mistakes in that...