When it comes to capitalizing words in sentences, if it’s not the first word or a proper noun (someone or something’s name), don’t. Junking up sentences with randomly capitalized words makes them hard to read. The rando-cap crashes like a… Read more

I’ve temporarily run out of syntactic annoyances to rail about, so here’s a poem, “Götterdämmerung,” which means an ass-whooping by the Gods or demagogues (my German’s not too good). Naturally, it’s whimsical, with a message of hope. Götterdämmerung The egg… Read more

Dashes are really handy items of punctuation. They can be used in place of commas, parentheses, colons, and semicolons for emphasis and clarity. And like the three bears, they come in a trio of sizes—en dash, em dash, and swung… Read more

If your oven looks as if a roast exploded inside every Sunday since 1999, here’s a tip: start a blog. I guarantee that oven cleaning will shoot up your to-do list, along with power washing the deck and exercise. I… Read more

If you’re making new year’s resolutions, it can’t hurt to add one about improved communication. To help, I’ve rounded up some easy targets for your better writing practice. From chilling your tone to selecting the right word, here are five… Read more

It was a pleasure chatting with Bettina Blanchard on Life Simplified Radio recently. We talked about some of my favorite things: short, sweet writing, mindfulness, and making time for the things that really matter to us. Here’s a link to the… Read more

What is it with cats and the Internet? Do cat owners have nothing better to do than GIF their pets, all hopped up on nip? Or have they succumbed to cat-induced schizophrenia, in which case the cats themselves are to… Read more

Mine (The best words. In the best order.) was repurposed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s definition of poetry. (Like the works of Shakespeare, those words, in that order are in the public domain.) So, what’s in your tagline—or are you flying… Read more

The serial comma debate is one of the most contentious in all of grammar geekdom. Also called the Oxford comma (because the Oxford University Press is an advocate), it’s the one before the conjunction in a list, such as: people… Read more

A clowder of cats—clowder being a collective noun for felines—is a beautiful thing. Not literally—no one wants a gang of cats amassing on their doorstep. But when you’re writing about such an event and get to call them a clowder,… Read more