I read a very interesting article in this week’s New Yorker written by Mary Norris, who’s worked on the copy editing end of that magazine for a long time. I find pieces like this fascinating (the New York Times also runs a regular column where they discuss stylistic choices made in the newspaper) because they give Read More
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Thoughts on Diagramming
You may have seen links to this NPR piece drifting around Facebook lately, or perhaps a friend or colleague has pointed it out to you. The lead image is from a PopChart poster that I have in my office where the opening lines to a handful of classic novels are diagrammed in classic Reed-Kellogg fashion. Read More
Appositives in Online Writing
I was getting my daily news fix the other day and came across an article about the current state of immigration reform in Congress. As I read, I came across this sentence: “They’re willing to treat people who simply want to make a better way of life for themselves and their families inhumanely and use Read More
New Words Added to OED
The Oxford English Dictionary, one of the most respected lexical collections in the English-speaking world, recently issued an update (they do this monthly, in case you’re interested) describing some of the new words that have been added to the dictionary. You can read about all the additions in the article linked in the previous, sentence, Read More
A Grammar Rant of a Different Stripe
So we’ve talked in class about grammar rants, which most often (today, at least) appear online in blogs or discussion boards or comment streams after articles with errors. Here’s a rant that takes on a different form, but focuses still on some of the same pet peeves that many ranters do. After watching it a Read More
When a Suffix Becomes A Word
There’s an interesting piece on Slate by Gretchen McCulloch about the growingly common use of the suffix -ish as its own word. As McCulloch explains: As a word by itself—which is to say, not as a suffix—ish means more or less the same thing: kind of, thereabouts, in a way. And imagining how it broke free Read More
The Tyranny of the Like Button
I’ll admit up front that I’m not an avid Facebook-er, so perhaps some of the complaint I’m offering here is due to my naiveté about the medium. I’m also kind of old, and maybe this is the embryonic old codger in me coming out. I imagine the Like button on Facebook has been around on the Read More
On Appositives and Emphasis
I encountered the use of appositives in two texts that I read this week and both had me thinking about the way we order the elements of an appositive (i.e., the noun and the phrase being used to rename the noun) to achieve a specific emphasis. The first use comes from the thesis I read Read More