Silver-tongued or eloquent?
Bob Katz, the author of Elaine’s Circle and not so incidentally the guy who manages me as a public speaker, has an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor asking us to pay closer attention to how...
View ArticleThe Wikipedia style
Mark Bauerlein has a terrific piece in The Chronicle of Higher Ed that compares the flat style of Wikipedia to that of other encyclopedias. It suffers from taking a single example — the entry on...
View ArticleBecause noun
I’ve been enjoying the rise of a grammatical meme, which the less charitable might call an ungrammatical meme. It’s that thing where you upset expectations by following “because” not with a phrase or...
View ArticleMore than 3 is many
Some book I read as a kid, possibly Mathematics for the Million by Lancelot Hogben, said that prehistorical humans could count up to three, and after that it was just “many.” I don’t know if there is...
View ArticleThe gasp of combined
“Prescription Painkillers Kill More Than Heroin and Cocaine … Combined” [Liberty Voice] “The U.S. spent more on defense in 2012 than the countries with the next 10 highest budgets … combined.” [NBC...
View ArticleR paragraphs 2 long?
Over the years as I’ve edited my own writing, I’ve come to rely on two heuristics: 1. Most paragraphs are better off without a topic sentence. 2. The ends of paragraphs sometimes make better...
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[2b2k] Inside.com’s updates: A new rhetorical form for journalism?
Inside.com is working hard to take the Web down a notch — the notch where, say, an announcement by NASA that they’ve discovered a possibly habitable planet in another galaxy gets the headline...
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