Does thinking about grammar rules make your eyes glaze over? Here’s a book to unglazed those eyes: The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker. Despite having a formal education in English literature from a fine academic institution, grammar terminology gives me the creeps. Pluperfect, prepositional objects, predictive […]
The Revision Process in the Workplace
Many people know that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. You may not realize that other members of Congress edited it. Imagine sending your carefully crafted draft to the United States Congress for revision. When comparing Jefferson’s first draft to the final, it’s clear that many changes led to substantive improvements. That’s what happens when Benjamin […]
Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors [Review]
Do great writers occupy a unique subspecies of the human race? Are their brains wired differently, or are they people who manage to work through the barriers that stump others? In the course of working on my upcoming book on optimizing the writing process, I discovered Sarah Stodola’s wonderful book Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors. If writing is […]
Writers and the Myths of Creativity
As an English major in college, I carefully avoided any “creative writing” classes in my major. I’d seen friends struggling to churn out short stories on demand and concluded that creative writing was both frightening and stressful. So I stuck to literature while exploring courses in human biology, psychology, journalism, and computer science. When it came it writing, I’d decided […]
Writing, Courage, and Community
My voice teacher hosts a monthly performance class for her students. Her studio includes professional singers with postgraduate degrees in vocal performance and experience in the local opera theaters. Others are confirmed amateurs, learning for personal development. Yet we are alike in one important way: everyone admits to battling nerves before performing, even when singing in this […]
A Quick Book Review: Between You and Me
Have you ever wanted to argue with a copy editor’s deletion of a hyphen? Do you have strong feelings about using commas for cadence? If so, you’ll love reading Mary Norris’ Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. The book dedicates entire chapters to gendered pronouns, hyphens, apostrophes, and—yes—commas. It sheds light on The New Yorker‘s copy editing styles, including its […]