“That’s what I call being shot out of the cannon.” “To be shot out of the cannon like that is just so exciting.”
Michael Kors, the quick-witted fashion designer, was quoted as having said both, the first by The New York Times, and the second, a slight variation, by The... (Read More)
Here’s the first bit of an email I got last week from a well-known media company.
Happy Halloween Alumni!
Are you afraid to wander outside on the scariest night of the year? Then spend a night in with one of our upcoming online courses. One of our most popular... (Read More)
The Supreme Court justices are bickering, but not about same-sex marriage, Obamacare, or voter identification. No, according to a Wall Street Journal story, they’re disagreeing about adverbs. Justice Scalia uses them; Associate Justice Kennedy does not. Kennedy sides with novelist Stephen King who says, “The adverb is not your... (Read More)
You might find rules that say it’s okay to use that with people or with terms like team and partner that denote people, but in business writing—where companies want to sound human—it’s best to use who when referring to people or entities made up of people.
Consider the difference between... (Read More)
“Who wrote this crap?”
Steven Pinker often asks himself that question when he’s reviewing his work. “Who’s Steven Pinker?” you might ask. He’s a professor at Harvard, chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and author of a new book on writing, The Sense of... (Read More)
A reader challenged my placement of a question mark outside a quotation mark.
“I don’t think that’s correct,” he wrote. “Always inside, that’s what the nuns taught.”
The source of debate appeared in the following sentence—part of a discussion in which I was clarifying when to use me instead of... (Read More)
It’s fun to write with dashes. Tack one on and dash off another thought. Problem is we tend to tack on one too many, which makes our copy look as if it’s had one too many.
Here’s how not to get slapdash:
Know there are two kinds of dashes: the... (Read More)
When a big executive of a big company made a big announcement about a service that promises to change the way we pay for things, he said his company is interested only in making transactions easier. When it comes to tracking what people are buying, where they’re buying, or how... (Read More)
Right up there with people saying I when they should say me—and me when they should say I—is the wholesale misuse of myself. Here’s the deal. (If my explanation falls short, Grammar Girl is good and clear on this one.)
Myself (like yourself, herself, himself, and themselves) is a... (Read More)
Seth Godin, who says wise things in his daily blog, made me wince after my last note, the one about keeping impact-the-verb to descriptions of wisdom teeth.
In writing about the myths of getting on “a short list,” he said (the italics are mine):
“It’s easy to seduce... (Read More)
