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On April 13, 2011, Jeff Haden published the following article on BNET.com. His points are well taken, so I am sharing them here with the author’s permission. I’ve received a number of emails recently from readers asking how they can improve their writing skills. Here are 10 tips: Always eliminate the obvious. For example, I […]

I saw a bumper sticker recently that said, “You can lead a horse to water but a pencil must be lead.” This would be funny if it were not incorrect. The past tense and the past participle of lead is led. A general leads his troops into battle. Napoleon led his men into Russia just

On October 22, 2011, Henry Hitchings, author of the upcoming book, The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, wrote a column in The Wall Street Journal titled “Is This the Future of Punctuation?”. In it, he proposes that English is rapidly becoming more oriented toward the spoken language than toward the conventions of written

The December 2011 issue of National Geographic contains a fascinating article by Adam Nicolson about the genesis of the King James Bible. (A link to the article appears at the end of this post.) While the history surrounding the document is intriguing, I want to focus on the fluidity of the language. In choosing the

I received an email recently that contained the signature line: “Expect typos.” Why should I expect typos? I expect people to avoid them, especially in business correspondence. Cell phones breed typos. Granted, when one is typing with thumbs on a tiny screen, errors are more likely to creep in. But this does not mean that