Via Lifehacker, 10 places to get writing courses online including MIT, Utah State, Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (more of a reference, less of a class repository, but whatever), and more. Another free way to improve your writing: join a critique circle. I dabbled in a few through Meetup.com (just punch in your city/state and “writing” [...]
Flickr: Thomas HawkFound while trawling the web: a five page (!) glossary of newspaper terms. Many of these are amusingly archaic (does anyone need to know “cablese” anymore?) but there will be times when you, a reporter, will be asked to write a “hed” and “deck” for your 10-”inch” story–or to go to the “morgue,” [...]
Great piece in the New York Review of Books about blogs. We, you and I, are not its intended audience—if we were, the author Sarah Boxer would not have to define “blog,” “LOL,” “WTF.” Yet this is interesting reading: Bloggers assume that if you’re reading them, you’re one of their friends, or at least in [...]
There is a very interesting and heated discussion raging over at Freelance Writing Jobs about whether one should include a rate quote with a cover letter when requested in a want ad. My position is no, no, no. Why might you want to do this? As many commenters have pointed out, if a prospective client [...]
At a party late last year, the owner of a new local web site asked me about freelancing. He’d been soliciting articles for his site from business owners and people who liked writing for exposure; he wanted to know how to attract professionals. “Well, you’re going to have to start paying them,” I said. (Too [...]
I really really love the word maven. I don’t know why. It’s just something about the way it sounds, maybe, the drawn-out maaaaaaaaaay followed by the short ven. Maybe because there are few words that rhyme with it: haven, raven, shaven. Maybe I just like it. A maven, the dictionary tells us, is “A person [...]
Came across an interesting post over at Language Log about the prepositions in/on/at. The basic principles are simple: in relates to a 3-dimensional container on relates to a 2-dimensional surface at relates to a 1-dimensional location Time and space as portrayed by Flickr user: Charles Van L. The experiential key here is that a day [...]
Well, The Root‘s been online now for two days, and though I’m not the target audience, I thought I’d go take a look at it. My first thoughts are that I’m pretty impressed with the look of the thing. It’s supposed to be “Slate for black readers” yet looks nicer than Slate. (I’ve never been [...]
I’m on an organization kick lately. The most recent of my experiments has been Things, a Mac-only organizer program. It’s in alpha right now, and is free for testing (though the final version will not be free), so go sign up and grab it. What you’ll get for your payment of $0 is a fairly [...]
One of my favorite etymologies (this is how you know I’m a nerd) is that of the word “heretic.” Merriam-Webster defines heretic as: 1: a dissenter from established religious dogma; especially: a baptized member of the Roman Catholic Church who disavows a revealed truth 2: one who dissents from an accepted belief or doctrine: see also NONCONFORMIST [...]