Did you know that in pre-Elizabethan times an average written sentence was 50 words long? Fifty words! Why? I’m guessing that few people read and...

I am fascinated by tense. Not becoming tense, of course. Just tense. What do I mean? Well, tense is a set of forms taken by verbs (the...

We’ve never had pets in our household. Although I’d dearly love a cat, my husband is highly allergic to animal dander, and the thought of...

Twenty years ago, if you’d asked me to describe the single task I found most difficult, I wouldn’t have hesitated for a nanosecond. “Writing,”...

The managing editor couldn’t have been any nastier. “We’ve had a bomb threat,” he said in an email to the entire newsroom of about a hundred...

I’d heard the dire warnings on the morning news. “The roads are covered with black ice. It’s a skating rink out there.” I’d even...

I’ve sounded off many times about the difficulties I’ve had with writing. Talking, for example about my mean Scottish editor, and my struggle to stop editing while...

What’s the trick to effective writing? I think the biggest secret is to stop focusing on the product — the piece of writing — and start...

I sometimes find myself getting bored when I write. This is not the end of the world, but it’s not very pleasant, either. And...

Our society is pretty funny (funny-strange, not funny-ha-ha) when it comes to the word “good.” This one-syllable, four-letter word is both vague and imprecise, and...