Archive for the ‘Favourite Blogs’ Category

I’ve been collecting great blog postings for ages now, and it’s high time I share a few of my faves.

Know any high school students who need to write a winning college entry exam? Here’s some advice from the Figarospeech blog.

English is a “magnificent bastard tongue” which has grown by absorbing words from other languages. Try this word/origin matching quiz from About.com. I only got 10/20, and I might have cheated a bit.

Another quiz from About.com—this one is an English Language Trivia Quiz.

Where does English get its best new words? According the todaytranslations it’s the Simpsons with words like Doh!, introubulate, craptacular and eat my shorts. Doh! has its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here’s a fun blog about English idioms—learn about the source and meaning of expressions like ‘pushing the envelope,’ ‘give a hoot,’ and ‘Potemkin Village.’

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Will you say twenty ten, two thousand ten or two thousand and ten? Probably twenty ten—read Language Log for a recap of the discussion.

Great Resources for ESL writers from Writing Matters

Free e-book with lots of inspirational bits from Seth Godin.

While most of you don’t write copy for the web, there’s a ton of good general writing advice in this Copyblogger article that applies to ALL writers: Ten Secrets for More Magnetic Copy

Some guidelines for using articles from The Grammarphobia Blog.

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The Myth of High-falutin Copy

Escalator Clause—Patricia O’Connor’s rant about the customer service buzzword “escalate” meaning to raise a problem or concern to a higher level.

There’s lots written about grammar rules that are just plain wrong—here’s a blog about rules that do matter. Learn them or find yourself in Grammar Hell.

Avoid Thundershower Activity: instead, be plain and direct: avoid thunderstorms instead. From Manage Your Writing by Kenneth W. Davis.

From the archives of Language Log, a linguist’s rant against the “rule” that says never start a sentence with “and.”

From Men with Pens, a fun tribute to the benefits of using exercise (and sex) to help overcome writer’s block.

A reminder from Zen Habits that Life is Poetry, and that we write our poem every day we live. It includes a beautiful poem by William Carlos Williams.

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This post from Zen Habits called The Minimalist Principle: Omit Needless Things is inspired by Strunk and White’s advice: “Omit needless words.” Good advice for writing and  living.

Want to test your punctuation? Here are 76 Online Opportunities to Build Your Punctuation Skills

If you spend a lot of time at your computer writing, you’ll appreciate this guest post on Problogger called Nimble Fingers. It gives you exercises to keep your hands, arms and shoulders loose and injury free.

Is it okay to use “they” or “their” as a singular pronoun? Yes, according to grammar guru Patricia O’Conner. Read On Language: All Purpose Pronoun

After reading Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics last spring, I’ve been wondering how the open source model might work in my world of corporate training. Seth Godin has a related post: Education at the Crossroads.

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In no particular order:

Translate Into English, by Kenneth Davis of Manage Your Writing. This post promotes writing with short, simple words. I always like his posts.

Two Quotes I wish I’d Written, by linguistics student Gabe Doyle, a fervent anti-prescriptivist.

5 Atrocious Science Clichés to Throw Down A Black Hole, from Wired. The title says it all. Seems no field is immune.

30 Words You Need to Stop Using Today, a cheeky, articulate and above all funny rant about clichés and buzzwords.

Write Like Me from Language Log. It’s about the same issues—her/she and like/as—that I discuss in You Don’t Drive Like Her.

Winning on the Uphills. Marketing guy Seth Godin writes about how we grow most when we’re challenged. Inspiring.

Have you read anything especially interesting?

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