Veteran journalist Barbara Falconer Newhall riffs on life as she knows it.
I’m a writer who loves to talk about writing, so if you’re a writer or an aspiring writer I hope you'll stop by now and then and keep me company . . . You’ll find writing tips here as well as my thoughts on the writing life. Watch out, though. The Grammar Geek will be putting in her two cents from time to time.
Noah Lukeman[/caption]
Ever since I read Noah Lukeman’s treatise on the comma in a 2006 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, I have been a fan. A devotee. No, let’s face it, a groupie. Read more.
Is religious art an oxymoron these days? Can “great” art address matters spiritual in the modern era? Read more.
Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God, is anything but girlish. First of all, she’s a woman, not a girl — she’d like that to be clear. She also has a tough, incisive mind.
The passive sentence gets a bad rap — it’s weak, it’s vague, it’s passive. But sometimes a neatly turned passive sentence is just what our ever-shrinking world needs. Obama’s Cairo speech is an example. Read more.
Passive sentences can be wordy and vague — or useful. For me, a passive sentence is one that, like it or not, obscures the doer of the action. Read more.
“To boldly go where no man has gone before.” Nitpickers and pedants take exception to that stirring old Star Trek slogan. I don’t.
My daughter Christina discovered the art of rhetoric when she was being weaned from baby bottle to plastic cup. She’d say, “I want milk and I don’t want it in a cup” — an elegant illocutionary statement that usually got her what she wanted, her bottle.