Check it Before you Wreck it

Spell check? That’s so 1995. Tone check? Now here’s something new. ToneCheck™ is a free download that promises to “stop e-mail confusion before it happens.” The ToneCheck website quotes the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, stating that “e-mail messages are interpreted incorrectly 50% of the time.” ToneCheck claims to evaluate your e-mails based on [...]

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Tweak Before you Tweet

Recently, The New York Times ran a story about “grammar vigilantes” who spend their time correcting linguistic blunders on Twitter. They’re probably very busy. Do you proofread your Tweets? Blog posts? Facebook updates? LinkedIn profile? Even when the prose police aren’t watching, does it pay to be proper? Increasingly, your best friend from high school isn’t the only one reading [...]

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Getting to the Point

Writers of fiction and poetry know the age-old principle of “attaining the universal through the specific.” Langston Hughes didn’t write “I am the darker brother. They discriminate against me.” He wrote “I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen/When company comes…” Hughes uses one specific example to illustrate a larger [...]

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