We’re all editors these days. Well, at least we should be. Whenever we write — be it a business proposal, a research paper, an article, a blog post, an email, a social media comment or even a text — we should edit ourselves. But who am I kidding? Seems like self-editing has gradually become a thing of the past, just like the evening newspaper and letters written in longhand. The truth is, anything poorly written or […]
editing
13 posts
Why do we dread reading medical records and legal notifications? Because we don’t understand them, that’s why. Who knows what kind of crucial information we’re missing out on simply because of overused jargon, poor grammar, misspellings and a stupefying abundance of words. But now, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, the increasing number of patients with direct access to their electronic health records is forcing some radiologists to reassess their writing […]
By now, most school districts around the country have begun another academic year. Many students complete their writing assignments on computers, but such technological wonders as a spell checker, formatting tools and a pop-up dictionary/thesaurus don’t seem to be helping high school graduates succeed at writing. Consider this recent news item from The Huffington Post: In 2012, high school graduates attained an average score of 488 on the writing portion of the SAT. This is […]
When blogging experts tell you to “write for your audience,” they’re presuming you already know the type of people who read your posts. For the purposes of this particular post, I’m making the same presumption. But how do you actually write for those people? How do you know your words aren’t fluttering above their heads, just beyond their reach of comprehension? One way is to run your post through The Readability Test Tool. The Readability Test Tool […]
Do you get frustrated when other people misuse apostrophes, or are you a misuser yourself? Do you agree that “reading is the gateway to whatever we want to do” and that “nothing leaves a bad first impression like a poorly written or poorly punctuated email”? And do you simply enjoy words because they’re words? If you answered “yes” to any of the previous questions, you’ll probably enjoy what you’ll see on the Two Lakes Media […]
“Weird Al” Yankovic, king of pop-song parodies, has done more for the English language this week than some teachers do in a year. To promote his latest album, Mandatory Fun — which contains parodies of Pharrell’s “Happy” (“Tacky”), Lorde’s “Royals” (“Foil”) and Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” (“Handy”) — “Weird Al” is in the midst of releasing eight videos in eight days. On Tuesday, he issued the best of the bunch so far, “Word Crimes,” a clever take […]