The Write Blog

Does “city-wide” need a hyphen? If you’re writing about a sculpture, should you italicize the title, or put it in quotation marks? The truth is, there’s no right answer. In most cases, style choices like this can vary from client to client. But what do you do when your client has no clear preference? Or [...]

So, Gamefly.com has been running this ad lately. Check it out: People buy bad video games. They freak out, realizing that they’ve purchased bad video games. They continue to freak out, ostensibly because they’re stuck with their bad video games (and out the 50 to 60 bucks they paid for them). The ad ends with [...]

Image via Wikipedia How’s this for a proofreading horror story: Because of a teeny little typo, people calling for a free cab service on New Year’s Eve ended up connecting with an “adult” chat line instead. Oops. That’s the kind of mistake that most likely ends in a lost client and a very, very unhappy [...]

I don’t know about you, but I gag just a little when someone talks about a ‘teachable moment’ – and, evidently, so do the folks at Lake Superior State University. Teachable moment is just one of the entries on LSSU’s 2010 list of words that should be banned from our vocabulary due to “mis-use, over-use, [...]

Need a creative boost? A good laugh? A few style pointers? Maybe you’re into science fiction or mysteries. Perhaps you prefer nonfiction or graphic novels or biographies. Or fantasy novels. But whatever you’re into, if you’re a writer, you probably love books about writing. This week, I thought I’d share a few of my recent [...]