I’ve been putting this post off for a while for a couple of reasons: first, I was a little burned out and was enjoying not thinking about my thesis for a while, and second, I wasn’t sure how to tackle this post. My thesis is about eighty pages long all told, and I wasn’t sure […]
Every writer needs a good editor. It doesn’t matter how good you are, how many years of experience you have, or how meticulous you are; you simply can’t see all of your own mistakes. We all have a blind spot for our own typos and for the weaknesses in our arguments, because we know how […]
My wife and I are launching a freelance editing and design service, Perfect Page Editing & Design, and are looking for clients. Please take a look!
There’s a long-running debate over whether the construction reason why is acceptable. Critics generally argue that why essentially means reason, so saying reason why is like saying reason twice. Saying something twice is redundant, and redundancy is bad; ergo, reason why is bad. This is really a rather bizarre argument. Reason is a noun; why […]
In case you haven’t been following me on Twitter or elsewhere, I’m the newest regular contributor to Visual Thesaurus. You can see my contributor page here. My latest article, “Orwell and Singular ‘They’”, grew out of an experience I had last summer as I was writing a feature article on singular they for Copyediting. I […]
