A fellow grammar geek, professional writer, and dear friend excitedly announced this week that he’d purchased “Grammar by Diagram,” by Cindy L. Vitto, and discovered a new rule governing comma usage. “It’s amazing what I don’t know,” he wrote. “I…
As cheap shots go, there may be none cheaper than poking fun at librarians. Slinging a barb about a librarian’s sensible shoes is so easy, anyone can do it. The stereotype is practically hard-wired into our collective conscience. Librarians are indeed among the world’s “Most…
I love Car Talk. Radio listeners call in, describe their cars’ troubles and mimic their cars’ sounds, while brothers Tom and Ray (the show’s self-effacing, MIT-educated hosts) try to figure out what’s wrong. Tom and Ray crank out the mechanical…
I remember my first couple months as a reference librarian. Every question seemed to draw upon yet another undeveloped region of my brain – or worse, force me to consult some scary reference work I’d managed to avoid in library school. I’d…
What’s a student-researcher to do when the “greatest technological innovation in research paper writing since the invention of the note card” bites the dust? Well, when the innovation in question is Mead Builder™ term paper software – and the students…
So you and your team have risen to the challenge and finally written that report. Well done! See? Writing collaboratively isn’t so bad! But what about the final output? Unless you’ve checked it carefully, you may have produced the written…
Those who write seem to have convinced the rest of us that theirs is an exclusively solo craft. We imagine the ruggedly independent “writer” hunched over the laptop at 3 am, mug of coffee at the ready, painstakingly choosing each…
Wikipedia’s impending one-day SOPA blackout last week inspired Washington Post blogger Maura Judkis to serve up a list of five alternative sources for answers in a pinch. It’s a terrific list, but of course my favorite is number 3: Why…
Mid-December always finds the happy owl a little more impatient than usual. As the old year – with all its familiarities and same-olds – winds down, she’s already got her eyes trained on the new one. But it seems this year,…
Writing is easy when you’re a writer, right? Not always true! Even experienced writers struggle sometimes with the Ultimate Transferable Skill. Each writing task – whether it’s an essay, cover letter, resume, article, report, novel, or simple email – presents…