Clean mechanics keep readers inside the story instead of tripping over the prose. These posts cover grammar, punctuation, and spelling — the rules worth knowing and the few worth breaking on purpose.
Children's BooksWhite spent fifty years writing essays for The New Yorker, wrote a children's book about a spider that has sold over forty-five million copies, and revised his old professor's self-published pamphlet into the most influential style guide in English. He…
Book ReviewsUrsula K. Le Guin's Steering the Craft is a short book that does one thing well: it teaches you how to build sentences that work. It's structured as a series of workshops, each one isolating a single problem, sound, punctuation,…
Book ReviewsA witty, bestselling defense of punctuation that turns commas and apostrophes into a genuine pleasure, the rare grammar book to become a cultural phenomenon. Funny, scholarly, and surprisingly moving about why these marks matter, held from the top by a…
AI OverrelianceNational Punctuation Day fights sloppy punctuation, and the marks are having a strange moment. A case for learning the rules cold before AI quietly forgets them for you, and why they still matter.
Grammar & SpellingNational Proofreading Day promotes error-free writing, but real proofreading is bigger than typos. The dangerous errors aren't spelling mistakes, they're failures of logic and clarity. A look at what a true pass catches.
Grammar & SpellingDictionary Day is October 16. Why a misunderstood word corrupts everything you read, the value of looking words up, and what Weird Al's Word Crimes gets right.
Grammar & SpellingNational Grammar Day is March 4. Why grammar matters, when breaking the rules is right, and how to keep your writing clean with editors and tools.
Book ReviewsOxford's flagship dictionary of American English, pairing the publisher's lexicographical rigor with an American focus. Ideal for a US-market writer settling spelling, meaning, and usage. A first-rate reference, held back only by the free, continuously updated digital dictionaries that now…
Book ReviewsA handbook to Tolkien's fourteen invented languages, built on a golden principle: languages first, world grown around them. The trouble is it is decades out of date and in places simply wrong on Elvish grammar. A useful doorway to how…
Book ReviewsMost dictionaries document a language that already exists; this one documents an invented one, and does it seriously, a linguist-built guide with real grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, far more rigorous than its Star Trek origin suggests. Solid for its craftsmanship…
Book ReviewsUnder a hundred pages, most of them rules, and it has shaped clear English prose for a century. The smallest important book a writer can own, and omit needless words is the whole game. Learn the defaults cold, then break…
Book MarketingEditing is one step. Quality control is the entire system around it, the methodical work that turns a rough draft into something worth publishing. A first draft is meant to be messy; the difference between an author and a drawer…
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