Semantic superheroes are taking to the streets

Under cover of night, volunteers with a shared purpose criss-cross their city. They’re not revolutionaries; they’re people who love grammar. Inserting accents, commas and question marks, and removing erroneous ones, they correct the language shortcomings of poets in training and unrequited lovers.

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A round of applause for conjunctions!

Conjunctions are one of the nine primary parts of speech in English. They are so useful! They’re function words – they live to serve: to join, coordinate and contrast. Complete control of these beauties will totally transform our writing.

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Gosh, there’s a word for that!

The number and variety of new words is astonishing! On 13 February 2024, in its winter update, Dictionary.com announced more than 1,700 new entries and revisions. I’ve chosen just 23: Barbiecore, enshittification, girl dinner, mid, bussin’, the ick, bed rotting, pretty privilege, boring billion, shacket, cozy, girl mom, squish, dry powder, bag holder, extreme heat event, intimate partner violence, supervised injection site, food insecure, energy poverty, worlding, fakeness and boobne.

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Gertrude Stein, joy, and writing as thinking in flow

Gertrude Stein’s How to write is an initially confounding yet extraordinary book. She argues and shows that thinking, feeling and writing occur at the same time: “The business of Art… is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that complete actual present”. When writing, she wants us to begin, to begin again, to begin again and again, to experience joy in writing’s purpose – that is, to focus on writing as thinking.

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What are your favourite words for 2023?

Every year, various online dictionaries, publishers and magazines choose words that, owing to their hyper-frequent usage, encapsulate a year. For 2023, Oxford’s was rizz; Cambridge’s was hallucinate. Merriam-Webster’s words included authentic, deepfake, coronation, dystopian, EGOT, implode, doppelgänger, covenant, indict, elemental, kibbutz and deadname. And there’s more…

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Steven Pinker’s how-to guide is a jewel

We owe Pinker a debt of gratitude. His 2014 book The sense of style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century is a wonderful grammar/syntax/style/usage guide. If you don’t already own it, please gift it to yourself. Anything but dry and boring, it’s clear, engaging and witty – “a worthy addition to any writer’s library… full of gems”.

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Abstracts 2.0: Do your abstracts sing?

Given the time, effort and resources that go into great research, it would be a pity to drop the ball in the abstract – in light of its many key roles. A “taste of the pie”, it should represent a manuscript 100%. Effectively summarising research usually involves repeated rewriting. Because time pressure is always a factor, the risk is that the abstract is rushed.

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