When I was a kid, even in the late Eighties, we were counted off for making our cursive letters incorrectly. Old Lady English teachers had no reason whatsoever to think proper penmanship would go by the wayside. What a difference twenty years makes these days. This BBC article says “the writing is on the wall” [...]

Past perfect tense and passive voice have their places within the structures of the English language. Generally, those places are under the stairs or in the attic, in boxes, on shelves, way behind the adverbs. Key point: The more verbs used, the higher the chance for confusion, the higher the chance your prose is too [...]

Chess is one thing, but if we get to the point computers can best humans in the arts—those splendid, millennia-old expressions of the heart and soul of human existence—then why bother existing? Fortunately, computers have yet to match us in music or writing or dancing or even drawing—the lines are straighter, but that’s not even [...]

In an interview posted online, Kirby Gann used the word “bildungsroman” to describe his first novel, The Barbarian Parade. You can’t just go dropping that word anywhere. I had to look it up. Having done so, I can say that the word’s very existence saddens me. First of all, I spelled it wrong twice trying [...]