Get Better At Writing Blog
Signatrer Dishes
Well, the photo is gorgeous, and the restaurant should definitely get credit for correctly pluralizing “dishes”, but that is not how to spell “signature”. I think the mistake is a phonetic spelling mistake and...
Shang Antique: Established Since 1984
Although Shang Antique only moved into this unit at the front of Tanglin Shopping Centre sometime within the last year or so, I am willing to believe that the business has existed from 1984...
Opaque
Once upon a time, I knew that ‘opaque’ had something to do with whether you can see through something, but I thought it was a synonym of ‘transparent’, not an antonym. Since most things...
Painstakingly
For the longest time, I understood how to use the word ‘painstakingly’ but I thought that the action embedded in the adverb was ‘staking one’s pain’ on something, which perhaps I thought meant something...
Excess words
Much has been written, ironically, on the virtue of brevity. On the basis of word choice, I take exception to the advice (found on page 704 of An Introduction to Fiction) to “cut excess...
What You Need to Know about British and American English by George Davidson
I’ve come a long way since the days when I consistently spelled the word ‘British’ with two t’s, which is phonetically intuitive but correct nowhere on the planet. Nevertheless, there were still some new...
IKEA opens daily
I’ve posted about errors in signs declaring business hours before. A giant European home furnishings company you may have heard of is among the businesses that have gotten it wrong. Why should the phrase...
Please tear sideway
Georgia-Pacific is a paper company headquartered in my hometown, Atlanta, Georgia. The Georgia-Pacific Tower, a pink granite building shaped like three tiers of steps, came into being about the same time I did. It’s...
Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe
To create Thing Explainer, Randall drew and labeled pictures to—well—explain various scientific and cultural ideas, but he chose to write all the text in the book using only a thousand commonly-used English words, just...