I’ve been jonesing to go to a baseball game—must be the summer heat. It’s a beautiful sport: the one-on-one duel between the pitcher and batter, the equal distribution of play (everyone gets an at-bat, doesn’t matter if you’re Ted Williams or Miguel Tejada), the spectacle of the ballpark, the food, the songs, the long season that turns players into workaday characters. Fact is, it’s baseball season almost as much as it is not baseball season, and the drudge of 162 games turns the sport into one that’s more calm and unhurried in its pace.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.

Since the NYT didn’t include definitions of these words, I decided to post a job to MediaPiston to produce an article defining and using each word in the list. Voila! Just a few hours later, here it is. So avoid coming across as jejune and laconic in your speech. Dive in to this list with alacrity!

When you think of great writing lessons, you usually don’t think of late-night TV hosts. But Conan O’Brien’s “People of Earth” letter was a pitch-perfect response to a crisis situation.

The man who writes your students' papers tells his story.

This enthusiastic engagement makes her, well, nicer than many writing teachers, and that niceness might be why she's posted a list of 10 writing tips that can help almost anyone on her blog.

But what exactly does it mean to write great copy? How do we know when we achieved it? Is this something that we can learn as part of the design process, or should we have a dedicated copywriter (if we don’t already)?

Your keyboard will have different things in it than mine does, of course. But, it’s impossible to know what’s in there until you’ve made the clackity noise for a few minutes. You think you know what’s in there. But you don’t. It’s not your brain that makes the clackity noise, it’s your fingers.

So all this has led me to an idea that comments could work quite a bit differently and remove the incentives to replay old arguments, and keep the comments focused on the ideas being responded to. 

If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill a position, always hire the better writer.

In printing, a cliché was a printing plate cast from movable type. This is also called a stereotype. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase used repeatedly as a single slug of metal. “Cliché” came to mean such a ready-made phrase. The French word “cliché” comes from the sound made when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to make a printing plate.

I promise you, one thing is never going to change. And that's our mission. People often ask me if there are guidelines in our practice of what I like to call MacNeil/Lehrer journalism. Well, yes, there are. And here they are:

The power of writing less.

Yawn.

It’s a good example of the way big companies wind up talking. Bloated language is what happens when copy gets filtered through a committee.

Compare that to The Saddleback Story, the tale behind bagmaker Saddleback Leather.

I have, or, well, had, David Foster Wallace to thank for my own peevishness about mistakes in what he called S.W.E., or Standard Written English. So what follows is the complete text of a worksheet from his class.

Answers here: http://htmlgiant.com/?p=20022

I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time...

I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

The greatest weakness of the list of n things is that there's so little room for new thought. The main point of essay writing, when done right, is the new ideas you have while doing it.

Using "they" instead of "he" or "she" as a singular pronoun.