Nothing like a slip-up in bullet list formatting to completely change meaning. Check out this hilarious example from failblog.org: Now that’s a major copy-editing FAIL.

I’ve just finished reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a wonderfully humourous book full of advice on how to write and how to overcome those challenges all writers face. Here’s an excerpt I particularly like: “But how?” my students ask. “How do you actually do it?” You sit down, I say. You try to sit […]

Every profession needs a theme song, right? Here’s one I found about technical writing, unashamedly cannibalized from the Beatles song “Paperback Writer.”      This little ditty isn’t exactly inspiring with lyrics like these: “So I spend my day inside a lonely pod, but I need a job, so I gotta be a technical writer.” But […]

Apple’s new MacBook Air is purportedly the world’s thinnest (and sexiest) laptop, but is a bit shallow when it comes to hardware. The lack of CD-Rom drive or landline internet access for example, may discourage first-time laptop buyers. But if you need some compelling reasons to shell out for a laptop you can fit into […]

This is as geeky as it gets folks. The EAC meeting last night featured a talk entitled “Crouching comma, hidden hyphen” by Ramona Montagnes, one of the authors of the Canadian Writer’s Handbook and director of the UBC Writing Centre. This list was on one of her handouts. The top 16 things likely to be […]