Yummy writing

rogersgeorge on April 13th, 2012

This post is a nice relaxing one—not too much grammar. It’s not yet time to post an example of outstanding writing, this being post number 168 (not 200), but I have an example of some pretty good writing to share with you. I confess that I’m a bit prejudiced because the writing is about several of my favorite non-writing topics: Local organic food, self-sufficiency, gardening, cooking, and (ahem) my wife. She has a friend, Rachel, who writes a local food blog called Rachel’s Table, which I suggest you go look at. Tell Rachel I sent you. Anyway, we had a few parsnips in our garden that had wintered over, and they came out a week or so ago as my wife prepped the beds for this season. My wife gave her one of the parsnips (and for effect, left it caked with dirt).

Enough preamble; here’s a picture of a parsnip plant:

Parsnip plant. Photo by Valerie George

I can’t resist saying something about the writing on the site. First, I found no actual grammatical mistakes or typos beyond a single missing comma and one tense I would have changed. Those are nit picks. The quality is far superior to a lot of Scientific American blog posts I’ve seen lately. Altogether, it’s a lighthearted, useful, and enjoyable read, and the photos are appropriate and useful.

One other point of interest: The third sentence of her post contains a nice example of hyperbole. Can you spot it?

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A new copy editor

rogersgeorge on April 10th, 2012

It’s called EditMinion, and it’s a website. You copy some of your deathless prose into it, click Edit, and it displays a “report card,” including a markup of your text. Now I’m a firm advocate of thinking about what you write, and of having other humans look at your writing as well. But I put [...]

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Old instructions

rogersgeorge on April 7th, 2012

I’m not sure what approach to take on today’s topic. Last week my brother (whom I hadn’t seen for maybe five years) and I visited the museum on the campus of the US Naval Academy. I was embarrassed at the poor quality of the writing  on many of the labels, but that’s a story for [...]

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A silly poem or two

rogersgeorge on April 5th, 2012

Fred Langa, a techie whose material I read assiduously, recently posted a link to a humorous drawing. Here’s the link to Fred’s blog, which has a link to the drawing, but don’t click it until you finish my post. The title on Fred’s post was a short version of the picture’s caption (which has nothing to [...]

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Plurals—or not?

rogersgeorge on April 3rd, 2012

English has a relatively simple rule for forming plurals—add “s” to the end of the word. Plus all the exceptions, of course. English is, after all, a pidgin language, a combination of two or more other languages. English has roots in the Germanic and Latin branches of the Indo-European language family.  Sometimes the origin of [...]

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