27 modifiers that have been drained of m...

My 6-year-old loves to use the word epic. “Did you see me jump off the diving board? That was epic.” Or “That game of Uno was epic.” The misuse of epic has long been a pet peeve. As a noun, an epic is an extended narrative poem celebrating the feats of a legendary or traditional hero. It can also be a long film, book, or other work portraying heroic deeds and adventures or covering an extended period of time. As an adjective, epic means heroic or grand in scale or characteristic of an epic. It can also mean impressive or remarkable. This usage gives me the most...

Meet the people behind everyday words

We’ve all heard of the Earl of Sandwich and Louise Braille. The words coined for their inventions are examples of eponyms—words derived from a person’s name. We can all think of some famous eponyms, but many words we use every day are eponyms and we don’t even know it. Here are some of those more obscure eponyms. (Definitions are from Wordnik.com.) Boycott—to abstain from buying or using; refusing to patronize or attend. Named after Charles Boycott (1832–1897), an English land agent in Ireland. Nonviolent coercive tactics were successfully used against him in...

How to say “I don’t knowR...

How many of you have had a boss who expects you to know and remember everything? He calls demanding an immediate answer, yet he himself can’t remember that he asked you the same question two days ago. Saying “I don’t know” to such a boss is unwise. Doing so can make you seem unprofessional or uninterested in the question. You don’t want to end up looking like Jeff Spicoli from the movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” (For those who haven’t seen it, here is the famous “I don’t know” clip from the movie.) Even more unwise is to give a wrong answer just...

Which style guide rules do you break and...

PR Daily readers love their style guides. As writers and editors, we rely on style guides to set and enforce standards for our company (or client) content or publications: Is health care one word or two? Do we use serial commas? Do we abbreviate the names of states? Though the styles guides we use (the Associated Press Stylebook, the Chicago Manual of Style, or even an in-house style guide) might have conflicting guidelines, without these guides, our content would be a hot mess. As much as we love our style guides, there are times when we are forced to put them aside due...

13 writing tips for the web

In a previous post, I wrote about my favorite book on Web writing, “Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works” by Janice Redish. Filled with practical advice and case studies, the book is one of the best I’ve read about Web writing. This week I found another outstanding resource on writing for the Web. It’s a new report from website usability expert Jakob Nielsen, “Website Reading: It (Sometimes) Does Happen.” Using eye-tracking studies of hundreds of users interacting with websites, the report describes exactly how users read Web content. Just...

Did you mean to resign or re-sign? Words...

by Laura Hale Brockway Much has been written on PR Daily and Ragan.com about the hyphen, which I call the most tiresome punctuation mark of all time. As the “AMA Manual of Style” says, “The hyphen is a connector; it may join what is similar and also what is disjunctive . . . it divides as well as marries.” There are rules for when to use a hyphen and when not to use a hyphen, and different style manuals have different usage guidelines. Then there are the exceptions to the guidelines. And finally, when it comes to hyphens, all style guides include the catch-all...