Crafting stories, poems, and other kinds of great creative writing isn’t something most people can do with ease. It’s hard to pinpoint what makes a piece of creative writing interesting (Engaging characters? Clever wordplay? Rhyme and meter? Stunning plot twists?) and even harder to do those things well. After all, there’s a reason people like Stephen King get paid the big bucks. But even Mr. King studied writing and worked on his craft at one point, which is why we wanted to offer up these 12 creative writing exercises to ...

Publishing your academic writing in a journal is crucial to advancing your career and becoming an expert in your chosen field. Standards are high and you usually only get one shot, so don’t waste it! Make your paper the best it can be before submitting. Read the journal. Just because a particular publication covers your field doesn’t necessarily mean that your article will be a good fit. Learn the aims of the particular publication, and then take it a step further by looking at the articles they choose to publish. ...

Is the English language trying to trip people up? Because it sure seems that way. Otherwise, why in the world would someone have created homonyms? You know homonyms. They’re those pesky words that sound alike, look alike, or (for the particularly cruel ones) do both. In fact, most of the time when people speak about homonyms, they are actually talking about two other distinct groups of words that both fall under the homonym umbrella – homophones and homographs. Homophones are words that sound the same – hence the use of the ...

Learning a new language and getting all the nuances and colloquialisms down pat is tough. It’s even tougher when the native speakers around you are saying things incorrectly as much (or more) than you are! Unfortunately, many Americans not only use words and sayings incorrectly on a regular basis, they have no idea that they’re doing so. Sometimes it’s because they were taught a misquoted version of what was once a common saying. Other times they might have misunderstood a phrase and intuited their own meaning so that it made ...