Category: Writing

Is Shakespeare mandatory for a well-rounded secondary education? After more than 400 years, it’s reasonable to ask whether the canon is due for an overhaul, or to be chucked out of the window entirely....

Video content is here to stay. As a text-based person with a face for radio, I’ve come to grips with it. But that doesn’t mean video alone gets it done. If you’re producing video content, please also share a transcript of the video. I realize some people love video,...

At least once a week when I’m reading, or editing, copy related to work I’ll skim over something and realize that what I just read makes no sense. Sure, the words are used properly. The paragraph is composed of sentences that seem grammatically correct. But if you stop to...

Infrastructure and code aren’t the only things in your organization that incur technical debt. Content marketing on blogs is a major offender. Here’s just three things to cut down on technical debt in your content marketing on blogs. Content marketing practice to avoid: Bare URLs/URIs in content Be kind...

The reMarkable 2 is a nifty piece of engineering. It’s about the size of a thin college (U.S.) notebook, responsive and feels as close to writing on paper as a tablet is likely to get. The tools, on the other hand, leave a lot to be desired. reMarkable 2...

There’s a running gag in the show Silicon Valley about a character obsessed with being in the “three comma” club. Being a billionaire, in other words. When he loses enough money to drop from $1.2 billion to “merely” $900 million, he’s “financially ruined” and despondent. Judging by the way...

People often try to fluff up the importance of an event or person by saying it “changed history,” “changed the course of history,” or “changed history forever.” (Or something along those lines, you get the idea.) There’s just one problem with that type of phrase: it’s completely, 100% wrong....

“This reporter” – Just use the first person. It might have worked for Edward R. Murrow, but with tech journalism – particularly blogs – it sounds like a ridiculous affectation. If you wouldn’t say it out loud when retelling a story, don’t write it. (And if you would say this...

Too many ledes in tech publications and blogs suck. I’ve been doing more editing and more content curation lately. The upshot of that is noticing a lot of really boring, fluffy, slow-to-the-point ledes that utterly fail at drawing the reader in. It’s not hard to do a decent lede...

It’s time for the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and other free software supporters to stop being the Party of Gno, and start thinking of positive ways to push for software freedom. The negative campaigns and telling users what not to use aren’t working. It’s time for change. Let me...