There’s an old joke that a teacher once asked her students to punctuate the following sentence:
A woman without her man is lost
All the men in the class wrote, “A woman, without her man, is lost.” All the women wrote, “A woman: without her, man is lost.”
The anecdote is a good illustration of the main role [...]

It has become trite to point out the sizable chasm between written and spoken language. Evidently, what finds its way on to paper is a bit different from what “escapes our teeth’s barrier.” One of the differences, however, has nothing to do with the matter of style, and everything to do with form: the written [...]

A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit
With the same Spirit that its Author writ.
~Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism”
I sit in my classroom and clench my pen, a bit frustrated. I’m frustrated because I’m tired of questions - not because questions are bad, but because the goodness of questions comes from their purpose, [...]

[Semi-technical!]
For some time, grammarians have attempted to make the passive voice the pariah of the English verb family. But for all its ill-treatment, the voice is infinitely interesting. Take, for example, the curious construction of the double passive voice, as in “one bookstore’s copies were neglected to be locked away.”
I am neither a linguist nor [...]

The sidebar of this site says that Word Miner is “a place to discuss all aspects of writing and saying, from pronouns to pens.” The pronouns have come up before, but some pen-talk is past due.
I think everyone has pen preferences. One blogger I read likes space pens. A friend told me not to long [...]