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Has texting destroyed proper spelling? I hope not.
I never took the home study course, but the texts and tweets and emails I send today are full of plz and thx and u and w and &, and that's true as well for most of the messages I get. I write coupla and wanna and lmk. i'm also -- the horror -- a lower case kind of guy. Many people rail against this as a degradation of language and a vandalizing of culture. I'm not one of them. I think it's efficient, occasionally ingenious, unpretentious and fun.
But I have my limits. Articles, resumes, professional work -- standard English only, please. In domains like that, I'm a hawk on spelling, grammar and punctuation. If you don't know the difference between your and you're, its and it's, affect and effect, I'm rigidly intolerant. I let myself get away with murdering the English language in an email, but for a job applicant I treat it like a capital crime.
The prescriptive case for standard English has always made sense to me. Good grammar, proper punctuation and correct spelling improve communication. Not only do they clarify the sending and receiving of messages, they clarify the thinking that goes into those messages. Plus there's a cultural argument: Language is constitutive of identity, and if the rules of language erode, the identity erodes.
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This is just......sad.(Hat tip: Book Riot)
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Settling the debate on who designed the famous shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Well, sort of.
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10 words you should cut from your writing. This list probably could be longer but it's a good start.
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How-to of the day: a primer on darts. While this is only a guide to playing one particular variation of darts it's still a handy guide.
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Having a messy desk isn't such a bad thing after all. Makes me feel better about the condition of my own desk. (Hat tip: Blogging Theologically)
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The (flawed) logic of the second glance. And it's not just a guy thing.
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The power of the word no:
Learning how to say no is one of the most useful skills you can develop I found, especially when it comes to living a more productive and healthy life.
Saying no to unnecessary commitments can give you the time you need to recover and rejuvenate. Saying no to daily distractions can give you the space you need to focus on what is important to you. And saying no to temptation can help you stay on track and achieve your health goals. In fact not being able to say no, is one of the most biggest downfalls that successful entrepreneurs claim as their own key mistakes.
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