:60 Steinbecks

60-Second Steinbeck Title

60-Second Steinbecks is my series of short videos intended to help everyone write better: write better sentences, write better emails, write better love letters, whatever you decide to write.

First, I hope to help you relax when it comes to writing. Even professional writers (like me) have trouble remembering all the rules. In fact, some 60-Second Steinbecks videos I created because I needed a trick to help me remember a rule.

Writing, now more than ever, is one of the most effective tools you have at your disposal to communicate with the rest of us. It should be fun instead of a chore.

So I hope to help demystify the “rules” of writing for all of us.

Despite that title, the series is not intended for those laboring in the rarified atmosphere of formal English composition and literature. Instead I have in mind those of us who find ourselves writing in the everyday world of business, where the real or imagined stakes are high and the grammar gestapo seems to be lurking around every corner. Every week or so, I’ll add a new video on a different topic and include it in the list below.

 

Click an item in the list below to view that video on a separate page.

60-Second Steinbecks

Or how to write with more confidence and less Gramma’-Drama.


1. Hyphenation

2. Serial Commas

3. “Stationery” vs “Stationary”

4. “Who” and “whom”?

5. i.e. and e.g.

6. “Gray” vs “grey”

7. “OK” or “okay”?

8. “You and me” vs “you and I”

9. “I may” vs “I might”

10. Periods inside or outside quotation marks?

11. Affect vs Effect

12. Lay vs Lie

13. Why is it Daylight-Saving Time, not Daylight-Savings Time?

14. Metaphors vs Similes

15. Veterans Day or Veteran’s Day

16. Moot vs Mute

17. Spelling “weird”

 

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