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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
It’s impossible to expect authors to absorb all of the 1000-page ‘AMA Manual of Style’; they’re just trying to get published, and it’s our job to help them. Today, we discuss three of the top-ten most frequent mistakes, including punctuation and style, ‘errors of grandiosity’ and wacky references.
What Cassie has been reading this week.
An excerpt from The Constitution in 2020.
The podictionary word of the week is “mumbo-jumbo”.
Anatoly Liberman explores various cultural forms and meanings of the term “scalawag.”
I’m reasonably sure that most American boys who reached adolescence in the 1960s knew Dillinger’s dick. It was enormous, preserved in formaldehyde at the Smithsonian Institution. Friends of mine who grew up on the east coast told me years later that on high school trips to Washington, the boys would spread out and look for it.
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article […]
Donald Ritchie says goodbye to Walter Cronkite.
Dennis Barron looks at Amazon’s decision to pull copies of Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm” from individual’s Kindle libraries.
Publishing a new edition of a style manual, particularly a lengthy, detailed manual that covers a ridiculous amount of technical material (Hello, ‘AMA Manual of Style’!), is a gruelling process. In our case, it involved ten people meeting for at least an hour every week for more than a year.
John R. MacArthur gives us a preview of Tuesday’s Bryant Park Reading Room discussion.
What Rebecca has been reading.
Douglas E. Phillips looks at Google’s new operating system.
An excerpt from On Living in an Old Country by Patrick Wright.
The podictionary word of the week is “camera”.
Chris Mallin writes on voting and corporate governance.