Little lessons to make your writing shine.
You are: a person who writes, a person who emails, a person who is curious, a person who likes short newsletters, or a person who wonders about words.
Small Change is a series of bite-sized lessons and stories to help you write better. You can read them below or follow along in real-time as they land in your inbox (nearly) every week.
The archives👇
Hyphens and where to stick ‘em
Where do they go? What are they used for? What are you doing in my house? These are all questions asked, and answered, during hyphen school.
The limit does exist: how many numbers is too many numbers?
When I was studying journalism, we were taught to never include more than three numerical values in a sentence because it melts people's brains and you don't want that on your conscience.
Sentence structure: an intuitive art
If you try to get too technical about it, you end up carrying around a basket of jargony words like clause, predicate, and compound-complex. We're not going to do that because I'm a cool mom.
The Oxford fuckin' comma
The Oxford Comma is like a seatbelt - most of the time, you won't need it but on the few occasions you do, you'll be very happy to have it.