Last fall I found an old essay, written when I was 50, the same week that I saw a Writers’ Digest call for entries in its Personal Essay contest, I sent in “Your Rings and Your Wallet,” about a 50th birthday gift–a luxurious day at a luxury spa–which, in an eventually humorous way, was anything...Read More

Try rhymezone.com. It’s absolutely essential if you want to write rhyming poetry with any hope of avoiding the obvious. Be careful, though — desperate use of rhymezone may cause groans. Also, thesaurus.com offers a “word of the day” and fun facts, like the medical word for sunburn, “erythema solare,” and word games employing techniques magicians...Read More

  August 17, 2012 Lawyers make good writers because we’ve learned to be careful with words. To us, words have both a precise and a nuanced meaning, not just a Black’s definition, but also an entire history of consequences and implications, as recorded in volumes of precedent. Words are powerful. Words are the tools of...Read More