How to Write Holiday Greetings and Avoid Common Mistakes

Maybe you don’t love holly or snowmen. Or winter jingles. Or trying to manage the list of gifts you’ll need to buy, wrap, and present to your loved ones. Heck, maybe every year you get stuck holding down the office for weeks on end while half the staff is away. Still, you want to power through this—to scream “come at me December, I can take you on!”

Nothing says “I am undaunted by the demands of the winter holidays and am not merely soldiering through—I am here to dominate” like a greeting card.

8 More Wondrous Winter Idioms

Feeling under the weather? Walking on thin ice with your vocabulary variety? These idioms will have a snowball effect on your language use this winter. And they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

Take a chill pill

If you’re going to tell someone to calm down, why not do it in rhyme? “Chill” means a feeling of coldness, as in, “there was a chill in the air.” Sometime in recent decades, probably the 1970s, the word also came to mean “relax”—just imagine a hippie flower child flashing a peace sign and saying “Chill out, dude.”

This Is Why Managing Stress Will Make You Successful

Workplace stress touches most of us at one time or another. In fact, according to the American Institute of Stress, 80 percent of us feel stressed at work. Deadlines loom. Bosses make unrealistic demands. Restructuring means anxiety over job security. Although stressors may be an inherent part of work life, buckling under the pressure doesn’t have to be.

There are plenty of reasons to manage your workplace stress rather than accepting it as part and parcel of having a busy career.

Beat Writer’s Block: 5 Tips for Writing Your Best

You’re sitting at your desk, staring at a flashing cursor and waiting for the words to flow. Every now and then, you write something, then mercilessly edit it or delete it all together.

Backspace . . . backspace . . . backspace . . .

You roll your head back and forth to work the kinks out of your neck and sigh. The words just won’t flow. You’re convinced you’ve got a serious case of writer’s block.

Bad vs. Badly—What’s the Difference?

Misusing bad and badly is a common grammatical mistake. The word bad is an adjective and should be used to modify nouns and pronouns. Badly, like most words ending in -ly, is an adverb and is used to modify verbs. The thing that trips most people up is that linking verbs such a to be and to feel take adjectives rather than adverbs.

Why do people use bad and badly incorrectly so often in their writing?

5 Ways to Stop Having a Bad Day

Your alarm fails to go off and you wake up twenty minutes late. You take a hasty shower, and for some reason the water temperature will only fluctuate between tepid and truly frigid. Despite those setbacks, you manage to grab a cup of coffee for the ride in, which you promptly spill down the front of your shirt. Then, when you arrive at the office you learn that your partner on a critical project has called in sick.

Embrace Your Geekness With the Character Sketch

You are a writer. You enjoy what you do, and you do it well. So, what do you love most about writing? Could you pick one specific thing? Are we speaking of fiction, nonfiction or poetry? Essays maybe? Where does editing fit in here? Be careful, it quickly becomes a complicated question.

If we parse out all of the elements of writing, there are literally thousands of specific mechanics from which we could choose.

5 Reasons You Should Read a Damn Book

Watching too much TV is bad for your health. According to some sources, being a couch potato will make you less smart. It will consume your time, influence your social relationships, affect your physical health in a very bad way, affect your emotional well-being, and skew your worldview. And the list goes on.

But this isn’t an article about the perils of TV watching.

Monday Motivation Hack: Avoid Negativity

Mondays induce negativity like no other day. After all, weekends are straight-up awesome. If we’re lucky, we get to sleep in, enjoy a breakfast that’s not rushed, and maybe savor a cup of coffee while laughing at YouTube videos of dogs failing at being dogs. Sometimes, we have exciting activities planned. Sometimes we get to enjoy leisure time. And sure, sometimes we work.

Why You NEED to Write Every Day

Alzheimer’s, dementia, and severe memory loss affect memory, thinking, language, and behavior—even beyond expected decreases in function from the typical aging process. But according to a recent study by the Medical Journal of the American Academy of Neurology, there are some strategies to help you avoid this type of cognitive decline that you can begin working on now.

5 Books for Understanding Women’s History

Close your eyes. Can you picture the significant women in your life? The images of women whom you interacted with during your lifetime are vivid, but what about those who lived in generations past? Even when no physical traces survive, we can still envision them. How so? Notice how Emily Dickinson gave a glimpse of her physical appearance: “I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur – and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves – Would this do just as well?” Can you see her in her words?

5 Reasons the Writing World Should Celebrate Dyslexia

Guest Post by Doug Sprei and Jules Johnson, LearningAlly.org

For many people with dyslexia, writing and spelling are some of the most challenging activities in daily life. And yet in the midst of this difficulty, a world of creative thinking is awakened. Some of the most acclaimed authors, business leaders, scientists, and innovators are dyslexic. The next time you switch on a light bulb or reach for a favorite book, consider the following reasons that dyslexia is something to be celebrated.