Author: Kirk

What are three ways to improve your writing?

General

No matter whether you write for your job, your business, or fun, you must be interested in improving your writing, or you would not be here at a website with the slogan “Better Communication for Smart People”.

And this made me wonder: What are three recommendations that I would make to anyone who wants to improve his or her writing skills?

The answer? 1. Look it up! 2. Read! 3. Write!

1. Look it up!

You have to be willing to “look it up”, if you want to improve your writing.

I go to Dictionary.com to look up word definitions and to check for proper hyphenation of words.

I go to Google to compare frequencies of competing phrases and expressions and to look beyond Dictionary.com for definitions.

And I go to Wikipedia for a rich source of information about words and the English language.

2. Read!

Better writers are more voracious readers.

What/where/how should you read?

Blogs let you read in snatches of time.

Books teach you about deep organization of a topic.

And news websites let you see how the same topic can be covered in several different styles.

3. Write!

I recommend that you “do it” by writing more email messages, blog posts, and articles.

Email messages let you test whether you are communicating well with your recipients.

Blog posts require you to present your thoughts in bite-size chunks.

And articles let you go into much more depth than you can with email and blog posts.

“cattle” vs. “cows”

Nouns, Plurals, Versus

I wrote yesterday about the nouns “swine” and “pig”.

Thinking about other animals, this has made me ask even more questions: 1. What exactly does “cattle” mean? 2. How is “cattle” related to “cow”? 3. Is it preferable to refer to bovines as “cattle” or “cows”?

Dictionary.com says that the plural noun “cattle” primarily means bovine animals, esp. domesticated members of the genus Bos.

And Dictionary.com says that the first three meanings of the noun “cow” are (a) the mature female of a bovine animal, esp. of the genus Bos, (b) the female of various other large animals, as the elephant or whale, and (c) Informal. a domestic bovine of either sex and any age.

So it is preferable to use “cattle” to refer to bovines in general and to use “cows” to refer specifically to mature female bovines or to refer to the females (usually mature) of other large animals (usually mammals).

Why is it “swine flu” and not “pig flu”?

Nouns

Swine flu has been in the news a lot recently.

This has made me ask three questions: 1. What exactly does “swine” mean? 2. How is “swine” related to “pig”? 3. Why is this flu called “swine flu” and not “pig flu”?

Dictionary.com says that the noun “swine” means any stout, cloven-hoofed artiodactyl of the Old World family Suidae, having a thick hide sparsely covered with coarse hair, a disklike snout, and an often short, tasseled tail: now of worldwide distribution and hunted or raised for its meat and other products..

And Dictionary.com says that the first three meanings of the noun “pig” are (a) a young swine of either sex, esp. a domestic hog, Sus scrofa, weighing less than 120 lb. (220 kg.), (b) any wild or domestic swine, and (c) the flesh of swine; pork.

So swine flu just as easily could be called “pig flu” instead. However, given the third definition of the noun “pig”, and given the claim that this flu does not come from eating pork, it makes more sense to call this “swine flu” than to call it “pig flu”.