In the kind of writing most of us do every day—the kind of writing I’ve mainly been concerned with in these columns—the only criteria that matter are clarity and precision. The kind of writing that ...

Last week, a friend who's been reading these "memmos" sent me an email that he's held on to for 13 years. The message was written by Hal Ritter, a former managing editor of the Money and News sections ...

We demand precision in devices we buy, contracts we sign, rules of games we play. Yet some people resist rules of grammar. Those rules help us to be precise — to write exactly what we mean, so that no ...

Precisely why do we need to strive for preciseness? The answer is simple: If we fail to be precise, we may cause misunderstanding, with costly consequences. A recent New York Times article created ...

Why do you have to be so corrective? I think the word you’re looking for is “pedantic.” For most of my career at the Free Press, I’ve been a copy editor or production editor. Which means worrying ...