I’ve previously proclaimed my love for Grammar Girl, a/k/a Mignon Fogarty. Now I love her even more.

Grammar Girl’s new book, appropriately entitled Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, will be available July 8. In honor of the release, GG has released a 40-page chapter called “Dirty Words.”

Get your minds out of the gutter! “Dirty Words” tackles a host of words that GG considers particularly difficult to use correctly. Of particular interest to legal writers, the chapter contains sections on the proper use of assure versus ensure versus insure; i.e. versus e.g.; pled versus pleaded; and (gulp!) hanged versus hung.

So, why are you still hanging around here? Download your free chapter now!

In an article entitled Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere, The Onion reports:

In the midst of a crisis that may have reached a breaking, point Tuesday afternoon, linguists, and grammarians, everywhere say they are baffled, by the sudden and seemingly random, appearance of commas, in our nation’s sentences. The epidemic of errant punctuation has spread, like wildfire, since signs of the epidemic first, appeared in a Washington Post article, on Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben, Bernanke. “This, is an unsettling trend,” columnist William Sa,fire, told reporters. “We’re seeing a collapse of the grammatical rules that have, held, the English language, together for, centuries.” Experts warn, that if this same, phenomenon, should occur with ellipses…

I get the feeling that it was a slow news day over at The Onion.

One of my favorite ways to empahsize a word or phrase is to set it off wtih an em-dash (—). But the em-dash doesn’t hold a candle to the extra slanty italics recently developed by Minnesota-based Pica Foundry. My writer’s toolbox is now complete. : - )

If you want to run a successful legal research and writing practice, you need to have an entrepreneurial spirit. I have found that reading blogs about entrepreneurship helps to foster that spirit in me.

Two entrepreneur-focused blogs I really like are written by Dmitry Davydov. My favorite posts on NicheGeek.com contain practical information about the entrepreneurial life. For example, Dadyov’s post on 10 Things You’ll Learn While Working At Home neatly sums up much of what I’ve learned over the past 11 years. Why You Should Get In Touch With Your “Inner Lazy Ass” helped me look at deadlines in a whole new way. And aren’t we all looking for The Sweet Spot of Success?

Unusual Business Ideas that Work is a little lighter. I have a lot of fun reading about unique businesses: it’s inspiring. I wanted to link to a few of my favorite posts, but the Blogger platform (which seems to lack a “categories” feature) makes it hard to find particular past posts. : - (

I returned a few hours ago from the Legally Female Conference, which is described on the official conference website as “a collaboration between Yale Law Women and the national blog, Ms. JD, that explores the status of women in the legal profession.”

I had been particularly looking forward to an afternoon panel entitled “Technology as a Tool: Changing What it Means to be a Woman in the Law.” I had hoped the speakers would address some ways in which technology has helped expand women’s choices within the legal profession.

Unfortunately, two of the three speakers didn’t really provide any information that was useful (or even of interest to me) about this topic. The first speaker was a very angry feminist who showed a number of powerpoint slides of web images she considers to be offensive, and slipped in a comment at the end of her 10 minutes about how you can use the internet to voice your opinions. The third speaker was less angry, but very theory-heavy.

The remaining speaker was Cathy Kirkman, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, California who writes the Silicon Valley Media Law Blog. She explained how she has used technology over the past 12 years or so to establish herself as an expert in her field.

One observation that struck home with me was her comment that, in the mid-1990s, it was hard for her, as a mother of a one-year old, to get away for a day and network on the golf course. She could, however, find time to publish a newsletter in her area of expertise, and worked on it while her son napped. She laid out the progression of her platform from faxed newsletter to listserv, to articles in the traditional media, to her own blog and a writing gig at LawCrossing.com.

The most valuable part of Kirkman’s presentation was her assertion that technology enables you to move your own intellectual capital from place to place and also empowers women to be businesswomen. I have certainly found that to be the case in my own practice.

One of the most important ways technology has benefitted my practice is that it has allowed me to develop relationships with both male and female colleagues around the country, who I never would have met but for the internet. The conference provided me with the opportunity to see three amazing colleagues who I first met online: Carolyn Elefant of MyShingle and Law.com’s Legal Blog Watch and Susan Cartier Liebel of Build a Solo Practice, LLC (both of whom I’ve gotten together with before), as well as Brandy Karl of bk!.

Kathy Brandt, a trial lawyer and fellow mycophile, was also the conference, and told me that she just made partner at her firm. Way to go Kathy!

I’ve always been a grammar stickler; heck, I have fond memories of diagramming sentences in 10th grade English class. Now, thanks to my co-blogger, Susan, I’ve found my soulmate (don’t tell my husband!): Grammar Girl.

Grammar Girl (a/k/a Mignon Forgarty) is a freelance technical writer and editor who writes a blog and produces a podcast about—you guessed it—the fine points of English grammar.

According to her About page, “Grammar Girl believes that learning is fun, and the vast rules of grammar are wonderful fodder for lifelong study. She strives to be a friendly guide in the writing world. Her arch enemy is the evil Grammar Maven who inspires terror in the untrained and is neither friendly nor helpful.”

Here’s a video of an interview with GG herself:

In an article entitled “Speech Crimes” in today’s New York Times, Patricia O’Conner reviews When You Catch and Adjective, Kill it, by Ben Yagoda and The Fight for English by David Crystal. Reviewing these two books in a single article allows O’Conner to juxtapose Yagoda’s centrist position between language prescriptivists (those who try to preserve the language by stressing rules) and descriptivists (those who merely observe changes in language) with Crystal’s strong descriptivist leanings.

Yagoda’s book—which contains a “surprisingly entertaining” chapter on conjunctions—sounds like the more interesting of the two. After all, how can I resist a book by an author who, according to O’Conner, can get “lexically aroused by the likes of ‘a’ and ‘the’”?

The subtitle of Crystal’s book is “How Language Pundits Ate, Shot and Left,” an allusion to one of my favorite grammar books, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: a Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss. According to the review, Crystal takes issue with “self-appointed language watchdogs” like Truss. I must admit, I’m in the same zero tolerance camp as Truss, which explains why I enjoyed her book so much. Nevertheless, since O’Conner calls The Fight For English “fascinating and insightful, often funny,” it might be worth a read.

What’s your position in the prescriptivist versus descriptivist debate? Are you prepared to go with the language flow, or are you a stickler like me? Leave a comment below.

SEC Chairman Christopher Cox addressed the 2007 Corporate Counsel Institute this week and emphasized the SEC’s commitment to the use of plain English. As I have mentioned previously in this blog, the SEC has been a long-time champion of plain English and its website includes a helpful “Plain English Handbook.”

According to Cox, the SEC will be “relentless in seeing to it that the language in which both regulation and disclosure are written is plain English.” Cox started out by reminding the group that lawyers did not always speak legalese:

It’s fitting that we’re gathered at a law school, because it reminds of us howwildered we all once were when we first heard the jargon and cant of the lawyer. Back when the deep structure of our minds was not influenced by the densely reticulated vocabulary of legalese, we could relate to the experiences of today’s investors trying to make sense of their proxy statements.

The speech is interesting and includes diverse references to John Grisham, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Mark Twain, all of whom recognize the value of plain English.

Thanks to the CorporateCounsel Blog.

There are many dangers in litigation, but death is usually not one of them.  The WSJ blog reports on a wrongful death action in Los Angeles that arose during a trial.  According to the complaint and the WSJ, he plaintiff’s decedent “tripped and fell over electrical cords that were attached to equipment set up by lawyers” at a Los Angeles law firm.  Be careful!

I have long wondered how you can avoid long sections of white space in text when you include a URL.  Word views the URL as one word and moves the entire URL to the next line, leaving the preceding line with too much blank space.  Eugene Volokh has a couple of suggestions to fix this.  He explains it well so read about it here.