Grammarly, the popular grammar and spellcheck tool, is launching a major update to its browser extensions, web app and native desktop apps today. In its early days, Grammarly was all about the mechanics of writing correctly. With this update, the tool will go well beyond finding standard spelling, punctuation and grammar errors and add a ...

From an excerpt from last year's The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, the rules of "Freddish" -- as Mr Rogers' crewmembers jokingly referred to the rigorous rules that Rogers used to revise his scripts to make them appropriate and useful for the preschoolers in his audience.

Rogers' nine rules are a ...

Earlier this month, I reviewed Richard Kadrey's new novel "The Grand Dark" for the LA Times; as I wrote, "His latest is “The Grand Dark,” a noir, diesel punk book set in a Weimar world of war trauma, debauchery, cabaret and looming disaster — and it's superb."

As part of his publicity for the book, ...

The Clarion workshops (Clarion at UCSD, Clarion West in Seattle) are key elements of the pipeline for producing excellent new science fiction and fantasy writers; I am a graduate of Clarion 92, and have taught both workshops, and volunteer on the board for The Clarion Foundation, which oversees the Clarion workshop at UCSD.

Leaving your ...

Apple has finally listened to its small, but slowly growing user base in India. The iPhone-maker today announced a range of features in iOS 13 that are designed to appease users in the world’s second largest smartphone market. First up, the company says Siri now offers all new and “more natural” Indian English male and female ...

Writing may seem easy in theory, but actually putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) is much more difficult in practice. And if you think people don't recognize your lackluster wordsmith-ing or grammatical know-how, they doThey really do. Whil... ...

The New Yorker's Mia Mercado asks: What Is Writing and Does This Count as It?

• Writing is when you sit—fingertips hovering over your keyboard, cursor blinking on a fresh blank document—and open Twitter for the twenty-eighth time.

• You can tell that someone is a writer because she’ll have a pencil behind her ear, a ...

If you saw the critically-acclaimed 2004 documentary Dig! about the frenemy neo-psych bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols, you'll remember that the real star wasn't either of the bands' frontmen but rather the BJM's inimitable, lovable tambourine player Joel Gion.

Rocking his impressive mutton chops and 60s shades, Joel has spent ...

I'm one of the guest instructors on this year's Writing Excuses Cruise, a nine-day intensive writing program on land and at sea, departing from Galveston and putting into port at Cozumel, Georgetown, and Falmouth, with a roster of instructors including Brandon Sanderson, Piper Drake, Kathy Chung, K Tempest Bradford, DongWon Song, Mary Robinette Kowal, ...

Our Boing Boing pal Joe Sabia made a video for Vanity Fair in which he gave screenwriter Emily Carmichael seven minutes to write a scene from a sci-fi thriller from scratch. It's interesting to hear her thought process as she writes the scene. After she writes it, the scene is critiqued by a studio exec, ...