If you’re like most professional writers, you avoid any math more complicated than balancing your checkbook. You might not even do that anymore, since you can just check your bank balance on your phone. A math-free life—how great is that?

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The Language Ninja explains the meanings of a newfangled millennial slang term.

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It’s a little tricky.

Many amateur writers use the word however incorrectly. The most common mistake—and we see it way too often—is using it as if it were a coordinating conjunction.

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Ahh, the music of language.

We’ve all heard the phrase before, but many of us haven’t given much thought to what it actually means. Is it how words sound? The “flow” of a sentence? Or something more?

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Q: If there’s a place in the linguistic world for the words “sexting”, “twerk”, and “totes”, why can’t we finally accept “ain’t”? It’s been in common usage for centuries. When will “ain’t” finally be recognized as a legitimate word?

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The grammar police nabbed me recently. A client whose academic paper I was editing objected to one of my corrections. He pointed out that in a sentence where the subject is in the form “Not only…but also,” the verb must agree with the noun in the “but also” part.

Example: “Not only language ninjas but also Rocky Mountain English professors know this rule” and “Not only the Language Ninja, but also the Rocky Mountain English Professor knows this rule” are correct, but “Not only language ninjas, but also the Rocky Mountain English Professor know this rule” is not.

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My new husband is a long-time Ayn Rand fan and has belonged to their Objectivist group for decades. I went to a meeting or two. There were some very nice, seemingly intelligent people there, yet I remained skeptical about some of their beliefs about altruism and their extreme anti-religion stance, among others. So, I thought, “I should re-read The Fountainhead.” I hadn’t read it since my pre-Master of Fine Arts (MFA)  in Creative Writing degree. I remember, though, that I had some trouble slogging through the book, and although the characters were sort of interesting, I had been left with the impression that it was not a particularly pleasurable piece of writing. So, in order to further my fine connection with my new sweetheart, I decided I should try again.

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On any given day, we end up writing in some manner or another—more than likely, it’s in an email format. That, at least, is simple–there’s no question about knowing your audience when you write a personal email. But for other types of writing, this becomes a bit more difficult to pin down.

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Marketing firms follow emerging demographics, so as Millennials transition from the spotlight to the steering wheel, the focus of the advertising industry will begin turning to upcoming generations.

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While the technology is still in the early stages of widespread social acceptance, some would say the future of advertising and marketing is an augmented one. In our digitally fueled business landscape, consumer immersion is shaping B2C creativity now more than ever, and it’s easy to see marketers taking advantage of the latest and quickest evolving platforms in immersive media: augmented and virtual reality.

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