I wanted to give a shout out to my friend Christopher Donahue, and his brand new shiny blog. Chris works with me, so we are constant talking about webby things, including SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is used by webby types to improve a site’s page ranking and position in search engine results, and it’s a good skill to have.

Ever Googled your own name? When Chris does this, an American Most Wanted page comes up featuring a serial killer by the same name…and from the same home state. What’s a guy to do? Start a blog, and optimize it so it appears near the top of the search results. After just 1 week, Chris’s blog is the #20 results…the very last entry on page 2. With some incoming links and additional activity, it should move up in no time. Good luck Chris!

Chris’s Blog

I gave a division-wide presentation on blogging a couple weeks ago, and my coworkers kept a running tally of how many times I used the word “blog”. 114! Not bad for 35 minutes. I’m speaking to a group of librarians tomorrow on blogging, and it’s a full hour! I put the over/under at 210.

If you’d like to check out the blogging I’m doing for my company, head on over to BlogBaud.com and check it out. It’s all about nonprofits, technology, and business. Enjoy!

For my second installment of key takeaways from Jan Venolia’s Write Right!, I want to focus on her notes for style. This section of the book is full of useful nuggets, so it would be next to impossible not to learn something from her writerly wisdom.

Here are some notes I jotted down in my Moleskine. Many may seem routine to you, but to me they were eye-opening.

• An acronym is pronounced as a word. “NASA, OPEC, OSHA”
• An initialism is pronounced letter by letter. “NBA, YMCA, NSA”
• Choosing the correct article (a or an) before an acronym is determined phonetically.  Use ‘an’ if it proceeds an F, H, L, M, N, R, S, or X.
• Abbreviate social titles only when the full name is used. “Rev. Jesse Jackson. Reverend Jackson.”
• Abbreviate country names, such as United States and United Kingdom, only when they are used as an adjective. “U.S. Ambassador, U.S. Foreign Policy.”
• Use italics for foreign words when they are not normal.

Here are a few notes on capitalization:

• Capitalize the first word after a colon if it’s a complete sentence; lower if not.
• Do not capitalize the word city in “city of Toronto”.
• Seasons are not capitalized.
• Capitalize African Americans and Caucasians, not blacks and whites.

And finally some notes on using numbers:

• Write the words (1-9) when using them for journalism, science, or business. “Two, nine”
• Write the words (1-99) for literary writing. “Seven, fifty, sixty-one”
• Write the words if they begin a sentence. “Four score and seven years ago…”
• Write the words for decades. “The twenties”
• Write the numbers larger than nine for journalism, science, or business. “29, 88″
• Write the numbers larger than ninety-nine for literary writing. “102, 1054″
• Write the numbers when it’s a mix of these rules, such as “8 to 30 employees.”
• Write the numbers when referring to a part of a book, such as “Chapter 9, page 71.”
• Write the numbers for all dates and times. “21st Century or 10 P.M.”

You can check out other key takeaways here.

The party is over. Hoops season is complete. Spring Break in Bracketville has given way to finals prep and summer job searches.

After a bracket-gone-wild pre-party, little George Mason showed up at the kegger with some bruises and shoulder chips. LSU, despite post-Katrina chaos raging on, managed to down twelve beers at the wet t-shirt contest before passing out in UCLA’s hotel room.

I just want to know one thing…who invited the Florida Gators to the Final Four?

Who voted them Prom King way back during fall semester?

Oh, wait, it was me!

While my official bracket was a colossal mess, much like the rest of the nation’s, I managed to tag the Gators as potential champions way back on December 12th. Now, I’m no hoops expert, but maybe Andy Katz and Jay Bilas should start answering my emails. That goes for you too Simmons.

Until November, enjoy your summer MLBcation. (zzzzzzzzzzzzzz…)

Writing is hard. There are rules. There are exceptions to the rules. Sometimes the exception is the rule. Throw-in perspective, irregular verbs, punctuation, and style and you’ve created alphabet soup with a side of insanity.

I’ve been sifting through books on writing, and have finally found a useful one. Jan Venolia’s Write Right! is the first writing book I couldn’t put down, despite what would seem like the most boring content in the world to a fiction aficionado. It’s straight up talk about grammar, words, style, and punctuation – just the facts ma’am. I’ve learned a lot, and I plan to dedicate three or four posts to my key takeaways.

The first thing I would like to share with you will not be that helpful, other than shedding light on why English is such a frustrating language. Check out these three classifications of similar words…it’s amazing we ever learn to speak at all.

Homonyms – Words that are spelled and pronounced the same but have different definitions. Beet (noun) and beat (verb). Blue (adjective) and blew (verb). I bet this is a huge problem when people learn English as a second language. Check out Alan Cooper’s huge list of homonyms.

Homographs – Words that are spelled the same but have different definitions and sometimes pronunciations. Fair (noun) and fair (adjective). Wound (noun) and wound (verb). Subject (noun) and subject (verb). More information on homographs, and their conservative cousins heteronyms, can be found here.

Homophones – Words that are pronounced the same but have different spellings and definitions. Their (pronoun), there (adjective), and they’re (contraction). Pair (noun), pare (verb), and pear (noun). Write (verb) and right (adjective). You can check out this extensive list for more English homophones.

As I mentioned, I’m not sure how this information can help you in any way, other than arming you with the vocabulary to verbally thrash the English language. Enjoy!

And like a bad case of Venezuelan shingles, November has come and gone. I gave myself a goal of one post per day, and realistically thought I would get half of that. To exceed thirty is a shock, so I’m pleased as punch happy - even if a bunch of the posts are just photographs.

I will continue to add to the Reviews and Parenting categories going forward, and have big plans for Geeking Out, Photography, Hoops, and Music. I have about a dozen articles already penned, and they should start appearing in December.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned.