I’m a sucker for this stuff. The @ is called chiocciola (snail) in Italian! The & was once taught as a letter of the alphabet! The manicule has been with us for a millennium! Thank you, Keith Houston, for bringing these little mysteries out of the shadows of typographic history.

Be bold. Be fast. Get to the point right away. The best email communication is simple and clear.

Voice is the je ne sais quoi of spirited writing. It separates brochures and brilliance, memo and memoir, a ship's log and The Old Man and the Sea. The best writers stamp prose with their own distinctive personality; their timbre and tone are as recognizable as their voices on the phone. To cultivate voice, you must listen for the music of language-the vernacular, the syntactic tics, the cadences.

Ultimately, whether we are writing posts, paragraphs, essays, arguments, memoirs, monographs or even just the Great American Tweet, writing is and should be a grand adventure.

In writing, the connection between storyteller and audience is just as important. By using some subtle devices, a narrator can reach out to the reader and say, 'We’re in this together.'

Verbose is not a synonym for literary.

Writers today must navigate the shifting verbal currents of the post-Gutenberg era. When does jargon end and a new vernacular begin? Where's the line between neologism and hype? What's the language of the global village? How can we keep pace with technology without getting bogged down in buzzwords? Is it possible to write about machines without losing a sense of humanity and poetry?