No, it has nothing to do with the 100 most common words — People constantly search for faster and more efficient ways to learn a language. Meaning they want to able to function in the language as quickly as possible, rather than have a deep understanding of obscure vocabulary or understand why the language is put together the way it is. People have developed a variety of approaches over the years, from things like learning the…

Possibly the Best Idea — Republicans recently floated the idea that only parents should be allowed to vote or that they should get additional votes based on the number of children they have. I initially, despite being a member of the wise, benevolent parental demographic, opposed the idea. …

And Storytelling — Verisimilitude is essential for worldbuilding. Everything needs to tie together in an internally consistent manner. This helps ensure that your world meets audience expectations. Often this means removing superfluous elements from your world. Other times, it means adding interesting details and developing a robust explanation for why things are the…

What the “How to Be Productive” Articles Aren’t Telling You I casually worked on being more productive the second half of last year, and I’ve been working hard to be more productive the first two months of this year. …

It was weird. — If you’ve read about building your brand as a writer, you’ve read about posting stuff on social media. How it’s essential for doing whatever it is you do to make money. Is it though? I have always posted things to social media more out of mechanical obedience to this mantra…

Video games and digital board games are a great way to connect with friends and family. — Going a long time without seeing people you care about can be stressful. Phone and video calls are an okay way to stay in touch, but they can end up feeling more like a status update instead of genuine interaction. In some ways though, hanging out with people you care…

Whitelisting helps ensure you don’t miss important emails. — Whitelisting email addresses and email domains on your Gmail account helps make sure your critical emails end up in your inbox instead of your Spam, Social, and Promotion folders. Follow the steps below for an easy way to whitelist specific emails or specific domains in Gmail. First, click on the gear icon to open your settings menu.

Same Story, Different Narrator — Uff, this one was hard to write. Not because of any technical challenges, I just got tired of telling the same story four times. The objective was to tell the same story from a variety of points of view and see how that impacted the way you wrote it. Not…