Beyond the Rhetoric

Do you have a tendency to blow things out of proportion? Do you find yourself lying awake at night, worrying about what tomorrow may bring? If so, you may be suffering from a phenomenon known as catastrophizing. This is when you have the irrational thought that something is a lot worse than it actually is. [...]

Rather than doing my usual speedlink, I decided to take a slightly different approach to What’s Up Wednesdays today. Thanks to some help from Gary Jones at BlueFur, I can now post Twitter replies on my blog. I enjoy interacting with the online community, both on Beyond the Rhetoric and through Twitter, so this is [...]

It’s been a few months since I told you about what I’m reading, so it is perhaps appropriate that I update you on my reading list. As a freelance writer, it is important that I keep reading the work of others, because it helps to refine my craft and to better understand how to best [...]

Some of the most common errors in English are due to our burning desire to over-correct ourselves. It is partly because we try to be mindful of our word choices that we can sometimes confuse easier and easily, less and fewer, and affect and effect. Even more common than any of these English grammar mistakes [...]

Watchmen is a wholly different kind of superhero movie. Having never read the original graphic novels on which this movie was based, I walked into the IMAX Theatre on Saturday night with an entirely fresh perspective. The trailer was positively electric and while some characters, like Nite Owl, looked far too generic, there were others [...]