I’ve always loved books. When I was little, I used to take my book to the dinner table and hope that my parents didn’t notice I was still reading as I ate. I’d walk into my parents’ bedroom and say things like “Little Women is my favorite book” as a subtle hint for them to buy me a new copy. I made my wedding theme revolve around books, and I still get excited about going to the library on a Friday night.

The only thing I love more than books is sharing books

Lucky for you, last weekend at the Texas Book Festival a publisher shared a bunch of books with me. I went to a panel held by Vintage Books called Writers on Reading, aimed at readers interested in reading groups, and they passed out a tote bag full of free books to every single person that walked in there. I was so excited about getting free books I figured you would be too. So I’ll be giving away the books as I go through them.

This week’s book is Cherries in Winter: My family’s recipes for hope in hard times, by Suzan Colón.

It’s a beautiful mixture of the author’s stories and her grandmother’s old recipes, which Colón uncovers after she’s laid off from her magazine job and realizes she needs to trim her budget. Freelance writers will find it very relatable, but so will anyone who’s been through hard times and has looked for comfort in food and family. I love how the recipes act as triggers for memories and stories of the women in Colón’s family, how each provides nourishment in more ways than one. Read more about the book here.

To enter to win the book, simply leave a comment below and tell me about a book that’s given you nourishment, in any sense of the word. It can be a cookbook, a novel that made you feel good, a non-fiction book that helped you grow as a person, a children’s book that nourishes your inner kid. You can also retweet this post (just make sure to tag @InkyClean so I can keep track of them) for extra entries.

I’ll start: When I moved to Texas, my mom gave me a copy of the Peruvian cookbook she’d used as a newlywed and throughout my childhood. It’s called Qué Cocinaré Hoy? by Nicolini (What will I cook today?) and it’s filled with all the Peruvian meals that mean home to me. I follow the recipes but they don’t always come out the same as when my mom cooked them. She must have added her own touches

Oh! And you have until Tuesday at 6 p.m. Central to enter! Good luck.

photo credit: Leo Reynolds

I’ve mentioned this before, but typos are no laughing matter. Except sometimes they are. Especially when you’re part of a community of writers and editors on Twitter that—exhausted from trying to educate the world on when to use peak, peek, or pique—decides it’s better to tackle blunders with humor. We have our fun while gently correcting errors because there’s no reason to be mean about it.

photo credit: Mr. Wright

So for Fun With Words, here are 4 famous typos that brought a laugh, a gasp, or both, to me and plenty of my wordy colleagues on Twitter. I emphasize the Twitter aspect because, while many of us thought these were kind of a big deal, I’m not sure the rest of the world really noticed.

The case of the poll-dancing Iron Man starlet

When MightyRedPen tweeted that a “typo has Gwyneth Paltrow doing some ‘drunken poll dancing’ in her new movie” the jokes about political thrillers and winning elections were simply impossible to resist. We all got a nice laugh out of it, but the guilty party? Blissfully oblivious, since at the time of this posting, the typo still hadn’t been corrected.

Some typos are for life

Before you even think about getting a tattoo, may I suggest spelling out (and then double, triple, quadruple checking) the message for the ink artist? If only these guys had done so…

Typos that just don’t taste right

Ever hear about the one that cost Penguin Australia $20,000 in shredded cookbooks? A recipe in The Pasta Bible called for “freshly ground black people” instead of “freshly ground black pepper.” The publisher blamed it on a spell-check program. I’d blame it on relying on a spell-check program.

The typo that had some truth in it

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve yelled at the TV while watching CNN as a typo just scrolled on by. For once, someone caught this one in action: a four-letter word about the NYC Mosque debate that actually reflects on the state of the situation.

And yes, I know we’re all human behind those keyboards. So we should approach them like we would an 80′s horror movie: Be afraid, be very afraid. Proofread and edit like crazy. If something happens to get by, it’ll either be really bad or really funny. Care enough to correct the error for next time, and try to avoid the trap again.

What about you? Any typos that have always stuck in your mind?

It’s been a while since I’ve done Fun With Words. Today’s FWW was inspired by a recent Twitter conversation I had with PS Jones about Trapper Keepers and Lisa Frank stickers that got me all nostalgic about the early 90s.

You know what I really miss? My favorite television show as a kid. It was SO fun with words. Anyone here remember Ghostwriter?

I’m not talking about the recent Ewan McGregor movie.

I’m not talking about its homophone, Ghost Rider (although when I first met my husband and told him how much I loved Ghostwriter growing up, he thought he’d hit the jackpot with a fellow comic book geek).

I’m talking about the early 90s PBS show about a ghost that helps a group of kid detectives by writing to them. Anybody remember this?

Ah, the side ponytails and scrunchies. The dancing with thumbs up and finger snapping. Don’t you just love how it oozes the 90s?

If you don’t feel like watching the whole opening, at least stick around for the first two seconds when the theme song kicks in: Ghostwriter--WORD!

Feeling rebellious? It’s okay to break the rules when you know what you’re doing (or writing). Here are three writing rules that you don’t always have to follow. Breaking them might even make for better writing, as long as you know how and when to do it.

1. Starting sentences with a conjunction. Whenever I start a sentence with and, but, or or, I think of my seventh grade writing teacher who taught me never, ever, to do this. But when you’re writing a blog post, or email, or anything else that’s rather informal, it’s best to mimic the way we talk. And we talk a lot like this.

2. Ending a sentence with a preposition. Winston Churchill said it best when an editor rearranged his words so they wouldn’t break this rule. Churchill responded with a note that said “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” His point was that the rules don’t always work, like in this case, where following them actually made the sentence clumsy, difficult to read and just plain ugly to look at.

3. Don’t use fragments. I’m actually a fan of fragments when they’re short, punchy and used for emphasis. They have to be intentional, because long fragments tend to sound like the author just forgot his way around a sentence. Think of a fragment as a puppy in a squirrel-filled park. You gotta keep it on a short leash or else you don’t know where it’ll end up. Maybe on another thought completely. Or at another park. Or something like that, anyways.

See? Breaking those rules wasn’t so bad after all. But I should add one rule to make this list of breakable rules work:

Know your audience. All three of these rules can be broken when the tone of the writing is meant to be informal and conversational. But that cover letter for the job you’ve been eyeing? Best to stick with formalities. You never know when the person in charge of hiring really took those seventh-grade English lessons to heart.

What about you? Can you think of any other writing rules you occasionally throw out the window?

Ah, word play. For many copywriters it’s one of the funnest parts of the job. Combining words, making puns or innuendos, misspelling words on purpose–it takes creativity to do it right. But there’s also something really dangerous about word play:

It’s easy to fall into the trap of “it’s so creative, it must be good writing.”

Now, I’m not trying to say that it doesn’t take creativity to be a good writer. Quite the contrary. It takes creativity to take very technical instructions and rewrite them in a way that a specific audience will understand them. It takes creativity to capture a company’s purpose, persona, and/or benefits into a six-word slogan. It takes creativity to simplify a long, drawn-out product description into a few sentences that are not only informative but will spark interest.

But to write these things well it doesn’t always take word play. Not every bit of copy needs to have poetry in it, or a joke, or a double meaning. It can, and it’s always fun when it does. But a good copywriter knows that the message comes first, and that sometimes, the best way to say something is also the simplest way to say it. (Notice I said simplest, not easiest. Two very different things.)

Wordplay works when it’s helping clarify a message, not when it’s hiding it.

Wordplay works when it’s helping show a company’s voice and personality, not when it’s being cute just for the sake of it.

Wordplay works when it’s catchy at the same time that it’s informative, not when it’s only trying to draw someone in.

The writing needs to deliver a message first; wordplay should serve as a mode of delivering it.

Five years ago today, YouTube posted its first video, so I thought I’d give a nod to the social media giant by browsing through the site for hidden wordy wonders.

I stumbled upon this treasure of poetry and punctuation. Here writer Opal Palmer Adisa reads “The Necessity of Punctuation” at Miami Dade College in 2007. I was living in Miami at the time, and I’ve written for MDC’s marketing department, so even though I missed this I’m so happy to have found it and be sharing it now.

I just love how she personifies each mark, each with its own strength or weakness in a dysfunctional family of punctuation. Each time I listen to it I find a new line that I love: “As a middle child, semi-colon was bound to have a complex.”

Enjoy…

In honor of National Library Week coming to a close tomorrow, I thought I’d share a website that does an amazing job of showing why libraries are so important. Trust me, you’ll never look at a librarian the same way once you’ve read:

Awful Library Books

Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner are public librarians in Michigan who started the blog in April to emphasize the importance of keeping libraries properly updated. Their definition of “awful library books” are those which are still found on shelves even though they would probably misinform readers more than they’d inform. The majority of books posted are submitted from anonymous libraries across the US and even the world.

A couple of examples on the blog: Computers In Action, published in 1972, was found on the shelves of a UK library even though its illustrations showed a Central Processing Unit the size of a desk; a book on Special Effects Photography has no mention of computer programs like Photoshop because it was published in 1985; and Men of Medicine, found in a small library’s youth collection and published in 1957, has no mention of women in the medical field.

If you’ve ever thought a librarian is just someone who scans your book when you go to check them out and shushes those speaking above a whisper, this blog will make you think again. Imagine being in charge of managing hundreds of thousands of books and making sure they’re meeting your community’s needs and staying current. As Mary Kelly puts it:

“A public library’s mission (at least the one I work at) is committed to providing patrons current information in a variety of subject areas of interest to the community. Since each community is different, the collections will reflect that difference… Hopefully, these funny titles and dated materials will get everyone interested in setting collection quality standards.”

On the flip side this is the fact that browsing these titles really takes you back. Some of these books belong in a museum for how well they capture the values and cultures of a certain time. Home Ec-50′s style, anyone?

I have a cousin* who used to take the last word of anything I said to him and start rhyming with it. So if I said, “Did you eat all the the ice cream?” He’d respond, “I ate it in my dream, right under this beam, but don’t let it ruin your self-esteem.” Kind of annoying and admirable all at once.

Good thing he got over that, or else he’d be all over today’s FWW link: Rhymer.com. The name really says it all. Type a word into the search tab and it’ll list a bunch of others that rhyme with it. You know, in case you’re writing a song, or a poem, or just want to see how long it takes for someone to slap you across the mouth when you speak in rhyme.

Oh! And by the way…purple? Really doesn’t rhyme with anything. Is that why it’s been my favorite color ever since I was a child?

*My dear cousin, you know I still love you…

I’m a bit conflicted over this Friday’s FWW topic. You see, this site helps you cheat at word games. To be honest, I don’t even know why I’m telling you this. I know quite a few friends who would just LOVE to beat me at Scrabble. They’d dance and wave their arms in the air singing “I beat the English major!” and forever remember the score.

But I digress.

Here’s how Morewords.com works. Let’s say you’re playing Scrabble, or doing a crossword puzzle, or playing Upwords or Quiddler*.

You get stuck with the letters F X E A H O plus a few others you plan on switching out. But x’s are always worth a lot of points so you want to use yours somehow. All you have to do is think of a word.

Type the letters into Morewords and up pops a list of words that can be formed with just those letters, like hoax, hex or fax, plus links to words that can be formed if you’re lucky enough to get other good letters. Like axone (n. – A long and single nerve-cell process that usually conducts impulses away from the cell body) and fovea (n. – A slight depression or pit; a fossa). Conveniently enough, the definitions to the words are right there (because you know someone’s going to challenge you on fovea).

So there you have it. I’ll say no more because I feel bad enough already. I just figured since it’s Fun With Words Friday, might as well have fun with words and win. That, and I’m testing to see if a certain Scrabble-playing friend of mine reads this blog. It’s a shout-out and a challenge to a word duel all at once.

*Don’t get me started on Quiddler. I love it because it’s kind of like UNO and Scrabble all in one, hate it because their instructions were some of the most confusing instructions I’ve ever seen on a game. After about half an hour of trying to figure it out we ended up checking Wikipedia for instructions. They seriously need a copywriter…which gives me an idea…

Yup. Every Friday. Fun with words.

It’s cheesy, but the name gets straight to the point, so what’s not to love about it?

This week’s FWW (oh, look at that! Already has its own acronym!) is this great site I discovered dedicated to the 3,210 most confusing words in the English language. It’s appropriately titled Confusing Words. You know, words like lay, lie, affect, effect, their, they’re, there, that are constantly getting mixed up and sending all sorts of wrong messages in the process.

You’ll also find some confusing words in disguise–words that are used incorrectly in common everyday expressions though their correct form isn’t widely known.

For example, in the phrase: “Here’s something that might pique your interest” the word “pique” is often misspelled “peak” or “peek.” One way to remember the difference is that when something catches your attention, you might ask, “what?” or “que?” Hence, the que in pique.

In the phrase “This might whet your appetite,” the word “whet” is often misspelled “wet.” I like to remember that one by thinking appetite is not like thirst, so it doesn’t need wetting; it needs whetting.

My favorite feature about Confusing Words is their search function. Remember how your teacher used to tell you to look up a word in the dictionary if you didn’t know how to spell it? Remember thinking that made no sense because if you knew how to look it up, then you probably knew how to spell it?

Confusing Words gets that. They’ll let you type whichever first letters you do know, followed by ***, and find the word for you. They’ll define that word and the words it’s most often confused with, and provide examples of each in a sentence. Problem solved.

What about you? What are your confusing words? Leave them in the comments below so we can find ways to clarify them.  (Are we having fun yet, or what?!)