British novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870) sat in his study in Gads Hill near Rochester, Kent circa 1860. He wrote one of the best first lines in literature. Great opening lines to books set the ...

Even if, as in my case, the habit you want to change is decades long.

Some short stories build to a single sentence. This is so common, actually, that it sometimes seems most of the stories I read are of this type. Readers are herded toward the shiny black nailhead of a ...

Orwell advised cutting as many words as possible, Woolf found energy in verbs, and Baldwin aimed for ‘a sentence as clean as a bone’. What can we learn from celebrated authors about the art of writing ...

An authority on the English language has set us free from the tethers of what many have long regarded as a grammatical no-no. Or has it? The answer depends on how you side with a declaration from ...

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our ...