Author Denis Waitley said, “The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don’t define them, or ever seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them.”
The ability to set goals is an important skill for writing success. Once you have a goal, you can establish the intermediate steps (sub-goals) required to achieve it. Goals have a way of bringing order and purpose to your writing life. There is hidden power in setting and achieving goals.
Why do some writers avoid creating goals? Let’s examine some causes and cures.
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Nothing demonstrates the change more than the fact that the publishers of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has removed hyphens from 16,000 words in its latest edition. For the most part, the dictionary dropped hyphens from compound nouns, which were unified in a single word (e.g. pigeonhole) or split into two (e.g. test tube), according to a report by Reuters.
Is there a rule you can apply to know if words have been unified or split? Nope. You’ll need to look up each word in the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary to know for sure.
Wikipedia often comes up near the top when you do a Google topic search. It is used by millions of people as a research tool, but is it a reliable source of information? Increasingly, Wikipedia is coming under scrutiny for providing biased and inaccurate information. There are three main issues:
1. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, conceived a notion of ”Neutral Point of View” (NPOV) for Wikipedia submissions, but it is extremely easy to find bias in articles. If people attempt to offer documented differing views, they are often quickly deleted by topic editors or others. The “consensus” about what to include at Wikipedia is created only by those who frequent the site, not a cross-section of people. It is estimated that only 615 people edit 50% of the articles, so it is not the universal pool of knowledge that many people think it is. [Read More]
Text messaging and other influences have contributed to some of the worst writing habits imaginable, including the failure of people to use capitalization and punctuation.
Sadly, that style is intruding into everyday communication. Many people ignore an e-mail that is a lowercase wall of type with no periods or paragraph breaks. They just don’t want to put forth the effort to try to read such messages.
The word “Bible” is a proper noun and is always capitalized when it refers to the book we love and seek to obey. Sloppy writers spell the word “bible” out of ignorance. Bigots also like to spell it in lower-case out of meanness, since they believe doing so diminishes the power and influence of the 1.9 billion Christians world-wide who read and revere the Bible.
However, Christians should always spell it properly by capitalizing the word. Make it a point to correct others when you see them misusing the word.
No need to capitalize the word if something is referred to as, “the cooking bible” or the “car owner’s bible.” When used in this way, the word bible is descriptive and not a title, thus not a proper noun.
By the way, the word “biblical” (as in, “He took a biblical studies course.”) is not a proper noun either, and is not capitalized.
