By Ilan Stavans. A recent classroom experience left me with the exhilarating feeling of having found a new word usage, barely a few years old, that has become a fixture in how we approach the world. This semester I’ve been teaching a course called “Impostors” that focuses on actors, spies, forgers, translators, plagiarizers, and other transgressors assuming someone else’s identity for commercial, political, psychological, artistic, or other purposes. Students read Plato, Diderot, Cervantes, and Freud, watch movies like Woody Allen’s Zelig and Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, and read classics like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. I’m holding Ed Snowden up as an example. Not of a patriot, or a whistle-blower, or a scoundrel, or traitor. But as an example of what I’ve been telling students and fellow teachers for years: that if you have something to express in your writing, you believe it wholeheartedly, and it carries the urgency of original thought, it will come out by way of elegant syntax and more or less error-free construction. We can yammer on about dangling modifiers and passive voice and incongruity and topic sentences till the cows come home, and none of it will make more than 10 percent of the difference. That Which Must Be Said is the big enchilada. More...

By Ben Yagoda. A couple of years ago, the BBC published an essay on that staple of British journalism, the terribleness of Americanisms polluting the mother tongue. The Beeb invited readers to send in their own pet peeves and got such a response that it published a list of the 50 that were sent in most often. More...