A good caption for a picture adds something the image cannot show on its own: context, a name, a date, a reason it matters. A photo of a graduate becomes “Maya, first in her family to finish college, May 2026” instead of just a smiling face. Keep it short, lead with the most specific detail,…
How you quote an interview depends on whether you conducted it yourself or found it published. A personal interview, one you did, is cited by naming the person and the date: in MLA the Works Cited reads “Ng, Sophie. Personal interview. 12 Mar. 2024,” and in APA it is cited only in the text as…
To quote a video, transcribe the spoken words exactly, put them in quotation marks, and cite the source with a timestamp instead of a page number. A timestamp uses hours, minutes, and seconds: in MLA it looks like (Kurzgesagt 00:03:12); in APA it looks like (Kurzgesagt, 2020, 3:12). The full entry names whoever posted the…
To quote a tweet, reproduce the post exactly, keep the spelling, hashtags, and emoji as written, and cite the account. In MLA the full text of the tweet becomes the title in quotation marks; in APA you use the first 20 words as the title and add “[Post].” Both styles put the account handle in…
To quote a textbook, put the borrowed words in quotation marks and follow them with an in-text citation that points to the author and the exact page. In MLA that looks like (Myers and DeWall 214); in APA it looks like (Myers & DeWall, 2021, p. 214). A textbook is cited like any other book,…
To quote a definition in an essay, put the defined wording in quotation marks, name the source in a signal phrase, and cite the dictionary or reference work you took it from. Cite the specific entry, not just “the dictionary” — the word you looked up is the title of the entry. In MLA the…
Somewhere in almost every article about owning less, there’s a number. Minimalists save two thousand a year, the posts say, or five thousand, depending on which one you land on. It’s a satisfying figure, and for a lot of people it’s the reason they give the whole thing a try. So I went looking for…
You know the moment: the conversation is clearly over, and neither of you can work out how to leave. So you reach for the polite exit — an excuse, a glance at your phone, a vague “we should do this again.” And that, it turns out, is the part that makes it awkward. The moves…
Final consonant deletion minimal pairs are word pairs that are identical except that one ends in a consonant and the other does not, like bee and beet, or bow and boat. They are the core tool for treating final consonant deletion, a phonological process where a child drops the last consonant of a word, so…
You shake someone’s hand, they tell you their name, and about four seconds later it’s completely gone. It’s one of the most common small panics in any conversation. And it usually has nothing to do with rudeness or a poor memory. In the moment you’re introduced, most of your attention goes to the handshake, the…