(Editor’s note: “How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times” is the fourth in a series of writing and language books written by Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark and published by Little, Brown, beginning ...

Brady Dennis was a night cops reporter in the Tampa bureau of Poynter’s St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times when he started writing “300 Words,” a series of short stories about ordinary people, in 2004. This ...

Initially, I didn’t think I could say a lot about acronyms. I was wrong. An acronym uses the first letters of a few words to form a new word. The purpose is to shorten a long string of words to one ...

The other day, a book arrived here called The Tiny Book Of Tiny Stories and I thought, "Oooh, how tiny will they be?" Very short stories can get very, very short and still be good. The most famous ...

A few years back I set out to write a comprehensive punctuation book — one that laid out the rules for proper punctuation in every situation imaginable. How naïve I was. You don’t have to spend a lot ...