Ronald E. Yates 
Today is Veterans Day. Given that only 7 percent of the people of this nation have ever put on a uniform, I wonder how many Americans know why Veterans Day is a national holiday. Yes, it means schools and most government offices are closed. But it means a lot more …
This Thursday, November 11, is Veterans Day. I will be posting about that special holiday, but before I do that, I want to discuss the deliberate deterioration and weakening of America’s military. Immediately following my comments is a commentary I received from US Defense Watch, a website founded by U.S. …
I had never heard of Winsome Sears before Tuesday’s Virginia gubernatorial election. Why not? She is charismatic, smart, confident, and formidable. She is a 57-year-old mother of three, a former U.S. Marine, vice-president of the Virginia Board of Education, and a business owner. And she was running for Lt. Governor …
There is a lot of talk and controversy these days about how our children are being indoctrinated with such specious Marxist ideas as Critical Race Theory, the erroneous and debunked 1619 Project, and Critical Gender Theory that posits that gender division is a social construct and that there is no …
To conclude my series of posts on the English language in general and on rhetorical devices, oxymora, respecting the language, and writing well in particular, here is a post about how illogical and difficult it is to master the English language. As with those previous posts, this post was a …
This post is a continuation of my discussion of writing and the English language. Yesterday and Monday, I posted about oxymora and some tips about writing well. Both posts were based on handouts I used to give my students when I was teaching journalism at the University of Illinois. If …
In my ongoing posts about writing and the English language, here is another handout I shared with my students at the University of Illinois during my tenure there as a professor and dean. I hope you will find it useful. An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines two …
As promised Saturday, here is another handout I used to give to my students when I was teaching journalism at the University of Illinois. I hope you find it useful. The contents of this post are an alphabetical arrangement of two lists that have been circulating among writers and editors for …
(When I was teaching journalism at the University of Illinois, I used to give this handout on Respecting the Language: 80 Do’s and Don’ts to the Reporting 400 class I taught. Students told me they found it helpful. Here it is for those of you who write or who are …
Anybody who covered the Vietnam War, as I did, became familiar with several phrases that were used to explain or clarify American involvement. Terms like “Body Count,” “Hearts and Minds,” “Pacification,” “The light at the end of the tunnel,” come immediately to mind. But there was another phrase that with …