Make sure your bright-eyed scholar is properly outfitted

With the imminent start of the school year, you have been supplying your young charges with all the kit they will need: a full spectrum of gel pens, notebooks full of inviting blank pages, dozens of apps for laptops, tablets, and iPads.

And if your bright-eyed scholar aspires to be a writer, you may also have thrown in a copy of Strunk and White.

Well, mistakes are made. But they can be corrected. 

At Amazon.com you can find, for an exceedingly modest price, The Old Editor Says, a pithy compilation of invaluable advice about writing and editing. Grammar Girl loved it, and your embryo Scott Fitzgerald or Max Perkins will benefit enormously.

Operators are standing by. 

Advice for an election year

From The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) by the Rev. Joseph Glanvill:

"They that have never peep't beyond the common belief in which their easier understandings were at first indoctrinated, are indubitabely assur'd of the Truth, and comparative excellence of their receptions, while the larger Souls, that have travail'd the divers Climates of Opinions, are more cautious in their resolves, and more sparing to determine."