Grammar, Bromance, and Book Covers

I'm a big fan of DailyWritingTips.com and I enjoy receiving their highly informative email every morning. It's filled with invaluable writing tips, grammar, style and punctuation guides. Sometimes the emailed posts serve as a simple refresher course on basic grammar that you may have placed in some forgotten corner of your memory bank, while at other times, they may enlighten you to a new and creative way of approaching your writing - or even introduce you to new concepts and resources.

A perfect example of this can be found in today’s Daily Writing Tip titled Make Way for New Words. It offers a brief discussion about new words that appear in our culture and how they find their way into the Oxford English Dictionary.

Coincidentally, one of the words mentioned in the article is bromance (a close friendship between two men). Just last night, I titled a new Pinterest board “Isn’t It Bromantic” (a twist on the Rodgers and Hart classic Isn’t It Romantic). The board offers  a cheeky yet charming collection of vintage photographs of men in various poses of affection – as men were once oft to do in mid to late 19th and early 20th century photographs.

There’s a fascinating discussion to be had about how men’s visual documentation of affection in personal photographs has changed over the years (from freely affectionate to highly restrictive) based upon changes in social norms and ideas about masculinity, but I promise to save that topic for another post.

One other treat that you’ll find on their site – for a whopping cost of free mind you – is The Basic  English Grammar Book. All you have to do to obtain the ebook is to subscribe to Daily Writing Tips via email – something I highly recommend.

My only issue with the book is the rather dated cover design. In my professional opinion as a digital designer, it screams 1990’s.

Ick.

I think a cover with a look that screams 1890’s with a present day "twist” would prove a worthy facelift. Here’s my version.

Should they contact me regarding this post, I would be more than happy to offer to them this cover design for free in exchange for all of the valuable – and free – work that they do on behalf of writers everywhere.