Have you ever known someone who just seems to have “a way with words“?  Well, we do!  CHARLES HARRINGTON ELSTER is a writer, a broadcaster, a voice talent, and a nationally recognized authority on language.  He has been talking about language on the radio since 1985.  You have heard him on his A Way With Words KPBS broadcasts.  Mr. Elster will be the guest speaker of SCFOL on Wednesday, September 22, at 7:00 pm in the Community Room of the San Carlos Library, 7265 Jackson Drive, San Diego, 92119.

    His articles and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times Magazine.  He has published ten books, most recently The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly.  Other well known works by Mr. Elster are two books written to assist students improve their ACT or SAT language scores: Tooth and Nail, A Novel Approach to the SAT, and Test of Time.  Other titles by Mr. Elster include the book and audio vocabulary-building program Verbal Advantage; There’s a Word for it,  a fun look at finding unusual and useful words;  The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations; and What in the Word? “a salmagundi of word lore and wordplay in a question-and-answer format”.  Ultimate Verbal Fitness, a companion to Verbal Advantage, will be published in 2011.

      Mr. Elster is a longtime lexicomane (lover of dictionaries), and his resume now includes being the orthoepist (pronunciation expert) for the online dictionary project Wordnik.com. He has been interviewed on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Weekend Edition, and All Things Considered and been a guest on hundreds of radio shows in the United States and Canada.  Born in New York City in 1957, he earned his B.A. cum laude from Yale in 1981.  He lives in San Diego with his wife and two daughters.  Please come and enjoy the evening with us.  Mr. Elster’s presentation is a MUST for all writers and logophiles.  We are most fortunate to have him as our guest speaker.  For additional information check out his website: http://members.authorsguild.net/chelster/.

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