Michael Erard (M.J.)

• writing for a range of audiences
• linguistics 
• academic communications 
• science communications
• grant writing 
• journalism and non-fiction writing

His career has been focused on language, languages, and the people who use and study them. He holds an MA in linguistics and a PhD in English, with portfolios in linguistics and rhetoric, from the University of Texas at Austin. 

As a language journalist, his work has appeared in Science, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, Aeon , and many other English-language publications. He is the author of two books, Um ...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (2007) and Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners (2012), which has been translated into 8 languages. In 2016, he received the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America. From 2017 to 2018, he was first-ever writer in residence at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He was profiled in Onze Taal. 

He has also worked extensively in research development and strategic communications. He was senior researcher at the FrameWorks Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC, where he designed and tested metaphors to reframe social issues and communicate new research. He described this work in a popular Aeon essay. He has also consulted on metaphors and messaging for public and private sector clients. He has edited and written grants in the social and biomedical sciences and supported researchers at the School of Nursing at the University of Texas, the Maine Medical Center Research Institute, and Strategic Healthcare.

He believes that good writing happens when writers receive support from their environments in order to have healthy relationships with the texts they read and write.