Robert Hartwell Fiske, author of The Dictionary of Concise Writing and The Dimwit's Dictionary

Robert Hartwell Fiske is the editor and publisher of The Vocabula Review, an online journal about the English language. He also runs Vocabula Communications Co., a writing and editing service. He previously spent several years as an editor at Addison-Wesley.

He is the author of The Dimwit's Dictionary: 5,000 Overused Words and Phrases and Alternatives to Them and The Dictionary of Concise Writing: 10,000 Alternatives to Wordy Phrases.

Fiske attended MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois for two years, then transferred to Friends World College, which sent its students around the world in an effort to promote understanding among people. He spent six months in East Africa, and a year and a half in Western Europe.

This time out of the country made Fiske aware of the abuse of English: "When I returned, many years ago, to the United States after studying for 25 months in Africa and Europe, I was astonished by how people spoke the English language. It was as though I were hearing people for the first time. I became preternaturally conscious of how people spoke, the nonsense of so much of it, the dimwitticisms people relied on," he says.

Before joining Addison-Wesley he wrote plays and worked as a milkman, model and waiter. He has written three plays, Speaking of Silence, Subject to Approval, On Death and Demons.