On 25 August Mercury enters Virgo, the sign it rules. What changes is how you think and speak: for a few weeks your mind stops chasing big ideas and starts paying attention to what can actually be checked.

What is happening

Virgo is mutable Earth, the sign that preserves rather than opens new doors, and its job is to keep finished work from falling apart. Mercury is at home here, but it is a different animal from the brilliant version in Gemini: slower, more concrete, focused on detail and on what is actually needed. These days you reason through successive corrections more than sudden flashes, and you speak with more precision and less need to impress.

Uranus is exalted, which sharpens your technical mind: you understand how things work and can explain them step by step. The flip side is Neptune in detriment, which takes away the breathing room of imagination, and the Moon in fall, which dries out feeling: you risk analysing everything and sensing very little, yours or anyone else's.

How to use it

Use this stretch for communication that has to be exact: a contract to reread, a piece of work to correct, an instruction to give with no room for misunderstanding. Mercury in Virgo gives you the sharpness to catch the mistake everyone else let slide.

Where it pays to soften the blow is criticism of other people. These days you spot the flaws before the merits, and the temptation is to name every single one, back to back, with no filter. Pick the one flaw that actually matters and let the rest go: precision works when it is aimed, it turns into nitpicking when it never stops.

Where you feel it most

If your Sun, Moon, Ascendant or Mercury is in Virgo, or in one of the other Earth signs (Taurus, Capricorn), you feel this transit directly: more analytical than usual, and sharper-tongued when something does not add up. For everyone else, what matters is the house of your birth chart this Mercury falls in: that is where you think and speak with the most precision over these weeks, for better and at the risk of over-criticising.

Want to know which house it falls in and what that means for you specifically? Calculate your birth chart: all it takes is your date, time and place of birth.